Just Making

Name: Just Making
ISBN: 9781506485539

A Guide for Compassionate Creatives

by Mitali Perkins

Publisher

Broadleaf Books

Publication

May 06, 2025

Format

Hardback

Illustrated

Price

22.99

Dimensions

5.75 x 8.75 in

ISBN

9781506485539

Pages

178

Age

Adult 18+

Rights Sold

🌍 World Wide Rights Available

Description

Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc? How can we justify making beautiful things? Author Mitali Perkins isn't afraid of hard questions about justice and art. She knows that the creative life can seem selfish. As the daughter of immigrants, she studied toward a career of eradicating poverty and knows the internal voice that challenges: "How dare you retreat to your studio to create?"

Yet Perkins learned that writing fiction wasn't setting aside her passion for a better world but pursuing it. In Just Making, she offers a justice-driven perspective unique among books on creativity. "My ancestors are village Bengali women who made beautiful things but didn't dare to dream of art as a career," she writes. Women across the globe have crafted beauty and order amid chaos, war, and deprivation, and Perkins turns our attention to what we learn from them.

Just Making introduces us to strategies such as forgetfulness in flow, tenderness in trauma, and crossing borders. In conversation with creative guides like Nikki Grimes, Chad Somers, and Carol Aust, Perkins offers ten practices that help creatives keep making. Persevering through pushback from within and without, we can keep making art that heals human suffering, transmits truth, and confronts the oppressor.

Here are dispatches for young and not-so-young creatives, crafted by a writer committed to shalom: the flourishing of all. We must keep making art infused with truth, beauty, and goodness, not to ignore a world in distress but for the sake of loving it. With vivid stories, practical ideas, and reflection and discussion questions, Just Making will inspire you to keep making beauty in a broken world.

Awards & Endorsements

Gary D. Schmidt, Newbery Honor and Printz Honor author of The Wednesday Wars and other books

"By inquiring into the relationship between the making of art and the performance of justice, Mitali Perkins foregrounds questions that any serious creative has to grapple with. By identifying and clarifying the kinds of questions that need to be asked about that relationship, and by setting them in such a winsome and vulnerable and engaging form, she has done those serious creatives an enormous service. This is a book to be read with gratitude."

Author(s)

Mitali Perkins

Mitali Perkins is an award-winning author of novels and picture books for young readers, including You Bring the Distant Near; Forward Me Back to You; Rickshaw Girl; and Bamboo People, among others. Her books have been nominated for the National Book Award, have won the South Asia Book Award, and have been listed as Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and School Library Journal. Born in Kolkata, India, Perkins has lived in India, Ghana, Cameroon, Great Britain, Mexico, Bangladesh, Thailand, and the United States. She lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.