Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Agent, Best Buds, graphic novel, K-Fai Steele, mg, middle grade
K-Fai Steele has just auctioned the world rights to her debut middle grade graphic novel Best Buds, to Kokila of Penguin Random House.
Article Summary
K-Fai Steele auctions world rights to her graphic novel Best Buds to Kokila.
Best Buds to be published by Penguin Random House in spring of 2026.
K-Fai Steele’s background includes prestigious fellowships and residencies.
Kokila’s mission: publish diverse books and revolutionize children’s publishing.
K-Fai Steele of A Normal Pig and All Eyes on Ozzy! has just auctioned the world rights to her debut middle grade graphic novel Best Buds, about a friendship that blooms between two girls over their love of gardening, library books, and crows, while exploring the roles they play in community care.
Joanna Cárdenas at Kokila won Best Buds at auction, and it will be published from Kokila in the spring of 2026. K-Fai Steele’s agent Erica Rand Silverman at Stimola Literary Studio negotiated the sale.
K-Fai Steele was an Art Handler at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and worked at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the National Writing Project. A Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library, and a recipient of the James Marshall Fellowship at the University of Connecticut, she received the Ezra Jack Keats/Kerman Memorial Fellowship in 2018 at the University of Minnesota. Born in Charlton, Massachusetts she now lives in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Kokila, the Sanskrit name of a bird that heralds new beginnings, launched by Vice President and Publisher Namrata Tripathi in May 2019 from Penguin Random House to make the world of children’s book publishing, from picture books to YA, more inclusive and robust. Its mission is not only to publish a greater number of diverse books, but also to embrace a new way of thinking about the publishing model — to impact which authors get a chance to be published and to change which stories land in the hands of diverse young readers, looking for a mirror that reflects a bit of their own lives.
The expansion of children’s graphic novels is fuelling all manner of publishers extending into the comics medium. Right now, it seems like an infinite market that is being tapped into, and creating longstanding comic book readers for decades to come. It is not for nothing that kids’ graphic novels in bookstores are being referred to as the newsstand of the twenty-first century.
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