About this ebook
Kiki has watched her mama practice karate for a long time, and now she wants to learn too. She wants to become strong and steady like a mountain. The bullies at school are strong for the wrong reasons. They make Kiki feel small. But today at her first karate lesson, everything changes.
Award-winning author Jane Yolen joins forces with debut author Ariel Stemple in this picture book about reclaiming strength, confidence, and peace through martial arts. This lyrical story of self-empowerment at a martial arts studio is woven around the poetic lines of Yolen's well-known poem "Karate Kid," used by educators and librarians for decades. Backmatter includes personal notes from the authors about how this story came to be and how martial arts helped save Stemple who was bullied as a child.
About the author
Jane Yolen is the author of well over 400 published books, including the Caldecott-winning Owl Moon, and the multimillion bestselling How Do Dinosaurs series, plus novels, short story collections, poetry collections, and many picture books. Her multiple awards include Nebulas, World Fantasy, three Christopher Medal awards, the Kerlan Award, the Jewish Book Award, the Sydney Taylor Body of Work Award, as well as being named Grand Master by three major writing organizations: Science Fictions Writers of America, the World Fantasy Association, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She has six honorary doctorates from colleges and universities. She teaches writing, sends out a poem a day to subscribers, and at eighty-three, got remarried to an old college boyfriend who is a poet himself.
Ariel Stemple is an author from Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a bachelor of fine arts degree from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. They come from a family of writers, including Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple. They trained in a martial arts style called wu chien pai for ten years. Kiki Kicks is their debut picture book.
John Ledda was born and raised in southeast Michigan. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue his MFA at the Academy of Art University. He is the illustrator of Kiki Kicks by Jane Yolen and Ariel Stemple, Big Bear Was Not the Same by Joanna Rowland, and other titles.
