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A medal-winning storyteller

Donna Barba Higuera wins nation’s highest prize in children’s literature

By California State University, Bakersfield

April 4^th, 2022

As a child, Donna Barba Higuera would look at the dust devils that formed in her hometown of Taft and imagine they were created by fairies living in the sagebrush.

She’d read “Mysteries of the Unexplained” over and over and dream up her own explanations for the strange, uncanny, incredible experiences people described to Reader’s Digest.

“I had a huge imagination,” she said. “I think a lot of it was trying to make my surroundings more interesting to me.”

But not until decades later -- after having graduated from CSUB with a biology degree, practiced optometry in Washington state and had children – did Barba Higuera begin sharing her stories with more than her journal and family. When she did, something remarkable happened that even she could never have imagined.

She won this country’s most prestigious prize in children’s literature.

Barba Higuera’s “The Last Cuentista” is the 2022 winner of the Newbery Medal, awarded by the American Library Association “to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.”

Walk into the children’s section of any library and there’s a good chance you’ll see Newbery winners on display. New copies carry the iconic Newbery gold seal, a signal to children that they’re in for a good read.

Previous winners include “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Sounder,” “A Bridge to Terabithia,” “Sarah, Plain and Tall” and “Dear Mr. Henshaw.”

“To think my book is going to be up on that row of books with those others is very strange,” the 1991 grad said from her home in Issaquah, Wash., just east of Seattle. “It is absolutely a once-in-a-lifetime (event). It’s lightning in a bottle. It’s one of those things that you don’t let yourself dream about because it just doesn’t seem possible.”

“The Last Cuentista” was No. 6 on The New York Times Bestsellers list for Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover for the week of April 3, 2022. It had risen to No. 4 the week before.

The Newbery Medal sticker on winning books is a universal signal to young readers they are in for a great story.

“The Last Cuentista” is about 12-year-old Petra Peña, a daughter of scientists and an aspiring storyteller who is among a group of people chosen to travel to a new planet before a comet destroys Earth. When she wakes up on the planet hundreds of years later, she’s the only one who remembers Earth because an evil Collective erased everyone else’s memory.

“Part of it is a question for children or a question for people of, ‘What do you value most? If you could take one thing with you, what would it be?’” Barba Higuera said. “’And then what if there was somebody who didn’t value that? What if there was somebody who wanted to erase those things?’”

For Petra, that thing is stories. It’s one of many things she has in common with Barba Higuera. They are both biracial, have science in their backgrounds and learned love of storytelling from their abuelita, or grandma.

“I think that every child reading this book can ask themselves, ‘What stories do I have from my parents, from my grandparents?’” she said. …”We all have those stories and they’re just so precious.”

Her story

Barba Higuera’s story starts in the western Kern County community of Taft where she grew up.

Her father, Howard Matney, is a retired high school history teacher and school administrator in Taft whose great grandfather Higuera helped establish San Luis Obispo. Her late mother, Patsy “June” Matney, was a kindergarten and first grade teacher in Taft who’d moved from Oklahoma to Lamont and then Derby Acres with her family after the Great Depression.

Barba Higuera’s parents met on a school bus when they were 13 years old and were together until June passed away a few years ago. Her sister, Melissa Taylor, is the principal of Jefferson Elementary in Taft who graduated from CSUB with a liberal studies degree in 1989 and teaching credentials in 1990 and 1995.

Barba Higuera as a toddler.

Barba Higuera in the second grade.

A Matney family picture in Taft (clockwise): Howard Matney, Patsy “June” Matney, Melissa Taylor and Barba Higuera.

Barba Higuera was editor-in-chief of the yearbook at Taft Union High School in Taft, an oil and gas town about 35 miles west-southwest of Bakersfield.

Growing up, Barba Higuera was a voracious reader whose favorite series were “A Wrinkle in Time” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” She loved disappearing into other worlds.

She wanted to be a writer, but her parents encouraged her to pursue a science career. After graduating from Taft Union High School, she studied biology at UC Santa Barbara before running out of money and returning home to attend CSUB.

“I felt like such a number at UC Santa Barbara with these huge lecture halls,” she said. “And then I went to Cal State Bakersfield and I got to do research and have hands-on experiences. It was wonderful.”

Her senior thesis was on the effect of cattle grazing on brograss, which she studied by applying cattle saliva to brograss with samples from her uncle’s ranch outside Bakersfield. Her control was cut grass. It was something that “could happen only at Cal State Bakersfield,” she joked.

After earning her biology degree in 1991, Barba Higuera earned her doctorate in optometry at the then-Southern California School of Optometry. She moved to the Pacific Northwest and opened a practice there.

Barba Higuera would make up stories to tell her two daughters at bedtime just like her father and grandmother had done for her. While waiting in the car for her oldest daughter, now 22-year-old Elena Chow, to get out of preschool, she’d write them down.

