Just before spring break, author Jerry Craft visited NRMS seventh grade students to talk about his book New Kid. Jerry Craft is the author of many books. He won the John Newbery Award for his hard work. 

The book New Kid is about a kid named Jordan adapting to a new school that is much different from the type of environment he is used to. During Craft’s presentation, he spoke about his own background; when he was a young kid, he loved to draw and never really thought of himself as an author. He didn’t really like to read that much, but the type of books he did like to read were comic books like Marvel superheroes. 

When he was just starting off as an illustrator and author, he sent different books and comics he had made to many different publishers. Letter after letter, he would get rejections. He eventually was able to make his own publishing business to not only make his dream come true, but others’ as well. 

When Jerry Craft talked about the book New Kid he gave some background information that we never knew, like how he came up with some of the characters based on people he knew in real life. Also, when he was going through his presentation, he analyzed  details about the characters like facial expressions that we never would have noticed.

Mrs. Warren, who teaches ELA, said “We decided to bring Jerry Craft to come to speak to us because we felt he had a great message to deliver to the students and he was the first award-winning author of a graphic novel.”

Issy Hartsgrove, ’26, said, “I was very impressed by Jerry’s visit because we got to learn about his journey to where he is and the time and effort he put into the book. We learned a lot about his life during the presentation, and it was definitely something many would find inspiring.”

At the end of Jerry Craft’s presentation, he made a drawing of Jordan for us to see his process. This was his process.