Leo + Lea

Kenard Pak used colors and shapes based on the Fibonacci sequence to create a visual story of a budding friendship that opens with a simple, airy room and blossoms into a full, lush landscape. He is the author and illustrator of Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn, and Goodbye Autumn, Hello Winter, winner of the 2018 SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Illustration. He is also the illustrator of several picture books including Ten Ways to Hear Snow by Cathy Camper, Have You Heard the Nesting Bird? by Rita Gray, and The Fog by Kyo Maclear, which was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, their young daughter, and three cats. You can learn more about his work at pandagun.com. Monica Wesolowska was inspired by a math-loving child to base the words of this story on a math pattern. Counting as she wrote, she followed the Fibonacci sequence into a story of friendship and learned how math connects us all. She is the author of the memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, named a Best Book of 2013 by The Boston Globe and Library Journal. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Literary Mama, The Carolina Quarterly, and Best New American Voices. She's a graduate of Reed College and teaches Creative Writing at the University of California Extension. Monica lives with her family in Berkeley, California. You can learn more about her work at monicawesolowska.com

"Leo is totally fixated on numbers and counting everything, even the words in the story the teacher reads; Lea is the shy new girl who shares his desk, and spends all her time drawing--but one day, in the noise of the playground, an accident brings them and their obsessions together in the beginning of a friendship"