By Suma Subramaniam

I met Pooja Makhijani a few years ago through an online South Asian children’s book group, and we’ve stayed friends ever since. Pooja is an incredible baker. She taught me how to make naan. When I heard about her forthcoming picture book celebrating bread, I couldn’t wait to cheer for her and share it with the world.

Your newest picture book, Bread Is Love, illustrated by Lavanya Naidu (Roaring Book Press, 2026), is about a mother and her two children who share a weekly ritual of baking bread, celebrating the process as a labor of love, patience, and family togetherness, even when the results aren’t perfect. What was your inspiration for this story?

Bread baking entered my life during a difficult divorce a decade ago. What began as a coping mechanism grew into a grounding ritual, one that calmed my anxiety, deepened my connections with others, offered weekly sustenance, and nourished me creatively as both an artist and a photographer.

Picture books, meanwhile, have always been a love! My first, Mama’s Saris, illustrated by Elena Gomez (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2007), found somewhat unexpected success in the aughts, but at the time I struggled to build momentum or a clear path forward in the field. The landscape for diverse—or ‘multicultural,’ as they were called then—books was so, so different.

During the pandemic, I took stock of the creative work I felt called to do and chose to return, deliberately, to picture books. Telling a story about breadand honoring everything it had come to represent for me, like science and self-care to sustenance and sharing, felt like the most natural place to begin (again).

In the author’s note, you write about the many mishaps you’ve had with over-proofed boules, gummy sandwich loaves, and burned baguettes, and how to continue to learn by just showing up. I think there’s a hidden writing lesson in there, too. How long did it take for you to write this book, and how did you find joy in the process?

In late 2021, I drafted a manuscript centered on our family practice of “baking in” the new year. Each New Year’s Eve, we choose a new recipe and aim, ambitiously, to pull the finished bake from the oven at the exact stroke of midnight. (We are not always successful; as Mama says in Bread Is Love, “Sometimes bread is moody.”) That treat becomes our breakfast on Jan. 1. My agent felt the story didn’t quite land—and, in retrospect, she was right!— so I set it aside and went out on submission with a different manuscript in 2022. A few months later, we heard from Connie Hsu, vice president and executive editorial director at Macmillan. She passed on the project we’d sent, but followed up with a question of her own: Would I be interested in writing a picture book about bread?

Connie’s email wasn’t totally out of the blue: She and I had met years earlier, when she was an editorial assistant at Little, Brown. We stayed loosely connected through social media, where she’d watched my bread-baking journey unfold.

The answer was an easy yes. In the earlier New Year’s manuscript, I’d already mapped out the mechanics of making a loaf—gathering ingredients, mixing, fermenting, shaping, and more—and much of that language carried into the new draft. With time (several months of rewriting) and Connie’s visionary editing, what I added were the elements the first version lacked: patience, adaptability, and attention as core baking skills; the way repetition teaches care, resilience, and growth; how the act of baking cultivates hope; and how bread, in its many forms, links us across cultures.

I’ve learned that the surest way to protect joy in writing is to untangle it from the machinery of publishing. The pleasure has to come from having made something beautiful, not from external validation; you will be a miserable artist otherwise!

Writing is playful and alive—even sacred. I love that feeling that you get when you know you’ve written something good, a sense that you tapped into something bigger or more otherworldly than you. I chase that buzz every time I sit down to write.

Lavanya Naidu’s illustrations in the book are stunning. How did your text change with the illustration pass?

Just stunning! Her illustrations are playful, wonderful, nostalgia-full. I appreciate her command of light and shadow. Bread Is Love unfolds over the course of a single weekend, and through shifts in color and directional light she conveys both emotional nuance and the quiet passage of time. The resulting mood is soft and meditative.

