Starting Over in Sunset Park

Starting Over in Sunset Park, is is now available to order! Story by José Pelaez and Lynn McGee, pictures by Bianca Diaz.

Whitacre Enterprises and Tilbury House Publishers also invite you to the online launch of Starting Over in Sunset Park on Saturday April 17, 2021, at 4pm EDT.

RSVP for link to whitacreenterprises2000@gmail.com by April 15.

Brooklyn is a strange, intimidating place for a girl who speaks no English when she steps off her very first plane after a flight from the Dominican Republic.

Jessica and her mom, Camila, must live in their cousins’ crowded apartment until Camila finds work making holiday decorations and they can afford their own place. Isolated on the playground and baffled in class, unable to understand her teacher’s instructions, Jessica is intensely homesick. But little by little, things get better. She begins to learn English, and she loves the cats she and her mom care for to earn extra money. Left behind by traveling owners, the cats make the best of their situation, inspiring Jessica to do the same.

Lynn McGee’s (Bronx, NY) published volumes of poetry include Tracks (2019), Sober Cooking (2016), and two award-winning chapbooks. Twice a Pushcart nominee, she is also a Best of the Net Award nominee and winner of a MacDowell fellowship and a Judith’s Room Emerging Writers Award. She has taught college writing as well as adult literacy to immigrants and has led poetry workshops in New York City elementary schools as an artist-in-residence with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Lynn is a communications manager at Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York. Starting Over in Sunset Park is her first children’s book

Bianca Diaz (Brooklyn, NY), a granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Pilsen, a Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago. She believes that healthy communities can help people become happy, independent human beings; through art and education, she strives to be instrumental in the collaborative creation of these communities. Bianca is a 2018 Ezra Jack Keats Book Award nominee for her illustrations for The One Day House.

José Pelaez (Brooklyn, NY) founded Kitty in NY, an agency that provides temporary homes to the pets of traveling New Yorkers. Starting Over in Sunset Park explores issues he himself experienced while adjusting to a new life in America. He hopes the book will help children during difficult times of transition.