Darnell Johnson: Hello. My name is Darnell Johnson and I am the illustrator of The Electric Slide and Kai. The thing that spoke out to me when I first read the manuscript actually for The Electric Slide and Kai was the life that was breathed into the characters just by the words themselves. Kelly did an awesome job with that and just creating that family feel within the manuscript. So it was easy for me to visualize what this family looked like, what Kai's family looked like, his brother, his sisters, his mom, and his dad, and then his grandfather and so on. That's what really spoke to me. The words really jumped off the page to really communicate a sense of family and a sense of belonging. To be able to show by just a mixture of the gamut of just brown skin tones was something that I initially thought of and something intentional that I did with the characters. Even within just Kai's family, you can tell that it's somewhat of a blended family of different skin tones.

Another thing, I would say, I wanted to really communicate movement within the way that I drew the characters. In contrast though to where in the story Kai is trying to learn how to dance, you can see that his drawings of earlier on were a little bit more stiff and that was done intentionally as well so that you could see the progression of him getting better and getting more comfortable with who he is on the dance floor. It was important for me to get the movement across because the book is called The Electric Slide and Kai. And I know for me, that dance pops up a lot at family reunions, at weddings that I've been to. All the way from when I was a kid up to now, that song gets played.

I like a lot of different spreads in here. One particular one is towards the end when Kai pretty much realizes that everybody is doing their own take on the electric slide. In his head, it was more sort of like, "Hey, this is how you do it. Left, left. Right, right." But, when he started to look around and see that people were misstepping or whatnot, that gave him a little bit more confidence; it put him at ease, I felt, a little bit more, so that he could just make the dance his own and just catch the rhythm how he would catch it and just vibe out. The spread I'm talking about is the spread like right after Uncle Troy fist bumps him and they go back into the reception hall and pop right into the line. And that's where he quickly realizes everybody's doing their own thing to the music. We get to the next spread that follows after that, where he's dropping low to the ground, popping back up and hitting the slide, just understanding that, "Hey, I can do this. I can make this my own." And I feel like in my head, in that moment, he wasn't quite thinking about, "I have to nail this to get a nickname." When he's in that zone, it's just for the love of dancing.

One thing that I really do like about the book and which is why I dedicated it to my own son is that it communicates a message of embrace who you are. Don't try to be like anyone else, so that we can shine our light, our unique light, within the world and not try to mimic anyone else.