Nadine Haruni

Kathryn interviews Author Nadine Haruni.How do you explain to a child that Mom and Dad will no longer live together? Dealing with divorce can be very confusing and challenging for children. Nadine Haruni presents a story to assist families adjusting to a new family dynamic and the often overwhelming feelings that surround it. Owing to the fact that approximately 50% of marriages end in divorce, it is helpful to have a children's book that explains what divorce is in a simple way. It also engenders empathy in kids whose parents are not divorced to better understand what their friends are going through. In this first book of her Freeda the Frog series the story centers on young Frannie and Frank and their parents, Freeda and Fred, who inevitably go through a divorce. They learn that both parents will still love them even if they don’t live together. The little tadpoles also discover that they are not alone and that tadpoles at school also have divorced parents. Haruni is an award-winning children’s book author. Along with writing and parenting she is a practicing attorney and a certified yoga instructor.Kathryn also interviews Author Francesca T. Royster PhD. As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Focusing on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Royster chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a black, queer, and feminist perspective. She interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. She is a professor of English literature at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches classes on African American literature and culture, Shakespeare, and gender and queer theory.