Today we are very excited to share an interview with author Jeff Gottesfeld!
Read on to learn more about the author, the book, and a giveaway!
Meet the Author: Jeff Gottesfeld
Jeff Gottesfeld writes for page, stage, screen, and television. He’s won many awards, including ones from the American Library Association, the Association of Jewish Libraries, and the Writer’s Guild. His most recent title The Christmas Mitzvah was named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
About the Book: Fight for the Right to Read: Samuel Wilbert Tucker and the 1939 Sit-Down Strike for Library Reading Equality
Award-winning author Jeff Gottesfeld and #OwnVoices co-writer Michelle Y. Green introduce us to another important historical figure who deserves to be better known.
Along with illustrator Kim Holt, Gottesfeld and Green bring vibrant life to the story of Wilbert Tucker who grew up in the segregated South and became a lawyer who loved to read. In 1939, he organized a sit-down-in-the-library protest to fight for the right to read along with the rest of the public. It took many court cases and years of fighting, but Tucker fought with words and conviction until everyone could sit and read in the public library.
~Author Chat~
YABC: What gave you the inspiration to write this book?
Any time I come across a story and go, “What? This is unbelievable! How the heck have I never heard of this before?” I’m thinking it’s possible book territory. It happened with the story of Beate Gordon and women’s rights in Japan, the story of John van Hengel and the invention of food banks, and it happened again when I read about S.W. Tucker and the fight to integrate Alexandria VA’s new public library back in 1939, nearly a generation before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I still can’t quite grasp that no one did a picture book about this before me.
YABC: What research did you find most helpful?
Two big things. One was Nancy Noyes Silcox’s middle grade monograph about Tucker, which might even have been self-published. She’s from Alexandria and was the first school librarian at the elementary school named for our hero. Then there was Brenda Mitchell-Powell’s doctoral thesis (and then a university press book) about the 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-Down Strike. The Alexandria Black History Museum (located in what used to be the separate-but-unequal library built by Alexandria to evade the order to integrate) has a ton of resources as well.
YABC: Which fact did you find most interesting to learn?
Everyone who took part in the sit-down strike was under the age of 26, and some were still in their teens. Tucker recruited about a dozen young men and trained them in non-violence, but about half dropped out because the action was so risky. It was, after all, the Jim Crow South, circa 1939.
YABC: How did you ensure that the book is engaging to your audience?
This is where my co-writer Michelle Y. Green, a dear friend as well as a colleague, was so great on this project. Michelle is an expert editor and wordsmith as well as a great writer, and her coming into the project at my request took it to the next level. We had a fantastic story, we knew that. We just had to make the writing as tense as the events of that blistering August morning in Alexandria.
YABC: If you could only write one genre for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
This is a great question, for someone who has written just about everything under the sun, from soap operas to episodic television to a movie to plays to essays to young adult to middle grade…even to an adult chicklit book, under pseudonym. My first picture book came out less than ten years ago, and I still consider myself to be early career in this genre. It’s all I want to do from here on out.
YABC: How do you keep your ‘voice’ true to the age category you are writing within?
I’m not a fast writer, not when it comes to picture books, anyway. (Soap opera scripts were another story. That was breakneck pace). Slow and steady wins the race. There’s a lot of reading aloud, there’s a few people whom I trust to comment on my drafts (especially my de facto wife Beth and my long-time agent, Laura Peterson at Curtis Brown Ltd.), and there’s a lot of rewriting. I do think that I have a knack for finding stories that deserve to be told, and that are going to resonate with my readership.
YABC: What can readers expect to find in your books?
Compelling stories, astonishingly good artwork by people like Kim Holt, Matt Tavares, Peter McCarty, and Michelle Agatha, and values that may be old-fashioned but have stood the test of time. If there’s a common theme, my books are about people taking actions that were crucial at the their moment, but where those same people had absolutely zero idea about how those actions would resonate, or to what those actions would lead.
YABC: What is your favorite snack when writing?
Is coffee a snack? If not, roasted almonds work, if there is a coffee chaser. But generally, I don’t eat and write.
YABC: If you were able to time travel would you want to visit where your book is about?
Good grief, what writer wouldn’t want to be on hand at the time and place that a book was about? (Though I might take a pass on Omaha Beach, the Tet Offensive, or Japan in early 1945). But to be outside the Alexandria Public Library when the sit-down strikers came outside, under arrest, to a big crowd of people, photographers, and the press whom S.W Tucker had assembled? What a moment!
YABC: What’s your least favorite word or expression and why?
It’s from movies and television, and it drives me absolutely nuts because it’s so hackneyed and so common. The problem is, now that I’m going to point it out, you’ll notice it in everything, and it will drive you nuts too. In fact, I predict you will be measuring how long it takes from the start of a script for the writer to break it out. Here we go:
CHARACTER: “It’s not about [fill in the blank]! It’s about [fill in the blank with something else]!”
YABC: What do you do when you procrastinate?
Read an astonishing amount of news and commentary, widely, across the political spectrum. I think I have a better handle on what people who don’t agree with me think and believe than most people do. I absolutely aced this test: https://perceptiongap.
YABC: What’s up next for you?
Two new picture books coming in the next year. Both are military-themed. The first is HONOR FLIGHT (Candlewick, 2026, illustrated by Matt Tavares who illustrated TWENTY-ONE STEPS). It’s about that incredible volunteer program that flies aging veterans at no cost to the vet to Washington DC to see their monuments. The other is WE ALL SERVE, also from Candlewick, illustrated by TeMika Grooms, about the strange and unique lives of kids whose parents are career American military. They look like all other children, but their lives sure are not like all other children. Oh! Grooms is an Army brat.
YABC: What is your favorite holiday or tradition and why?
American holiday: Thanksgiving. A holiday of gratitude. Jewish holiday: Passover. A holiday of gratitude. Do you detect a theme? 🙂
YABC: Is there anything that you would like to add?
Thanks for giving me the chance to share like this. Keep reading.
Title: Fight for the Right to Read: Samuel Wilbert Tucker and the 1939 Sit-Down Strike for Library Reading Equality
Author: Jeff Gottesfeld & Michelle Y. Green
Illustrator: Kim Holt
Release Date: 9/9/2025
Publisher: Creston Books
ISBN-10: 1954354339
ISBN-13: 9781954354333
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
Age Range: 7-13
~ Giveaway Details ~
Five (5) winners will receive a copy of Fight for the Right to Read: Samuel Wilbert Tucker and the 1939 Sit-Down Strike for Library Reading Equality (Jeff Gottesfeld & Michelle Y. Green) ~US Only!
This book looks so interesting
This sounds fascinating–and it’s in a city not far from my school. I think our readers would really be interested in reading this.