Welcome to Cherry Creek Reads 2026!
Whether you’re joining us for the first time or are a returning participant, we’re so excited to have you celebrate with us this year. Cherry Creek Reads is all about coming together as a community to **Read Together, Shine Together!**
To get started, take a moment to check out the **Overview: Cherry Creek Reads 2026** slideshow, where you’ll learn more about this year’s celebration.
Inside this site, you’ll find a variety of materials to help you create a celebration that’s just right. Feel free to pick and choose activities and resources that work best for you. We hope these tools inspire meaningful moments of connection, joy, and of course, a love of reading!
Let’s make this year’s celebration unforgettable!
Karen Connors, Teacher Librarian at Mission Viejo
Kim Casali, Teacher Librarian at Buffalo Trail
ABOUT THIS SITE
Promotional Materials:
Here you’ll find everything you need to promote the event, including sample letters, a kick-off video, how to order stickers and bookmarks from Printing Services, how to order the book AXXXXXXXXXX, and more.
Participation Materials:
This page provides everything you need to support the "One Book" selection,XXXXXXXXXXX. It includes discussion questions, ideas for scheduling a CCSD Board of Education member or administrative leader as a guest reader, a creative art project, and more!
This page includes all the resources you need to showcase your participation, including "Currently Reading" signs, a 68-minute reading tracker, and more!
ABOUT THE BOOK
All the Stars in the Sky written by Art Coulson and illustrated by Winona Nelson
Last Stop on Market Street meets We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga in this “staggeringly lovely” (BCCB, starred review) picture book about a young boy who learns the Cherokee lesson of gadugi—how working together and helping each other makes the whole community stronger.
When eager Clay asks his elisi (grandmother) for help to be named star of the week at school, he’s surprised by her answer: No one person is more important than his family and his community. But is Clay still important at all?
This contemplative exploration of community, individualism, and responsibility—accentuated with traditional beadwork in the art—is a moving invitation to consider an indigenous perspective of one’s place in the world and how we all light up our sky, together.
From Simon and Schuster
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & ILLUSTRATOR
Art Coulson is a writer of Cherokee, English, and Dutch descent and comes from a family of storytellers in all three traditions. A Navy brat, Art traveled the world, attending fourteen schools on three continents before graduating high school. Art served as the first executive director of the Wilma Mankiller Foundation in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma after an award-winning twenty-five-year career in journalism. A 2023 McKnight Fellow in Children’s Literature, Art is the author of twenty books, graphic novels, and plays, including Chasing Bigfoot, Bank Street Best Book of 2020 The Reluctant Storyteller, All the Stars in the Sky, and Look, Grandma! Ni, Elisi!, which was named a best STEM children’s book by the National Science Teaching Association. Find out more at ArtCoulson.com.
Winona Nelson is a fine artist and illustrator of comics and children’s books. She’s the illustrator of If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving by Chris Newell, which was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and All the Stars in the Sky by Art Coulson. Her fine art, which often focuses on the stories and history of her tribe, the Ojibwe of Minnesota, as well as on gender and diversity, has been featured in galleries across the country. She lives in Pennsylvania with her artist beau Anthony and their gentleman cats, Diego and Tod.
From Simon and Schuster