"When I signed the deal for "A Boy Named Isamu", a designer friend asked where I got the inspiration. I said that Isamu's childhood of not fitting in with American kids because he was too Japanese or Japanese kids because he was too American resonated with a part of my childhood." James Yang
A boy named Isamu is based on the life of sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), with James Yang imagining a day in the life of Isamu Noguchi as a child seeing the world through a childs/ artists eyes, it won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award in 2020.
