NEW YORK HERE WE COME! By SCBWI South Africa ARA Yvette de Beer
Created April 01, 2025 by Elizabeth Sparg
As the Assistant Regional Advisor for South Africa I was lucky enough to be able to travel to New York City at the end of January to attend the first in-person conference since Covid 19. I was joined by Emily House, our Regional Advisor (RA) and Elizabeth Sparg our Illustrator Coordinator (IC). This was the first time the three of us had met since we each live in different corners of the country. We were very excited to get to know each other better and do some team building before the busy weekend ahead.
The team meet at last!
All three of us opted to participate in the Portfolio Showcase on the Friday evening. Hectic preparations were made beforehand to get our portfolios and book dummies ready for the showcase. We dropped off our portfolios with SCBWI head office personnel who arranged for them on the tables in the Grand Ballroom at the Hilton Hotel.
There was approximately 200 members exhibiting on the day, and the work was outstanding. All the SCBWI Regional Teams along with Industry professionals were invited to a VIP cocktail party to view the work before it was opened to the rest of the conference attendees. Art directors, agents, publishers, artists, writers, librarians, everyone involved in children’s publishing was there. The lingo was very interesting! The cocktail party was packed with industry professionals from all over the globe.
For an extra fee there were also in-person manuscript and portfolio reviews for the members who was lucky enough to book a spot beforehand.
The Portfolio Showcase
Prior to the conference the three of us went on an excursion to the Society of Illustrators, which coincidentally was holding a special exhibition of Children’s Book Illustration. Great timing for us! It was exciting to see children’s book illustration being taken seriously and we were able to see originals from some of our favourite illustrators on display.
The Original Art Show at The Society of Illustrators
The conference officially started on Saturday morning. Proceedings were opened with a very interesting keynote speech by Newbery Winner, Erin Entrada Kelly, after which we all split up to attend our choice of creative labs. These were intense three hour workshops, packed with information.
I chose to attend the lab hosted by Tiff Liau, executive editor at Penguin Random House on MAKING WORLDBUILDING COME ALIVE. It was extremely thought-provoking.
Later that day there was a wonderful interview with Peter Brown the creator of The Wild Robot book series, an agent and editors panel discussion and a networking happy hour and a variety of socials that you could attend.
Sunday morning was also given over to a range of creative labs. For this session I chose THUMBNAILING YOUR GRAPHIC NOVEL by well-known graphic novel artist Sheree Miller. After these final labs the conference was wrapped up with a closing keynote speech from Sophie Blackall and a book signing session by all the celebrity authors and illustrators attending.
A lot of postcards were exchanged, new friends and contacts made, wonderful experiences lived in the very impressive New York City.
In the streets of New York
We would like to extend a big THANK YOU to SCBWI for all the support, hard work and commitment in accommodating, organising and executing a weekend with an estimation of about 700 attendees. In particular, Patricia Wiles Director of Regional Team Management, who took the RSA team under her wing and made us feel super welcome. We left inspired!