Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Graphic Memoir, yellow singing sail

Yellow Singing Sail, a New Graphic Memoir by Yinfan Huang

Published Thu, 11 Jun 2020 10:25:16 -0500

Yellow Singing Sail is a middle-grade graphic novel memoir by Yinfan Huang, that has just been picked up by Yasemin Uçar at the publisher Kids Can Pres.

Yellow Singing Sail is set in China during the "one-child policy" era, and Publisher's Weekly reports that the memoir details the author's adolescence as an only child and the struggle to forge an artistic identity and find friendship, made even more challenging by a move from a small town to a big city.

Yinfan Huang is now a New York City-based illustrator, working from her studio in Forest Hills, Queens, and known for creating editorial illustrations, comics such as I Am A Cat Lady, and live drawing, has illustrated several books and picture books.

Raised in South China, her name means Yellow Singing Sail, the name of her memoir, and came from one of her mother's poems. She left for the USA when she was 22, to pursue a dream of becoming a professional artist, attending the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and now that story of her journey has become her first graphic novel.

She posts on Instagram "I'm so thrilled to finally share this news I've been holding for too long: I'm WRITING AND ILLUSTRATING my first middle-grade graphic novel MEMOIR! I can't begin to express how important, and special this project is to me, and for the past a year and half I've been working on it, I literally cry whenever I just think about the idea of it: my childhood, growing up in two different worlds in China, telling my deeply personal stories, and sharing that with my art. Yellow Singing Sail is the translation of my name in Chinese, which my mom gave me. Extremely grateful for @mccarthylit for recognizing and believing in me, and @kidscanpress for your endless trust "

The graphic novel will be edited by with Debbie Rogosin, will be published in the spring of 2023 and Huang's agent Sean McCarthy at Sean McCarthy Literary handled the deal for world rights. You can see more of her comic books here.

Kids Can Press is a Canadian owned publisher of children's books, with a list of over 500 picture books, non-fiction and fiction titles for toddlers to young adults. The Kids Can Press list includes characters such as Franklin the Turtle—the single most successful publishing franchise in the history of Canadian publishing, which has sold over 65 million books in over 30 languages around the world.

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