Photo: Jeremy Charles.

In the early days of expanding her art business, the Tree of Life Studio, into the online frontier, my friend Rebecca Lee Kunz, the 2025 Caldecott Medal winner, did what everyone did circa 2008: she started a blog. It was called An Artful Way, and its banner was not just the simple photo that so many of us early bloggers had at the time. She resisted the new technology in a way that was uniquely old-fashioned. Her title banner for An Artful Way featured a sample of her own fine embroidery, the letters exquisitely satin-stitched across vintage fabric. I can’t remember all the details of it, but the impression An Artful Way made on me is indelible, as has been my friendship with Becca over the last twenty-five years.

We met as young women at the outset of forming our adult lives and identities. The nineties! Barely, but it’s true: we partied together on Y2K. In the years that followed, we attended each other’s weddings (she was in labor with her firstborn at mine), found our life’s work, and gave birth to a handful of daughters between us. Our older girls are now on the cusp of young womanhood themselves, and in the intervening years we have grown up as mothers, as artists, and as women in a world of dramatic, sometimes disorienting change. Along the way, witnessing Becca’s journey as an artist has been one of the honors of my life. Her friendship has enriched me in an impossible number of ways, and beyond my knowing her as one of those extra-special souls I have been blessed to call my friend, she has been an inspiration for me in how to live and create.

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It would not be an exaggeration to say that Becca lives her entire life in an artful way, a way that reinforces her particular, blossoming branch on the Tree of Life that gives her studio its name. Her home and garden are sanctuaries. After she sculpted an abstract fresco of the Cherokee corn deity Selu on her kitchen wall, it essentially became a temple. The list goes on: you would not believe the exquisite Christmas stockings or paper lanterns she made for her daughters when they were little or be surprised that the greeting cards featuring her paintings appear at nearly every birthday and special occasion in town. She can folk dance, sing harmony, bake a lattice-top pie from scratch, and create larger-than-life sculptures and murals that seem rooted in another dimension. We all try to eke out a garden from the high desert; only Becca’s has hand-woven willow trellises and cabbages that look like roses. Though she will not like me saying this, I have to tell you: she is the best-dressed person at every event. Hands down, she is also the nicest person in the room.

All this, it turned out, was just her warming up. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Becca dove deeply into a solo show of paintings, working furiously to bring to life a series of visions that connected to Cherokee mythology, climate change, ancestral wisdom, and her own navigation of that tumultuous time. She honed her ability to listen to the stories being told by coyotes and birds she encountered on her evening runs, as well as in old folktales. She followed threads of dreams, myth, and emotion, weaving them into a powerful body of work she called “Story Paintings.” These works and those in subsequent exhibits plumbed the depths of Becca’s ­attunement to the natural world, to the transformations that accompany us through the blessings and challenges of life.

Again and again, in every aspect of her life, Becca demonstrates that creativity is our birthright, and that art is at the core of what it means to be human. An artful way, then, is not an aesthetic preference, but an essential act. Radical in the sense that it is at the root of our existence, perhaps even our survival. Over the decades, Becca has nurtured that root, tending it with an unwavering dedication I would call devotion. Her work is an act of deeply listening and seeing as much as it is about creating images. I have come to understand that it is her commitment to those practices that allows beauty to burst forth from her hands into the world.

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So of course, of course, when it came time to bring Andrea Rogers’s beloved Sissy and Chooch to life, no one was better suited to the task than Rebecca Lee Kunz. Andrea knew it right away — a prophetic and fortuitous instinct sparked at their chance meeting at the annual Cherokee National Holiday, a gathering commemorating the signing of the 1839 Cherokee Nation Constitution. The two, writer and artist, connected, recognized each other as fellow creators and kindred spirits, and set to work.

Perhaps Becca also knew all along what she had in her, what she would be able to summon to the page while illustrating Chooch Helped. We all had faith in her, of course we did. But I can tell you ­something — the afternoon she gave me and our friend Sarah a peek at one of the images in progress, Chooch and Oginalii gigging for crawdads, it was as if a veil lifted. We were mid-hike on a mountainside amidst ponderosa pines, their green needles glittering in late afternoon sunbeams. The image she shared with us was like no children’s book picture we had ever seen before. It was rippling with light, and something beautifully intangible, almost numinous, was carried in that light. A silence fell over us, our awe palpable. We knew without a doubt our friend was in the process of creating something extraordinary.

Though Becca made her life and home in New Mexico after coming to Santa Fe for art school and falling in love with her husband, the landscape, and the community, I have come to see that who she is cannot be separated from her origins. She belongs to the deep roots that tie her to family and land in Oklahoma. I can picture her growing up in the sheltering arms of her granny’s farm on the Grand Lake of the Cherokees (which I plan to visit someday, crashing one of their legendary family reunions), but also the sheltering arms of her mother and five aunties, her grandmother and great-grandmother. She told me once that all through her childhood, even in hard times, she felt a sense of her women kin lifting her up and saying, “Whatever you want to do, we believe you can do.”

Since departing from that rich motherland, Becca has cultivated her relationship to another kind of home, an imaginative realm that she has learned to navigate. A place where she can summon symbols and images to tell stories that at once belong to the past, to myth, and also to our complicated, perilous present. In one of her paintings, Return Us Home, she tells a dozen different stories in one stunning image of a running woman who seems to be carrying the entire cosmos within her. Describing the moth spread across the woman’s chest, Becca writes,

Nocturnal creatures were given the superpowers to see and move about during the night. While staying awake, the moth sees things that only appear in the depths of the night…As a result of her willingness to brave the dark she, like the moth, has been gifted the supernatural.

These words describe the work each of us is given to do in difficult times, be they personal or collective. Armed with paints, pigments, brushes, printmaking tools, and more recently, a tablet, Becca has learned the full extent of what it is to follow an artful way, courageously walking through shadow and light. Her resulting gifts aren’t supernatural. They are very much of this earth, yet point us to the parts of life that are all too often disregarded and rendered invisible. Life-giving things, like a sense of belonging that reminds us we are part of a story that is bigger than just our small lives.

That quality of connection and belonging permeates Chooch Helped. It fills each page as Becca manages to illustrate the story of two siblings while also expanding it to fulfill Andrea’s vision of a much larger story — that of the Cherokee people, their resilience, cultural riches, and vibrant contemporary life.

The light surrounding Chooch and Oginalii gigging for crawdads pours into every scene. Birthday candles, windows flooded in golden beams, fireflies, stars, glinting bird wings, rosy sunsets, wisps and strands of light even in the hard moments. Light radiates from the characters. It surrounds and moves between them. Like her many-layered symbolism, it is a light that has reckoned with devastating histories and ongoing struggle. It has nocturnal-moth wisdom in it that bears memory, imagination, songs, stories, strength, beauty, and cultural inheritance.

All these things infuse the atmosphere that surrounds Chooch and Sissy, along with their wide circle of family and friends, wrapping them up in a sense of wholeness so all-encompassing that it can’t help but carry the rest of us along too. What Becca has done as an image-maker seems to me to be something more than ordinary illustration. She is a translator of the unseen, giving us a lens with which to see inside our hearts. What she translates into the story of a helpful little boy is the essence of what it means to be human: love.

From the July/August 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles, click the tag ALA 2025.

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