Niña Mata, Illustration ’08, has a literary partnership that might make other illustrators extremely jealous, especially if they’re NBA fans. The New Jersey–based children’s literature illustrator has teamed up with Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James on two books, with the latest to be published in April.
I Am More Than (HarperCollins, 2024) riffs off James’ reply to Laura Ingraham when the Fox News host said on air in 2018 that the NBA champ should “just shut up and dribble.” James wrote on Instagram, “I am more than an athlete.”
Mata says, “We want to tell kids that they can be multifaceted and they don’t just have to choose one thing for their career.”
I Am More Than is a follow-up to her first collaboration with James, the picture book I Promise (HarperCollins, 2020), which instantly rocketed to No. 1 on The New York Times children’s picture book best seller list.
“My friends and family assume I’ve met him, but I haven’t,” Mata says. The first book debuted during the pandemic, so in-person readings were canceled, and the virtual readings were prerecorded. In fact, when Mata applied to illustrate I Promise and took an art test, she had no clue James was the author.
Only after she was hired did she learn that James was attached to the project.
“What I love about our books is that the plot, the characters, they aren’t about him, but about multicultural kids and the message he wants to get across,” Mata says. I Promise centers on stories of children from various backgrounds striving to better one another and themselves.
The illustrations sprang from Mata’s childhood in Queens. “[The book editor’s] only suggestion was that the books had to appeal to kids from different races, so I pretended it was all happening in Queens,” she says. “That was my life there, growing up with Colombians, Koreans, and so many other folks all blended together.” —David Silverberg