The text changed little after we received Lavanya’s initial sketches. However, when I wrote the manuscript, I envisioned a mother baking with her school-aged daughter; as writers, we often draw from our own lives. Lavanya, however, introduced a third character: a toddler sibling, buoyant and mischievous, with her own parallel bread-making adventure. Her expressions are wonderfully alive. Through this character, Lavanya wove in a wordless narrative layer—one I never could have anticipated and one that deepens the story immeasurably.

This book has a STEAM theme encouraging young readers to think about baking bread as science, math, and art. You embedded so many ways for readers to fall in love with baking. How much research did you have to do to write this book?

Not ‘research’ in the traditional sense. I’d baked hundreds of loaves by the time I sat down to write the book, and the science, math, and artistry of bread baking had been absorbed gradually, through practice. Each loaf taught me something about temperature or ratios or scoring, and I tapped into those lived lessons and experiences as I wrote. The knowledge came from doing, rather than from looking anything up, which feels true to the spirit of the book itself!

What do you want readers to take away from Bread Is Love?

I hope this book inspires readers to invent traditions of their own—birthday bread, Focaccia Fridays, or something entirely unexpected. I wrote Bread Is Love to remind readers to find joy in the process and not in the product, especially in an era in which artificial intelligence can spit out “art” in seconds. I want readers to embrace the chaos and the unexpected (and the magic!) as they learn and experiment in whatever their art form is—poetry, pottery, gardening. Life is messy and wildly imperfect, which is exactly what makes it worth living.

How do you balance being a parent, working a day job, and pursuing writing, and what advice would you give to others trying to get published while juggling similar responsibilities?

My first bit of advice would be to reject the myths of artistic meritocracy. You don’t have to be ‘struggling’ to be a great artist. Artists don’t work in solitude. Having a day job doesn’t make you a lesser artist. You have to live in the world!

I’d also encourage women writers to reject expectations that they can ‘do it all.’ My friend Olivia Campbell, the New York Times bestselling author of Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine (Park Row) and Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History (Park Row), wrote a damning essay about balancing art and parenting, and specifically mothering, in LitHub during the height of the pandemic.

“Women writers have always been up against the expectation that they can do it all, all at once,” she writes. “Male authors are lauded as disciplined recluses for closing themselves away to write; women are praised for juggling writing and family simultaneously. But you can’t have it both ways. Either writing is a laborious, worthwhile craft requiring time alone or it’s not, no matter the writer’s gender. ‘How does she do it all?’ society muses while staring at the bedraggled mom-author clutching her book in one hand and her baby in the other. By having no work-life balance or boundaries. Losing sleep. Hiding in pantries. Getting increasingly angry by the lack of support. By nearly drowning.” Like many of the writers who Olivia quotes, I too write in my car, often in short bursts, always on my phone (Google Docs app for the win).

Lastly, I’d remind writers that for everything there is a season, and different times of life are meant for different things. Balance, in this framing, isn’t about equal hours. It’s about listening to what this season is asking of you; all are part of the same life.

What are you working on next?

Together for Mama, illustrated by Nadia Alam (Rocky Pond Books), a picture book about a girl whose extended family jumps into action to provide support when the girl’s mother begins to suffer from postpartum depression, will be out in June. Aunties, illustrated by Ruchi Mhasane (Roaring Brook) and scheduled for spring 2027, is a celebration of all of the aunties in our lives. Both books are, in different ways, about the collective care of children and families. I’m also working on a middle-grade novel (she says with trepidation)!

Cynsational Notes

Pooja Makhijani is a writer, mother, and baker. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Teen Vogue, and Bon Appétit among others. She lives in Central New Jersey with her daughter, the inspiration for Bread Is Love.

Suma Subramaniam is a recruiter by day and children’s book author by night. She writes picture books, middle grade, chapter books, and poetry. Her works include Crystal Kite Award winner Namaste Is A Greeting and ILA Notable My Name Is Long As A River, and the V. Malar series. When not recruiting or writing, Suma volunteers with SCBWI and We Need Diverse Books or blogs about children’s literature. Learn more at https://sumasubramaniam.com.