The #WorldKidLit review team here at GLLI is thrilled to welcome our newest contributor, Karthika Gopalakrishnan, to its ranks. Our regular readers may recognize Karthika from last year’s celebration of World Kid Lit Month which she co-curated, focusing on #IndiaKidLit. Welcome, Karthika!

Karthika is an educator, children’s book writer and editor, and the director of the annual Neev Literature Festival. Established in 2017, the festival is a celebration of children’s literature about Indian lives. It features “masterclasses, panel discussions, book readings, and curated selection of books for readers to purchase at the Marketplace.” According to the NLF Report: Children’s Literature in India 2022, an in-depth look at the current state of children’s literature in India, the Neev Literature Festival is “the largest physical gathering of the children’s literature ecosystem in India today.”

As an educator, Karthika serves as the Head of Reading at Neev Academy in Bangalore. In that role, she and her seven person team support teachers with reading resources and grow students as readers by striving to make the library the beating heart of the school.

Making books available to children—through school and home libraries—is of course central to making children lifelong readers. Karthika herself grew up in a house filled with books; comic books, in fact, were what hooked her into reading. She’s been a reader all her life, through school, college, during her time as as journalist, and of course, currently!

In addition to advocating for children’s literature and literacy, Karthika is a writer and editor of children’s books. As an editor and writer for Ms. Moochie Books, she worked on picture books such as I Won’t Eat That (shortlisted for the Peek-A-Book Awards) and illustrated chapter books such as Eeee… Here’s My Story! with the storyteller Geeta Ramanujam. She also wrote and guest-edited for Pratham Books, specifically on The Grand Patch Up, a book set in North-East India, and We Love Our Home, an early reader book about animal habitats.

Karthika’s official bio is below. All of us here at GLLI are happy that Karthika has agreed to lend her wide range of expertise to our work. I would like to add my personal thanks for answering the questions I sent her way as I wrote this article. Be sure to be on the lookout for her book reviews. Again, welcome Karthika!

Karthika Gopalakrishnan is the Head of Reading at Neev Academy, Bangalore, and the Director of the Neev Literature Festival. In the past, she has worked as a children’s book writer, editor, and content curator at Multistory Learning which ran a reading program for schools across south India. Prior to this, Karthika was a full-time print journalist with two national dailies. Her Twitter handle is g_karthika.

Klem-Marí Cajigas has been with Nashville Public Library since 2012, after more than a decade of academic training in Religious Studies and Ministry. As the Family Literacy Coordinator for Bringing Books to Life!, Nashville Public Library’s award-winning early literacy outreach program, she delivers family literacy workshops to a diverse range of local communities. In recognition of her work, she was named a 2021 Library Journal “Mover and Shaker.” Born in Puerto Rico, Klem-Marí is bilingual, bicultural, and proudly Boricua.