CRITIQUE GROUPS: Everything You Need to Know for Success (for grownups)

Join acclaimed book makers Christy Hale, Julie Downing and Katherine Tillotson as they tell all about their critique group and share good practical advice for others.

Want to join or start your own critique group? We’ll share a critique group google form with any attendees who want to connect together after the event!

We’ll save time at the end so you can ask them questions!

Christy Hale has taught at the New York Center for Book Arts and as an adjunct professor in the Communication Design department at Pratt Institute while working in children’s book publishing as a designer and art director. Now she teaches an online course in Writing for Picture Books through the illustration department at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Her books are highly acclaimed and have been honored with starred reviews, SOI recognitions, ALA Notables, NY Book Show awards, among others and are often found on the Best Books of the Year lists. Her most recent books are Out the Door (Neal Porter Books), Water Land (Neal Porter Books), and TODOS IGUALES / ALL EQUAL (Lee and Low Books).

Katherine Tillotson has been creating picture books for many years now and the work continues to give her the same pleasure and excitement she felt so long ago in grade school when she brushed paint on paper and watched it form a tree. Her picture books have been celebrated with starred reviews from all the major trade publications as well as by American Library Association as Notable. Her most recent book is The Three Billy Goats Gruff – The True Story (A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book/Atheneum) written by Richard Jackson. She uses all kinds of paint, charcoal, pens and paper and likes playing with materials as they all provide seemingly endless possibilities for expression.

Julie Downing teaches watercolor and Children’s Book Illustration to both graduate and undergraduate students at the Academy of Art University. She has illustrated over 45 books for children and her work has been featured at The Society of Illustrator’s Original Art Show in NYC and has been exhibited at galleries throughout the United States and England. Julie has won numerous awards for her work, including a Parent’s Choice Award, the New York Public Library Best Books Award, APAAL Best Illustrated Book, and the Irma Black Silver Medal. She was selected to appear in Talking with Artists Too, a book about 12 of the nation’s best Children’s’ Book Illustrators. The art for her most recent book, Lotus and Feather by Ji-li Jiang (Little Brown Books for Young Readers), is rendered traditionally using watercolor, colored pencil, ink and then combined digitally.