Author Dr. Amitha Jagannath Knight incorporates her love of art+science and observation into every book she writes. Join us in our conversation about all things STEAM, building community, and the poetry of medicine!
Leonora: I absolutely love the math + art concepts you used to tell the story in Usha and the Big Digger for the Storytelling Math series. Are there other ways that you incorporate art and storytelling for communicating STEM concepts in your writing?
Amitha: Almost all of my writing incorporates science in some way. I’ve written fantasy manuscripts that incorporate astronomy, rock collecting, and climate change, as well as a few more math-based picture books. I’ve even written poems for adults incorporating science and biology themes. A lot of people view science as something separate from their art, but actually, I don’t believe this is the case for anyone. How can you even draw pictures without even having a subconscious understanding of symmetry or proportion?
Even the act of writing a novel requires recording real (or imagined) observations of the world around you–a basic skill for any scientist. The dichotomy of science and art is not a real one, but one entirely based on our need to teach these as separate subjects (a subject I tackled in one of my manuscripts).
Leonora: You’re also an MD, which is incredible! Do you find yourself bringing your creative work into your science, or vice versa? Do you feel there are elements of poetry in medicine, or are they separate in your mind?
Amitha: I have a medical degree, but I do not practice medicine, so most of the time I am bringing my science background to my art rather than vice versa. What I miss most after having left medicine during my pediatric residency is hearing people’s stories! Now I make them up instead. Also, in medicine, there is a lot of summarizing–for your medical records, you have to basically summarize everything someone told you about themselves while being sure to include the important bits. You do this multiple times a day, every single day. That skill is something that absolutely translates well to writing fiction.
As far as whether there are elements of poetry in medicine–there is poetry to all of life isn’t there? As a doctor, I saw births and deaths and everything in between. I witnessed some of the worst, absolutely most tragic days of people’s lives, as well as their happiest, most memorable ones. There is definitely poetry in that!
Leonora: Gnomes and Ungnomes combine the work of over one hundred authors and illustrators, what was it like working with such a large group of people to create one cohesive book?
Amitha: This book was so much fun! The writers worked together to critique each other’s works so that we could revise what we had written. The editors and the book designer worked extremely hard to include the work of numerous illustrators who also went through a similar critique process. It was very cool to see it all come together.
Leonora: Your foundational work with the BosKidLit Collective has brought together BIPOC creatives in the Greater Boston area for over a decade. How can people get involved and/or support the work of its members?
Amitha: Thank you so much for bringing up the Collective. The BosKidLit Collective itself is actually only two years old! I started with the BosKidLit Calendar in 2009, which included all children’s author events in the Boston area. At that time, I remember there were very, very few events featuring BIPOC children’s authors. I began the calendar because I wanted to learn more about writing, and I found a lot of value in hearing authors speak about their writing process and then reading their books. This was my cheap version of an MFA, and I could often bring my kids too!
However, the number of bookstores and the number of children’s bookstore events slowly grew over the following decade (I hope in some small part thanks to my calendar), and it became a lot of work to scour websites and newsletters to create this calendar with no real way to automate it. I also became involved in We Need Diverse Books, where I volunteered for about five years. As such, my time for actually attending events was dwindling, and I transitioned to BIPOC events only in an effort to highlight these events among so many others. However, then the pandemic happened, and with so many virtual events popping up on my radar, it felt strange to list only local events when you could attend events virtually anywhere in the world.
Conversely, I also began to feel more of a need to find some kind of BIPOC community with people who lived nearby. In 2022, I decided to reach out to my KidLit network and a few people (namely Jennifer Cheng DesAutels, Janaea Eads, Emily Sun Li, and Lisa Stringfellow) volunteered to join me in creating a collective of local BIPOC childrens and YA authors and illustrators. We are now about 30 members strong and growing!
If you are a BIPOC author or illustrator (or an aspiring author or illustrator) of children’s or YA books living in the Greater Boston Area, we invite you to join us. For more information, please check out our website and fill out the Google form linked there to join. Membership is free. We have a newsletter and a Slack for members to chat, share information, and support one another. If you are not a local BIPOC kidlit author or illustrator, please forward the information to your friends.
Leonora: What projects do you have coming up? What else can we look forward to from you?
Amitha: My upcoming project is a poem for adults in an award anthology called Brave New Weird (Vol 2), which was released on June 26th from Tenebrous Press. As far as my children’s work, I have been constantly writing and submitting children’s novels and picture books since 2008. Currently, I am on submission to publishers with a couple of novels and picture books, so fingers crossed one of those pans out. But if not, I have a few more projects I’m still drafting. Wish me luck!
Follow Dr. Amitha Jagannath Knight on Instagram @amithaknight for upcoming events and book news!
