The TeachingBooks Blog
When I’m asked how I came to illustrate Patricia Hruby Powell’s Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker (Chronicle Books 2014), my most direct answer is that my agent Steven Malk shared the manuscript with me, after being approached by editors at Chronicle. The more magical response would be that Josephine Baker’s life was an inspiration to me long before I read Powell’s text. 
For seven years, I’ve been sharing the stories of the many incredibly talented Native artists, writers, fashion designers, and entrepreneurs across North America on my blog “Urban Native Girl” and the online magazine I co-founded, Urban Native Magazine. So when Mary Beth Leatherdale came to me with the idea to create an anthology for youth featuring contemporary Native writers, artists, and teens talking about their experiences growing up Indigenous, I was thrilled.
For me, it was the sheer number of fields in which Roget developed a working knowledge, and in which he also had significant influence. Roget was interested in just about everything and wrote papers, articles, and books on subjects ranging from botany to mathematics and optics to public health. Today, when most people super-specialize in a field or a skill set, this may seem unfocused. But in Roget’s time, when there was no such thing as a professional scientist, this broad intellectual life was encouraged and admired.
My interest in the natural world began early. It stemmed from my mother’s infectious excitement on hearing the song of an oriole, then finding its intricate hanging nest at the top of a nearby cottonwood tree. And from my father’s comments on the geology of the landscapes streaming past our car windows on our annual summer vacations—the alluvial fans, volcanic cones, scarp and dip slopes, and the forces that created them billions of years ago. My father also taught us the names of constellations and studied the bark of trees during our woodland walks.
