The wait is over! The new LGBTQ-children’s book ALL MOMS, written by GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis and her wife, founding member, guitarist, and songwriter for the all-female popular rock band Antigone Rising Kristen Ellis-Henderson, is now on sale. ALL MOMS is available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.
ALL MOMS celebrates all different types of moms and the amazing things they do. ALL MOMS is a love letter to mothers—moms who make us laugh, moms who read us stories, moms who snuggle us when we’re sad, and moms who help us grow. Some moms are silly, some are sporty or crafty, but all moms are incredible. Moms can do anything!
GRAMMY and Academy Award-winning singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge praised the book, stating: “ALL MOMS is such a special and important book for young readers, because more than ever, it’s key that we teach our children to have love and compassion for others. This book reminds kids and families that all moms are superheroes, no matter how they look, what they do for work, or where they come from.”
“We could not be more excited to be sharing ALL MOMS with the world,” said authors Sarah Kate Ellis & Kristen Ellis-Henderson. “At a time when legislators across the country are attempting to ban books which help our youth understand LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities, this book sends a powerful message about the importance of inclusivity, empathy, love, and acceptance. All kids deserve to see themselves and their families in books, and we hope that ALL MOMS does just that, while also helping children understand the many different ways a family can look.”
In 2011, Sarah Kate and Kristen co-authored their first book together, a memoir titled “Times Two, Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made,” released by Simon & Schuster. The autobiography chronicled their simultaneous pregnancies and road to motherhood.
ALL MOMS is the most recent title released as part of a partnership between GLAAD and Little Bee Books, which was announced in 2018. The partnership represents a commitment to increasing positive representation of diverse gender and sexual identities in children’s books. Previous books in the partnership include Prince & Knight, Maiden & Princess, Grandad’s Camper, Two Grooms on a Cake, and Jack (Not Jackie).
In honor of National Reading Month in March, GLAAD will continue its #BooksNotBans campaign to support LGBTQ authors and resist censorship efforts targeting LGBTQ books—primarily children’s and YA titles— and inclusive educational materials in schools. Throughout the month, GLAAD will feature LGBTQ authors and their work, spotlight timely conversations around the importance of LGBTQ-inclusive books and the harms of censorship, and engage with the community on social media with prompts about books and reading.
In December 2021, GLAAD joined a coalition of over 600 national advocacy groups, publishers, authors, and others concerned with the growing censorship of books about LGBTQ people and people of color. That week, GLAAD launched the #BooksNotBans campaign on social media, with participation including Scholastic, the American Library Association, BookPeople, Jazz Jennings, Mayim Bialik, and more. As part of the campaign, GLAAD also created a media guide for reporting on book bannings and school censorship, including background on the bans, recommendations for coverage, important timelines, and more.
In 2021, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked over 476 book censorship challenges between September and the end of the year. Many of those targeted books by or about LGBTQ people. Three of the most widely targeted books featured LGBTQ protagonists: Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy. Debates over the books—especially Gender Queer—greatly influenced political races in late 2021, including the Virginia gubernatorial vote. Censorship of LGBTQ books in school districts has become so rapid and widespread, the National Coalition Against Censorship launched a crisis hotline in February 2022.
About the authors and illustrator of ALL MOMS:
Kristen Ellis-Henderson is the founding member of the all-female rock band Antigone Rising and co-author of Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made, written with her wife Sarah Kate Ellis. The two moms learned they were each pregnant on the same day with due dates only three days apart! As a proud lesbian mother of twin 10-year-olds, Kristen is passionate about expanding images of LGBTQ families in media.
Sarah Kate Ellis is the President and CEO of GLAAD, the nation’s leading LGBTQ+ media advocacy group. She has been a publishing executive for the brands Real Simple, Vogue and InStyle. Dedicated to making LGBTQ people of all ages feel seen and understood, Sarah Kate has played a key role in driving the growing trend of LGBTQ inclusion in kids and family media over the past several years.
The first gift Max Rambaldi remembers receiving was a yellow pencil and a stack of plain paper. She grew up in Italy, filling blank spaces with her brush strokes. She believes that the world deserves more colors and shades, and in particular loves creating characters of all backgrounds. She also adores depicting scientific subject matters, animals and space. To date her favorite title she’s worked on was Stunt Kid Seriously Stacks It! (now a series). As an LGBTQ identifying artist, she was delighted and proud to work on All Moms with GLAAD.