What Do You Know? [Hardcover]

What might a well, a bear, a farmer, an historian respond when Love asks, What do you know? This introspective and poetic picture book, created by sisters Aracelis Girmay and Ariana Fields, explores the acts of questioning and listening, shining a light on all of the wisdom these very different, yet interconnected, entities have to offer.Ariana Fields is a graduate of SFAI (printmaking) and the City College Masters of Landscape Architecture program. She is interested in visual modes of storytelling, representations of movement, and works on paper. When she is not building, gardening, or drawing, she is making shapes with her body skating and surfing. Aracelis Girmay is a mother, auntie, teacher, and writer. Originally from Southern California, where the names of streets like Orange, Cherry, Bristol, Laurel, Buffalo, Santa Clara, Lime were a kind of poetry, she now lives and reads with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

"Authors and sisters Girmay and Fields give voice to a variety of beings, imagining love itself asking, ‘What do you know?’ and listening carefully to the response... In softly tinted art with the feel of sketchbook pages, … Fields draws as if setting down memories or dreams, with forms that repeat: people and birds with downcast gazes, bears with great claws, landscapes that undulate like ocean waves. Employing incantatory lines that conjure flame-like warmth and reverence, Girmay and Fields acknowledge the kind of knowing that’s older than books."

Publishers Weekly

“[In] this lyrical exploration of the world, … the musings are philosophical, ecological, poetic, and even sociological in nature… Many of these spreads let Mother Nature take the focus; humans (most are Black or brown skinned) are part of the land, not creatures who lord over it. Things even take a cosmological turn when readers hear from the Seven Sisters, who know ‘the language of light.’ lã1