Grid Books

Love Is the Only Thing

An illustrated song for children

Poet and visual artist JoAnne McFarland will curate and present Love Is the Only Thing, the first illustrated children’s book published by Grid Books. Based on lyrics by John McFarland, the poet’s late father and a musician and songwriter for Aretha Franklin, Love Is the Only Thing will be available in print and audiobook formats and will feature fifteen original full-color illustrations by the award-winning artist Scherezade García.

Both García and McFarland are know for work that reflects on history, attempting to counteract violence with creativity. As the poet puts it, “each act of making thwarts violence’s aim to destroy.” The truth-telling lyrics of Love Is the Only Thing do just this—they can be read as both a lullaby and a call to action.

With its first-ever children’s book, Grid Books aims reaching younger audiences with a universal message of love and nonviolence, and to encourage parents and educators to deliver this message by reading to the children in their care.

JoAnne McFarland is an artist, poet, and curator, and is Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and former Cave Canem poetry fellow. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, with artwork in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress and the Columbus Museum of Art, among many others. She is the author of eighteen poetry books and libretti, including, most recently, the multimedia collection Pullman, published by Grid Books in 2022.

Scherezade García is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization. In her artist statement, she describes her own artmaking as a kind of narrative process. “Through my art works,” she writes, “I become a storyteller.”