Members' Preview for Open+Shut: Celebrating the Art of Endpapers

Bruce Handy is a longtime magazine writer and editor whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult (2017) and the forthcoming Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies. He has also written four picture books, three of which were named New York Times Best Children’s Books, including, most recently, There Was a Shadow (2024), illustrated by Lisk Feng. His fifth picture book, Balloon, illustrated by Julie Kwon, will be published this fall.

Airlie Anderson is the author and illustrator of Neither, Cat’s Colors, Momo and Snap Are Not Friends!, and several other children’s books. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and creates her illustrations using gouache on paper. She has also won the Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, the Independent Publisher Book Award, and the Practical Preschool Award.

Deborah Freedman was an architect once-upon-a-time, but now she prefers building worlds in picturebooks. She is the author and illustrator of 11 of them, featuring protagonists that include an earthworm searching for its purpose in life, a house that dreams of its origins, and a character that is almost too shy to appear in its own book. Her stories have been translated into ten different languages, adopted in classrooms across the country, and honored with many starred reviews and awards. She daydreams and makes books in her colorful home in Connecticut.