Stars Align

In search of the stars and a new constellation a girl discovers something more important – the star seekers themselves.
Enamored with stars and celestial tracking, a girl embarks on a trip to see a different sky—one filled with stars like in her dreams. She travels all the way to New Zealand to see constellations in another hemisphere. With a change in perspective, she finds other star seekers who make her world much brighter. Using symbolic language, this story explores children’s complex emotions of loneliness and the power in reaching out and shining our light on others. The girl in Stars Align ultimately finds something more important than the stars—the star seekers themselves.

Kristina Kaufman is an artist, writer, professor, and overall "fan of anything space related" who is quite serious about picture books. She has a doctorate degree in education (Ed.D.) in curriculum and instruction, a B.S. in education with a K-9 teaching certificate, a 2nd bachelor’s degree in marketing and an MBA. She has published several scholarly academic articles in the marketing discipline and wrote a chapter for a book on STEM (published by Brill). Yet, Kristina’s passion is astronomy, which started at an early age when her grandfather gifted her a telescope – (and she would wake at 4 a.m. to see the Hale-Bopp comet.) Kristina first self-published a picture book, "I Soar", which she wrote and collaborated with the Caldecott Honor recipient, Corey R. Tabor, to illustrate. Her latest book was inspired while travelling in New Zealand and viewing the universe from a different perspective.