In about 2010, Barba Higuera started writing a novel. When she took it to a book critique, it was automatically entered into a Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest and it won best young adult book in its category. It encouraged her to keep writing.

Barba Higuera used to make up stories for her daughters, Sophia and Elena Chow, when they were young.

Here are Barba Higuera and her daughters all grown up: Barba Higuera, Sophia and Elena.

'So funny and smart'

One weekend, Barba Higuera attended a children’s book writing conference in Portland where she and about eight others sat around a table and read the first pages of their book. She read the opening of “Lupe Wong Won’t Dance,” the story of a 12-year-old girl who hopes to be the first female pitcher in Major League Baseball and, always the social justice warrior, objects to having to participate in a square-dancing unit.

“Hey, Donna, where are you with that book?” Nick Thomas, then an editor with publishing giant Scholastic, asked Barba Higuera as she was leaving. When Barba Higuera said it was finished, Thomas asked her to have it sent to him.

“It was so funny and smart and her talent was so apparent,” Thomas said in an interview.

“It’s really, really hard to be funny as a writer,” he went on to say. “When a joke doesn’t land, it’s rough. So when someone is genuinely funny multiple times in one page, it’s extraordinary.”

Thomas also loved the “vivid feel for Lupe” that one gets from just a few paragraphs.

Cover of — A “Lupe Wong Won’t Dance” review in The New York Times concludes: “This book has wide appeal and offers something we all desperately need: light and laughter. Higuera has knocked it out of the park.”

A few months into contract negotiations, Thomas announced he was leaving Scholastic for a new independent publishing house called Levine Querido and asked Barba Higuera to come with him. Levine Querido was founded in 2019 by Arthur A. Levine, who had helped introduce J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books to U.S. readers.

Levine Querido specializes in books for children and young adults that present the voices of underrepresented people, those of different colors, religions, sexual preferences and abilities, Thomas said.

Barba Higuera began writing “Lupe” the night after her younger daughter, now-18-year-old Sophia Chow, came home from middle school upset that she was going to have to square dance in PE, especially the part about having to hold a boy’s hand.

In the book, Lupe wants to get out of square dancing until her uncle, a groundskeeper for the Seattle Mariners, proposes a deal: get straight As (including in square dancing) and he’ll introduce her to her favorite Mariner.

“It’s not really a book about square dancing, it’s about friendship and how she treats others, learning that ultimately, square dancing really isn’t the enemy, it’s a rite of passage and sometimes you don’t have to fight everything,” Barba Higuera said.

“Lupe Wong Won’t Dance” won the Sid Fleischman Award for Humor, named for the author of the Newbery Medal-winning book “The Whipping Boy.” It was also a Pura Belpré Honor Winner, awarded by the American Library Association to a Latino/a writer and illustrator who portrays and celebrates Latino cultural experiences in outstanding children’s literatur

Barba Higuera was thrilled with Thomas’ editing and encouragement to share the weird and scary stories in her head, ones based on the Mexican folklore passed down by her paternal grandmother. So she again went with Levine Querido for “The Last Cuentista.”

She’s “a joy to work with,” Thomas said.

“She’s really funny in person, too. We’ll have little conversations in the margins of the manuscript sometimes that really make me laugh,” he said. “She also has a strong ego in the sense she knows what she wants at her core, what’s most important to her, but she’s incredibly humble and will work toward and consider all things.”

Making scary adorable

In Mexican folklore there’s a bogeyman named El Cucuy who has bloody fangs and glowing eyes and kidnaps misbehaving children. Barba Higuera’s grandmother would warn her and her sister that if they didn’t go to bed, El Cucuy was going to come out of their closet and get them.

So when presented a writing prompt to make adorable the thing that most frightened her as a child, Barba Higuera chose El Cucuy. The result was “El Cucuy is Scared, Too!”, a picture book she released last year with publisher Abrams Kids. It features Ramón, a boy who can’t sleep because he’s nervous about his first day at a new school, and El Cucuy, a monster living in Ramón’s cactus pot who is scared of something, too.

Barba Higuera has two more picture books in the works with Abrams including “The Yellow Handkerchief,” due out in 2023, and “Feliz Navidad, El Cucuy,” due out in 2024. She’s also working on another middle grade science fiction novel that she can only say is “in the same universe” as “The Last Cuentista” but features a different character.

Barba Higuera also loves visiting classrooms to share her work with children, and so has been dropping in on schools throughout the world via Zoom. With the littlest kids she shares “El Cucuy” and has them draw pictures of their fears.

She fits the sessions in between writing projects, media interviews, selling the foreign rights to her books, and phasing out her optometry work. She sold her practice to focus on writing full-time.

