Muralist and children’s book author Katie Yamasaki didn’t always know she wanted to make art. In fact, she says, she was “a little bit intimidated by it” before she began taking drawing classes in college. Readers of her new children’s book, Dad Bakes (Norton Young Readers, Oct. 26), would never suspect her hesitation—her saturated colors and lush scenes of a father-daughter pair are a study in warmth and affection, with the young narrator watching her father go about his daily routine as a baker.

Yamasaki is the illustrator of six previous books, three of which she wrote or co-wrote, covering a range of topics from famous proverbs of the African diaspora to the life story of Soichiro Honda, founder of the Honda Motor Company. Dad Bakes tells the simple and spare story of a father getting up early to go to work at a bakery before returning home to teach his daughter how to bake. “We mix, / we knead, / we roll,” says the young narrator. But when she tries to get a peek at the rising loaf, her father tells her to wait. “The bread needs peace,” he says. As night falls, he presents her with a loaf in the shape of a teddy bear.

The book’s backmatter tells the story of Yamasaki’s involvement with formerly incarcerated parents and their children, a vantage that informs the reading and rereading of this story. But for Yamasaki, it was crucial that the father’s time in prison is never mentioned in the story itself; the reader sees only the tenderness with which the father treats his daughter as he makes his way through a single day. “I want the reader to have a chance to just get to know the dad, just as a dad and as a person,” she says.

For Yamasaki, part of the beauty of this story is in the patience required in bread making—and life. “I did want to show how the waiting can also be kind of an opportunity,” she adds. “While these kids are waiting for their parents to come back, how can we support them and provide them with enriched experiences?” Yamasaki appreciated the chance to illustrate this patience through the father’s baking craft, as he rewards his daughter with a painstakingly made gift.

Yamasaki first began working with incarcerated parents and their children when she was commissioned to paint a mural at a women’s prison in Mexico in 2009. The laws were such that a mother with a child under 4 years old who had nowhere else to send that child would have to bring them along with her into prison. At first, Yamasaki says, the prison wanted a “cheerful decorative mural for the kids.” Instead, the mothers asked her for something different. “The mothers [said], ‘we want to tell our stories,’ ” Yamasaki recalls. They wanted a mural to reflect “their journey and their trauma.”

After her time in Mexico, Yamasaki went on to work with incarcerated mothers at New York’s Rikers Island whose children were living in East Harlem. “I had months of workshops with these mothers, and then we designed a mural for their kids, and the kids painted it in East Harlem. And then the kids did the reverse,” she remembers. The project solidified her abiding sense of what it means to miss somebody—that “we all can resonate with that feeling and also that people are more than the worst thing that’s happened [to them].”

Yamasaki’s work is full of dreamy, vibrant color and unfurling landscapes. While she does not always plan her palette, she says that for Dad Bakes, the paintings were born out of many layers of color and the fullness that emerges from working on a piece over time. So much about the prison landscape is “a very harsh deprivation of sensory experiences that are positive,” she reflects. “I wanted [the book] to feel like warm smells and growing plants.”

Part of that warmth and comfort is the rhythm of baking, a rhythm Yamasaki first learned when working with such collectives as the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance, whose bakery was the site of Yamasaki’s mural of Trayvon Martin. Her involvement with community organizations is an inheritance from her father, who worked at cooperative housing sites in Detroit. Many of these collectives have a religious bent, and Yamasaki cites her own “activist Catholic household” in her childhood home north of Detroit as a part of what inspires her projects.

Yamasaki is a mother herself, and her 4-year-old daughter has benefited from the baking projects in this book. “She’s made teddy bear bread with my mom,” Yamasaki says. But beyond the recipes (which she promised to send me via postcard), she has observed the close father-daughter bond in her own daughter and husband. Above all, she reflects, this book has helped her to see the treatment of mothers in prison more clearly: “There’s so much stigma. I hope that this [book] will just be part of the movement of people seeing each other more clearly.”

Johanna Zwirner is the editorial assistant.