Author Christina Soontornvat reflected on her path from her parents’ Texas restaurant to the pages of her own books during the 2026 Spencer G. Shaw Lecture: “The best way to understand my work is through embarrassing childhood photos of myself.”
Soontornvat is the only author to receive Newbery Honors for both nonfiction and fiction in the same year, for “A Wish in the Dark” and “All Thirteen,” which was also the first nonfiction work to win the Young Readers category of the Kirkus Prize. She gave the annual lecture for the Information School on Oct. 8 at the HUB.
She began by speaking about the two people who made her a writer: her parents. Her father, who grew up outside Bangkok, told her frequent stories of life on the river where his parents ran a cargo boat and he spent a few summers as a monk. They were "magical, incredible stories," she said, and she was "just hanging on every word." "He is the best storyteller I ever knew," Soontornvat said, adding that Spencer Shaw may have been No. 1.
Her father came to the United States in 1968 and met Soontornvat’s mother in Texas. The three of them eventually moved to Weatherford, Texas, where they noticed there was not a single Asian restaurant in the county. They opened Golden Moon, where Soontornvat spent her afternoons, weekends and holidays as one of few Asian American kids in town, at a table in the corner with "a plate full of spring rolls and a big stack of books."
Growing up in the 1980s, she said, “I didn't have any books where anyone was remotely like me," and the only thing she knew about authors was the photo on the back cover. Diversity work was happening elsewhere, she said, but “for me in this small town in Texas, it didn't reach me yet.” It was “just impossible to imagine myself as one of them.”
That absence shows up in her novel “The Changelings,” a magical story about a girl who feels as if she doesn't belong in one world or another, and her graphic novel “The Tryout,” following her experience trying out for her middle school cheer team in her small town. She didn’t set out to write about race, she said, “but I couldn’t tell my story without talking about that.”
Soontornvat then turned to “All Thirteen.” She was in Thailand during the 2018 rescue of a soccer team from a cave, watching the news coverage as it unfolded. She noticed a large difference between Western coverage and what she saw in Thailand. Thai news coverage focused on the boys, but reports in the United States focused on the divers and their journey. She wanted the world to know all sides of the story.
“You really can't know the story if you don't know about Thai culture,” she said. The difference in media coverage inspired her to begin interviews with locals, divers and the boys, turning them into a book.
Soontornvat also discussed Banned Books Week, calling efforts to take books away from children who need them "unconscionable."
"These are the books that kids need the most," she said. “If you are sitting in this room… I don't need to persuade you to join the fight against book bans. I feel that you probably already know how vital it is to fight them.”
She spoke about resisting the current backlash against diversity and inclusion in the U.S.
“We are not going back to the way things were,” she said. “We're not giving up the gains that so many authors and librarians and educators and activists have worked so hard to win.”
Soontornvat addressed the room after remarks from Washington State Librarian Melody Sky Weaver, MLIS ’10, and Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services in the UW Information School, who read an introduction written by doctoral candidate Mandi Harris.
Spencer Shaw, for whom the lecture series is named, was an African American University of Washington professor and later professor emeritus of library science. He was internationally known and recognized as a gifted teacher, librarian and storyteller. The Information School celebrates his legacy by spotlighting the best authors and illustrators in the field each year.