Shirin Bridges: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by Ezra Jack Keats award-winning author — and now Publisher of Goosebottom Books

---

Shirin Bridges
Head Goose

I come from a family of storytellers. When I was growing up in Asia, the stories that my great-grandfather, my grandparents, and my parents told wove to form a matrix, a context for my life. Through stories I understood who I was and where I’d come from, and also where I could go.

One of those stories became my first picture book, Ruby’s Wish. It’s the tale of a girl in Old China who wants to go to university, even though girls weren’t taught how to read or write. The Umbrella Queen followed, about a girl from a Thai village where everyone paints umbrellas the same way. Of course, our heroine wants to paint hers differently.

So you see, my stories were about girls who found ways to do and be more than expected. Imagine my reaction, then, when I watched my niece disappear into a pink princess haze.

“Do you know there were real princesses who didn’t sit around waiting for a prince?” I asked her. There were princesses who changed their own worlds; ones too busy and too empowered to worry about being pretty or popular.