I think it is miraculous how a designer can come up with a cover concept that captures the story so perfectly, as is the case here. Hayes called the new book’s cover, designed by Jessica Jenkins, junior designer at Penguin Young Readers, “truly striking. This was a daunting task for her, but she felt she had a responsibility to finish the Logan family story, and I am so pleased for her that she did.” She wrote numerous drafts and was a wonderful reviser, tinkering with the manuscript every time she read it over. I started working with her on the novel three or four years ago. Though close to two decades have passed since the publication of The Land, the penultimate book about the Logans, Hayes noted that All the Days Past “had been percolating in Mildred’s mind for a long time.

“I asked myself, ‘Can this possibly be so brilliant?’ I was amazed at the leap Mildred made between her first two books. “When I first read Roll of Thunder, I literally got shivers,” she said. “She is a wonderful writer, but the manuscript was a bit too lyrical, so I said, ‘This is beautiful, but it’s too long-remember that your audience is 10! It’s the story that matters.’ ”Īfter finishing Song of the Trees, Taylor moved on to her second book, a novel that took Hayes by pleasant surprise. “Mildred and I worked closely together on the book,” she said. Taylor selected Dial as her publisher, and Hayes became editor of the debut.

“I had recently arrived at Dial as senior editor, and Mildred interviewed Phyllis Fogelman and me, along with editors at other houses, who were also interested in acquiring the manuscript,” Hayes recalled. The novel was edited by Regina Hayes, editor-at-large at Viking, who first worked with Taylor more than four decades ago, after the author won the African-American segment of a writing contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books, for her manuscript that became Song of the Trees.

In All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, which will have a first printing of 100,000 copies, Cassie Logan is now a young woman, searching for her place in the world, a journey that takes her from Toledo to California, to law school in Boston, and, ultimately, in the 1960s, home to Mississippi to join the voter registration drive. The sequence, which centers on this African-American Mississippi family and chronicles the civil rights movement, began in 1975 with Song of the Trees, a novella illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, and continued with the Newbery-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), The Road to Memphis (1990), and a prequel, The Land (2001). Taylor’s Logan Family saga, whose cover is revealed here for the first time. Viking has announced the January 2020 publication of All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, the fifth and final novel in Mildred D.

Song of the Trees by Mildred D. Taylor