Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen
Two Caldecott-winning picture book creators discuss the art of making books that carry genuine emotional weight for readers of every age.
Why we picked this
Barnett and Klassen have built a body of work that takes picture books seriously as a literary form — the kind of craft conversation that rewards anyone who cares about how stories are made.
Mac Barnett has sold more than five million books in over thirty languages and served as the ninth U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His work is distinguished by a refusal to talk down to young readers: the San Francisco Chronicle has noted his belief that picture books can carry the kind of Swiftian absurdity and untidy endings that most children’s publishing treats as off-limits. He writes with the assumption that young readers can handle moral complexity and unresolved endings — and his sales numbers suggest he’s right.
Jon Klassen came to picture books from animation, having worked on films including Kung Fu Panda before pivoting to writing and illustrating his own work. His hat trilogy — I Want My Hat Back, This Is Not My Hat, and We Found a Hat — earned both the Caldecott Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal, and demonstrated that picture books could operate with the emotional restraint and tension of literary fiction. The New York Times described his style as carrying “honest feelings, emotional tension and poetic restraint.” His illustrations create space for the reader to project, rather than filling every panel with instruction.
Together, Barnett and Klassen collaborate on the animated series Shape Island and the newsletter Looking at Picturebooks, an ongoing conversation about the form they’ve helped redefine. At Sydney Goldstein Theater, co-presented with 826 Valencia, the evening should be part craft talk, part comedy, and entirely worth attending whether you have children or not.