Scholastic presented me with multiple choices and together we selected the images we agreed best represented the characters I had created.
The photographs come from the Walter Dean Myers photograph collection, and the photo albums of the families of Edith and Herbert Langmuir, Dean Langmuir, and Joan Lacovara, relatives of an employee of Scholastic Inc.
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karenhesseblog 
Dear Karen, I have embarked on a project to write a book where every page was a self contained chapter. In writing workshop, feedback was that scenes felt fragmented and readers struggled with time and space. I was thrilled when my son told me about Witness. It showed me it can be done! Could you talk about how you worked with that format? Thanks!
Yay for your son for telling you about WITNESS. And yay for you for discussing with your son what you’re working on! It’s always tricky to make the work feel authentic and organic when you’ve committed to a rigid “literary device”. I can tell you that I wrote hundreds of poems that never made it into the final cut; I had a lot of options, cutting and moving poems around, to shape the narrative into something that had both flow and form . I also had poems that extended over several pages. And sometimes a single incident would be seen through several different sets of eyes and sensibilities, hence several pages looking at the same moment in time. The task you’ve set for yourself is a bit more challenging. It’s not impossible but it’s going to keep you reinventing until you’ve got the voice (or voices) and flow just right. Good luck. KH