Author and illustrator Jerry Craft stopped by the Daily Show to talk about his new book with guest host Roy Wood Jr.
Craft’s middle-grade graphic novel School Trip was published Tuesday by Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins. The book is the third installment in a series that began with New Kid—winner of the Kirkus Prize, the Coretta Scott King Award, and the Newbery Medal—and continued with Class Act. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called it “another triumph of storytelling filled with heart and wonder.”
In Craft’s new novel, a group of eighth-grade students embark on a school trip to Paris. Wood asked Craft about his own experiences traveling as a student.
“As a child, it was all local stuff,” Craft said. “When my sons graduated from college, I took them to Paris.…I make the books that I wish I had when I was a kid, that make kids readers, that give them hope, because you don’t even know the things that you can hope for.”
Craft said he read a review of his book online, in which a teacher said that she didn’t think her mostly poor, Black students would be able to relate to the novel.
“You’re saying a kid can relate to a kid who goes to wizard school, flies on a broom, and waves a wand, but you can’t picture these Black kids going to Paris, so you’re not going to let them see the book?” Craft said. “That’s worse than being banned.”
Craft’s books have frequently been the targets of challenges and bans. In 2021, a Texas school district temporarily pulled his novels after parents complained that they promoted critical race theory; they were later reinstated.
Wood jokingly congratulated Craft on having his books banned, and Craft noted that New Kid has been translated into 13 different languages.
“They can read it in Albanian, Romanian, Greek,” Craft said. “They just can’t read it in Texas.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
