Matthew Cordell: Hi, my name is Matthew Cordell and I'm the author and illustrator of Explorers. A lot of my books that I've been an author of are stories that have really been inspired by my family. So either things that my kids have done or things I feel like I've learned being a parent or things that we love doing together.

One of the things that we love to do as a family is to go to museums. When I think about museums, I really love the knowledge that museums hold and what you can learn at museums, but I also love when you go to a museum and you look around and you look at the families at museums, and a lot of these families, they were at the museum for the same reason that my family goes to a museum. They want to spend time with their family. They want to learn about something.

A lot of these families, one of the great things is that they don't look like my family. They might be of a different race or different religion or speak different languages. I love that about museums. I love that even though we look different and we speak differently and we might even act differently in certain ways, we all have that connective tissue that we all want to be with our families. We all want to learn. We want to better ourselves. Because we're there for that reason, I think that bonds us no matter what our differences are.

So when I figured out that I wanted to make a book about a family visiting a museum, I realized I wanted to have an adventure that this family has, but I wanted there to be a component of a book that speaks to the division I think that we have as people when we don't understand each other, closing that gap just by being in the presence of others and interacting with others really can change that.

So the main character before he goes into the museum, he gets this little toy bird. Instead of really paying attention to the museum, and he's chasing after it and the family are sort of chasing after him. So he throws it through this exhibit and another little boy from another family catches this bird. This family, they looked different. They have brown skin, and the mom and the daughter, they're wearing the hijab. When we don't know who we're encountering, there is a little bit of awkwardness.

The main character, he snatches the bird away from this little boy that he's just met who's trying to give the bird back. There's this confrontation, and I think everyone feels uncomfortable and sort of unhappy with the way that happens. Eventually the boy, he loses the bird in the museum and he's running around frantically trying to find it, and he gets lost. What happens is the second family, the family that this little boy wasn't very kind to, finds him.

Instead of not helping him, they know what it's like. Any family knows what it's like for a child to be lost. It's sort of our worst nightmare. They help this little boy find his parents. When they do find each other, it's just this really special moment, I think from these two families, there's a connection there, there's a gratitude of someone helping you connect again with your lost child. There's a connection of learning a bit about a person or a people that are a different culture. I feel like it's just a really special moment in the book where these two families come together, and even though they might look different from each other, they might have cultural differences, we're really not that different. We all want safety, we want security, we want happiness. I think that's what is realized in that moment of the book where these two families come together by helping each other at a time of need.