Wild Trails to the Sea (April 2024), illustrated by Elena Skoryeko Wagner and published by Nimbus Publishing.

A tender and lyrical story celebrating the natural world and our place within it, Wild Trails to the Sea follows a coastal family as seasons change and children grow. With a hopeful refrain, a parent shares their dreams for their young ones, urging them to pay attention to every bit of magic the world has to offer, from watching a mayflower bloom to skipping pebbles on an icy pond, encouraging a lifelong love of natural spaces.

Told in gentle free-verse with luminous, tactile illustrations, this nostalgic story celebrates raising children in the great outdoors and will leave them enchanted with the lemon-burst of spruce tips, the steam of saltwater bonfires, and white rocks as vast as the moon.

The debut children’s picture book by celebrated Halifax-based editor and co-author of Amazing Atlantic Canadian Women Penelope Jackson and York-based, Nova Scotia—born paper-collage artist Elena Skoreyko Wagner, Wild Trails to the Sea is a love letter to the earth, the sky, and the sea—and to their future stewards.

Amazing Atlantic Canadian Women (2021), with Stephanie Domet, illustrated by James Bentley, for Nimbus Publishing. Highly recommended by CM and Atlantic Books: “An important and impactful read…Books like this keep me hopeful for what the literary world will look like in the future.”

You’ve likely heard of some of the most famous women from Atlantic Canada – women like activist Viola Desmond, painter Maud Lewis, and singer-songwriter Anne Murray. But this book celebrates some amazing women you may not have heard of, like pioneering radio producer Betty Riley, lawyer Linda Lee Oland, or engineer Mona El-Tahan.

With profiles of over 70 amazing women past and present from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador, authors Stephanie Domet and Penelope Jackson share incredible stories of women who have overcome adversity, excelled in STEM fields, established successful creative careers, and bravely led change.

Papergirl (2019) with Melinda McCracken, for Fernwood Publishing. Working on Papergirl, seventeen years after Melissa passed away, was a unique process described here (excerpt below).

Ten-year-old Cassie lives with her working-class family in 1919 Winnipeg. The Great War and Spanish Influenza have taken their toll, and workers in the city are frustrated with low wages and long hours. When they orchestrate a general strike, Cassie — bright, determined and very bored at school — desperately wants to help. She begins volunteering for the strike committee as a papergirl, distributing the strike bulletin at Portage and Main, and from her corner, she sees the strike take shape. Threatened and taunted by upper-class kids, and getting hungrier by the day, Cassie soon realizes that the strike isn’t just a lark — it’s a risky and brave movement.

With her impoverished best friend, Mary, volunteering in the nearby Labour Café, and Cassie’s police officer brother in the strike committee’s inner circle, Cassie becomes increasingly furious about the conditions that led workers to strike. When an enormous but peaceful demonstration turns into a violent assault on Bloody Saturday, Cassie is changed forever.

Lively and engaging, this novel is a celebration of solidarity, justice and one brave papergirl.

From Prairie Books Now:
“Melinda’s manuscript came to me as a 17,000-word story with a funny, delightful protagonist, 10-year-old Cassie…” Jackson explains. “I added about 15,000 words that flesh out the rest of Cassie’s world. I wanted Cassie (and the reader) to see the poverty and desperation of Winnipeg’s workers up close, so I gave her a best friend, Mary, whose war-widowed mother was struggling to make ends meet as a factory worker.”

Jackson also added a fictionalized version of Helen Armstrong, “a brilliant labour leader who’s been largely overlooked by historians (like many other women). Using information from primary sources and from a riveting documentary by Paula Kelly called The Notorious Mrs. Armstrong, I was able to weave her into the text; she becomes a mentor and role model for Cassie and Mary,” Jackson says.