Thank You for Coming! Goodbye!

A young girl is so excited about the speech she will give in a play—“Thank you for coming! Goodbye!”—that she jumps out of bed (on the bed, actually), earning that familiar you’d-better-stop-that-right-now “look” from her mom. From cover to cover, this book will steal your heart. With Alaina and the Great Play, beloved author Eloise Greenfield successfully captures the joy of a Black child and the strength and support of her family as they prepare for a special performance. The emotions of the story are brought to life by the gifted Colin Bootman, whose textured paintings exude the qualities of Black Girl magic.

Don Tate is an award-winning illustrator of numerous critically acclaimed books for children, including Carter Reads The Newspaper (Peachtree Publishing, 2019), No Small Potatoes: Junius G. Groves and his Kingdom in Kansas (Knopf, 2018), Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions (Charlesbridge, 2016) The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (Eerdmans, 2015); many others.

Don is a founding host of the The Brown Bookshelf –a blog dedicated to books for African American young readers; and a one-time member of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, created to address the lack of diverse, non-majority narratives in children’s literature.

Don lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.