The Heart of Our Home with Janelle Washington

This author-illustrator debut from Caldecott honor-winning creator Janelle Washington is a timeless ode to one family’s kitchen table: stained, scratched, and full of love.

Saturday, September 12th at 1 PM.

The Heart of Our Home features intricate hand-cut paper illustrations that bring warmth and emotion to every page. Janelle will demonstrate the steps of paper cutting from beginning to end and the tools used as well as perform a reading from the book. 

Perfect for elementary school children and for the young of heart!  

The Heart of Our Home is a heartfelt picture book celebrating the everyday moments that make a family. Centered around a family’s kitchen table, the story explores how shared meals, traditions, conversations, laughter, and love create lasting memories and transform a house into a home.

The heart of this family’s home beats steadily at the round wooden kitchen table. Every morning, they gather around it for breakfast. In the afternoons, it’s where homework gets done, and where art projects, and sometimes brownies, are made. On Fridays, it’s where they prepare the fish fry.

Anniversaries, birthday parties, graduations. All are celebrated at their kitchen table. When they tell their stories, it listens. And when they cry, it gives comfort. Their kitchen table is a place for family, friends, and memories.

Janelle Washington is a paper-cut artist, illustrator, and recipient of the Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator for illustrating Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Angela Joy. 

Janelle recently moved back to her hometown, Richmond, Virginia, where she spends time with her parents, sitting around their kitchen table. When she isn’t at her childhood home, she enjoys being outside in the sun or inside, cutting her paper-cut designs.

The Heart of Our Home is her authorial debut. She is a member of the Guild of American Papercutters.