Photo: Bill McGuinnessI can’t remember a time when I have not been drawing and painting!As a child I loved picture books and memorized Mother Goose poems. I attended public elementary school in the Bronx, New York. In kindergarten, the teacher taught us the alphabet. She asked the students to draw a picture...

Editor’s note: Rather than writing formal speeches, Ashley Bryan speaks to what moves him at the moment in connection with an event. At the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, he led us in animated and memorable recitations of several of Langston Hughes’s poems as part of his acceptance speech. We are...