Bursting into tears

Librarians submit nominations for the Newbery; Barba Higuera didn’t know she was nominated until she won, and still doesn’t know who suggested her. Members of the selection committee, made up of more than a dozen people who read thousands of books, surprised her with the news on a Zoom call that she thought was about a Barnes and Noble program that sets up virtual visits between kids and authors.

“I burst into really embarrassing tears,” she said. “I saw my editor, who is just kind of this strong guy, and he’s crying. And then people on the Newbery committee were crying. … For them, it’s this culmination after a year of hard work.”

Barba Higuera’s reaction when she learned she won the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious prize in children’s literature.

Very excited for her was Sandra Bozarth, interim dean of libraries at CSUB, whose husband, Robert, is Barba Higuera’s first cousin. As a librarian, she immediately understood the significance of the Newbery.

“I looked at my husband and said, ‘Do you understand what happened here?’” Bozarth said. “He said, ‘She won an award?’”

“’No, it’s like the award, given to just one person a year and only 100 exist,’” she said she replied. “’It happens to you once. It doesn’t happen to you twice.’”

It couldn’t have happened to a more thoughtful person, Bozarth said, recalling what happened when, newly married, she told Barba Higuera at Christmastime that she didn’t yet have many holiday decorations.

“A couple months later I get a package from Washington of Christmas ornaments, all of them themed snowmen and Santas,” Bozarth said. “That’s just the kind of person she is. She pays attention, she’s a caring individual.”

While he wouldn’t go into detail, Thomas said sales of “The Last Cuentista” were 300 percent higher after it won the Newbery. For the week of April 3, 2022, “The Last Cuentista” was sixth on the New York Times Bestsellers list for Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover, a list it had been on for seven weeks.

All of that is not only good for Barba Higuera but helps Levine Querido invest in great new talent, Thomas said. When asked what he sees in Barba Higuera’s future, Thomas said: “it’s whatever she wants.”

“She’s one of those rare people who can write in many different mediums in a really extraordinary way,” he said. “She can write funny, smart, contemporary like Lupe Wong, she can do science fiction fantasy like “The Last Cuentista,” and she can do these great picture books, too. I think she can do whatever she wants.”

A 'childlike' imagination

Barba Higuera met her husband, Mark Maciejewski, at a Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators conference about 10 years ago. His longtime career has been selling construction materials but like Barba Higuera he got seriously into writing his own children’s books in about 2011.

Barba Higuera and her husband, Mark Maciejewski, hiking in Glacier National Park in Montana.

Barba Higuera’s husband, Mark Maciejewski, says on his website he writes novels about “kids who refuse to let the fact that they don’t fit in stop them from being who they really are.”

They started dating after meeting up again at a mutual friend’s book launching party and then participating in a critique group together.

The couple married in July 2016 and their blended family also includes Maciejewski’s children, Max, 24, and Bethany, 22. They bounce writing ideas off each other, sometimes during “what if sessions” on their patio while smoking pipes.

“I’m more of a plot-driven person and humor is a big part of what I write. And Donna is amazing at story structure, which is different than plot, and character work,” he said. “We talk to each other a lot about what we’re going through and the challenges we’re having.”

Maciejewski says a Newbery win can be life-changing for a writer, but it hasn’t changed the Barba Higuera-Maciejewski family yet save for some book lovers getting a bit starstruck when they meet Donna.

He says he can’t predict what her future holds except to say the “sky’s the limit” now that she’s about to start writing full-time and is in the editing hands of Thomas, who “asks the questions that get her to dig deep and bring out her best stuff.”

“He is absolutely brilliant and the two of them could not be a better team,” Maciejewski said. “And there is no shortage of ideas in Donna’s head, so the more time she is able to spend on writing, the better work she’s going to come up with.”

The whole family: Back: Mark and Max Maciejewski. Front: Elena Chow, Barba Higuera, Sophia Chow and Bethany Maciejewski.

Sophia Chow, Barba Higuera’s youngest, remembers vividly the stories her mother dreamed up for her when she was a little girl.

In one, there were fairies living in a fairyland on the other side of her bedroom wall who threw color-themed parties. In another, there was a caterpillar and squirrel who fell in love. One day the caterpillar went away and the squirrel was sad, but then it returned as a beautiful butterfly.

“Her imagination is very childlike,” Chow said, going on to describe her mother’s reaction when parrots flew over the family’s head as they lounged by the pool in Costa Rica.

“’Did you guys see that?’” Chow recalled her mother saying. “’Did you know that those are here?’”

“’Well, we’re in Costa Rica,’” Chow said she replied. “And then she started crying because she was so in awe of the parrots.”

Maciejewski then chimed in: “I’ve always said that the most beautiful part about Donna’s spirit is that even as an adult, she has not lost the capacity to wonder.”

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Footnotes

Story by Christine Bedell, senior alumni engagement specialist

FootNotes

Story by Christine Bedell, senior alumni engagement specialist

© 2026 California State University, Bakersfield

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