Hello Suma,
You earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Why did you choose that program? What did you love about it?
The MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts gave my writing a purpose. I joined the program to study the craft of writing books for children. I spent all my time studying books as a writer under some of the most brilliant children’s authors in the country. The program gave me a community of lifelong friends and a writer’s toolbox that will stay with me forever. This is what I love about Vermont College and the Writing for Children and Young Adults Program.
You have a day job like most writers do, and you write about STEM/STEAM topics. What is the crossover here?
Children’s books make great mediums to introduce kids to various aspects of science, arts, culture, and the histories of courageous people and places. Although my day job has nothing to do with children’s literature, my education has a combination of science and arts.
Writing for children helps me carry
empathy into my workplace environment.
Likewise, writing helps me blur the boundaries between science and the arts. The routine of working a day job and writing every day helps create a continuity between myself and children in a beautiful way. I’m forced to put my devices away and turn to pen and paper for the service of children. This is a practice of mindfulness and takes precedence over everything.
The Runaway Dosa (Little Bee Books, September 2023), illustrated by Parvati Pillai is a fairytale mishmash of The Gingerbread Man and a popular Tamil rhyme called Dosai, Amma, Dosai!
In the summer of 2015, I was working with my faculty advisor, the one and only Jane Kurtz in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature program when...
...we both challenged each other to write
a story from the cultures we grew up in.
The story would be inspired by The Gingerbread Man – a folktale about a man made of gingerbread who runs away from a cast of characters.
Jane Kurtz was an early believer in this story, and I’m thrilled that this book will be available now in honor of the relationship I share with her. She created THE RUNAWAY INJERA for Ready Set Go Books, which is one of the bestsellers of the Open Hearts Big Dreams Fund Program for children in Ethiopia. I created THE RUNAWAY DOSA, also inspired by an all-time favorite Tamil rhyme, Dosai Amma Dosai, for dosa lovers all over the world.
What do you do as a volunteer for Diverse Books?
I volunteer for the internship grant committee at We Need Diverse Books. Since its inception, the committee has given away thousands of dollars in grants to interns from marginalized backgrounds so they can pursue careers in publishing. More than 80% of the interns have gone on to secure long-term jobs in the publishing industry. Some of them have started acquiring books, too.
I follow my VCFA faculty advisor Martine Leavitt’s advice, which is to write every day and to write for the child in me even if it is only for fifteen minutes.
Slowly, the ideas will form, the revisions will happen, and the manuscript will fly off the nest when it finds a home in the big, wide world.
Something you wish others would ask or that you want others to know …
My real name is Suma Venkata Subramanyam. It has been misspelled over the years and has evolved into Suma Subramaniam. Suma means flower in Kannada. Venkata Subramanyam is my father’s name. Here is the pronunciation guide for my name: https://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?pid=3379
Well, thank you, Suma!
I enjoyed getting to know you and how you keep up with writing and working. Thanks for the advice! And I appreciate the pronunciation guide. I love that! If you'd like to follow Suma on her amazing, award-winning, KidLit writing journey, see her bio and links below.
Suma Subramaniam’s interests in writing for children are centered around STEM/STEAM related topics as well as India and Indian heritage. When she’s not recruiting by day or writing by night, she’s volunteering for We Need Diverse Books and SCBWI or blogging about children's books.
Her second book, She Sang for India: How M.S. Subbulakshmi Used her Voice for Change (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), illustrated by Shreya Gupta, is an Honor Book in Toka Box’s top South Asian Children’s Books of 2022 list. Suma is also the contributing author of The Hero Next Door anthology from Penguin Random House, which is a finalist for the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award.
Her poems have been published in Poetry Foundation's first Young People's Poetry Edition of Poetry Magazine. She lives in Seattle with her family and a dog who watches baking shows. Learn more at https://sumasubramaniam.com.
Write~on,
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