Poem for son launches Shreveport author’s book series

With art: Photo of author Brittney Winn Lee, four children’s book covers

Britney Winn Lee of Shreveport did not set out to be a children’s book author. But a snowstorm at the Grand Rapids, Mich., airport led to a pop-up poetry reading with bored and weary travelers, and an acquisitions editor heard a poem Lee had written for her son.

That was thousands of book copies and four contracts ago. “This has been the most unexpected, humbling and joy-filled ride of my life,” she said. “I have found great purpose and hope in getting to play with the medium of children’s literature to help a variety of little humans—and their grown-ups—feel seen, not alone, understood, empowered and resourced for some of life’s tougher topics and heavier loads.”

If you’ve ever struggled to help a child go to sleep at night, her newest book is one you’ll want: “Good Night, Body: Finding Calm from Head to Toe,” released last month by Tommy Nelson, the children’s division of Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, and illustrated by Borghild Fallberg.

Echoing the comforting chants of the classic “Goodnight Moon,” “Good Night, Body” leads children into greeting, moving and relaxing each body part. With text and illustrations, this picture book helps connect kids with who they are inside and out as they reach their arms like a telescope, let their mouths hang like a hammock, dance their fingers like wind chimes and listen to their hearts beat a reassuring cadence, "you're loved, you're loved."

The book is designed for a comforting nighttime routine and can be useful for children ages 4 to 8 and their parents and caregivers, families who enjoy yoga and mindfulness exercises, children who need a relaxing bedtime ritual to smooth the transition from play to sleep and children who experience anxiety, insomnia, bedtime fears and intense emotions.

“From an early age, many of us learned how to disconnect from our bodies,” Lee said. “Body scans can be a great way to counter those tendencies and a powerful tactic to calm anxiety. This book is designed to help children—and their grown-ups—lovingly reconnect with their bodies and gently invite this part of themselves to find rest.”

The book joins Lee’s “Big, Big” series, illustrated by Jacob Souva, that celebrates topics like big emotions in boys, big curiosity in girls and big imagination in nonbinary kids. While “The Boy With Big, Big Feelings” encourages embodying feelings, “The Girl With Big, Big Questions” encourages speaking one’s mind and “The Kid With Big, Big Ideas,” which releases from Beaming Books in August, encourages the inclusion of children’s good —and big—ideas in decision-making processes that affect them.

“My children’s books have really come from needing a specific kind of book for our family’s particular context, i.e. ‘The Boy’ came out of wanting to make more space for my tenderhearted son’s emotions; ‘Good Night, Body’ came from needing a way to co-regulate our anxious bodies at the end of the days during COVID lockdown.”

More about the author:

Lee, associate pastor at Grace United Methodist Church, said she’s “a lifelong lover of the story of faith” and hopes her work helps better connect churches with the world. In addition to her children’s books, she wrote for and edited the collaborative “Rally: Communal Prayers for the Lovers of Jesus and Justice,” an anthology of call-and-response liturgies written by more than 50 diverse voices on topics ranging from liturgies for migration and litanies for rest amid justice work to Lenten prayers for peacemakers and pieces for honoring the bodies of women. She also wrote “Deconstructed Do-Gooder: A Memoir about Learning Mercy the Hard Way.” For more info, see www.britneywinnlee.com.

Columnist Judy Christie is the author of 18 books, including the fictional “Gone to Green” series and the nonfiction “Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.” Co-authored with Lisa Wingate, it is the true sequel to Wingate’s bestselling novel “Before We Were Yours.” For more about Christie, see www.judychristie.com or follow her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JudyChristieAuthor.

This article originally appeared on Shreveport Times: Photo of author Brittney Winn Lee, four children’s book covers