Kadir Nelson: Hi, my name is Kadir Nelson, and I illustrated the book, "Ellington Was Not a Street", written by Ntozake Shange. I had been working on sketches for quite a while and hadn't quite figured out how to end the book. My editor had hinted this might have been a gathering of people who could've all been in this one place to have some type of a party. My mother used to host wonderful parties at my home when I was a kid growing up, and this idea really kind of rekindled some of those childhood memories.

I also remember looking at a group photo of my mother's side of the family that my grandmother always had on top of the piano. And in the photo, my mother and her siblings were gathered around my grandmother, who held my older sister in her lap. As a child I always loved looking at that photo. It always gave me a great feeling, a wonderful sense of family and belonging. I thought it was a really great idea to use that idea for the ending of this book. I figured I'd have this great big group shot of all these famous people attending the party, and so I posed all of the guests at this party in Ntozake's home around her father, and she and her younger brother are posed in front. So it was really kind of like a really nice family portrait.

The medium I used for this book was pencil, watercolor, and oil paint, in that order. And that's a medium that I use for most of the books that I illustrate.