>> Ruth Behar: Hi, I'm Ruth Behar, and I'm the author of “Tía Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey”, a picture book. And I'm here at the National Book Festival. Well, the way it worked with this book is the illustrator is in Germany, so we didn't really get to meet. But what's amazing is you write the story and then it goes to your publisher. You work with your editor, and then the editor suggests possible artists to illustrate the book. And then all together, we decide which artists might be the most appropriate, and then they reach out to the artist. And fortunately, this artist, Evan Holdsworth, accepted immediately. She was very excited about the story. And then basically it was just such a beautiful process. She read the story. She started illustrating. She had her own ideas of how the story should look and what the characters should look like, and she was able to visualize them. But I also created a portfolio for the artist because this is a book very close to my heart. It's a Jewish Cuban story, a Sephardic story, and it really is very much about my identity and my family's identity. So I even sent her family pictures because I wanted her to see, well, this is what these people look like who are Jewish Cubans, and I wanted her to have an idea. And then I sent her some of the symbols that are important to the culture as well. Like, for example, these lucky bracelets, these appear in the book. So this character, Tia Fortuna and Fortuna, she wears the bracelets, as you can see there. So I wanted her to see what those bracelets are like because this whole idea of luck is very important in the culture and wearing the lucky arm bracelets, I sent her pictures of the bracelets. I sent her pictures of the Bourekas these are delicious empanada type pastries that the community eats. And I wanted her to see what those were like. So I sent pictures of those as well. And just many other things. This is a community that descends from Spain. So I sent her pictures of what remains of old synagogues in Spain as well. So I sent her all of that material, created a big portfolio for her. And she was just such an amazing artist because she incorporated images from those pictures into the art as well. The other thing I'd love to show, and this was one of my favorite design elements that the artist created, when you open up the book and remove this cover, you find out that it's a suitcase. And so this book, it's a book, but it's also a suitcase, which is really, really relevant to the story of Tia Fortuna, because it's about a person who has lost many homes and she descends from people who have lost many homes in Spain, then in Turkey, then in Cuba. But despite that, she talks very, very optimistically to her young niece and says, well, we've lost homes, but we also have gone everywhere with hope, with Esperanza. And so the suitcase is a very important symbol of being in transit, but also always being able to find a new home wherever you go and never losing your sense of Esperanza. So this was another part of the design, in addition to the beautiful art in the book and on the book cover, this idea of having this suitcase with something that I thought was really amazing and just fit the story so well.