I’ve been a huge reader all my life. I started with picture books, then chapter books, then basically anything I could get my hands on at the library. I read every genre—fantasy, mystery, history, memoir—but my heart has always been drawn to protagonists who are plucky, smart, and ambitious, the kind of women who have adventures and make something of themselves. And, yes, sometimes fall in love.



The problem, for most of my life, has been that those characters never looked like me.



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Most often, in the literary world, the most well-known stories featuring Black girls and women are tales of hardship and sorrow. Slavery, abuse, rape, struggle, servitude, pain—those are the narratives that most frequently get told about us. And sure, sometimes those women and girls triumph over their pain and struggle. But before they do, we the readers get to see how difficult life is for them—how terribly the world treats them, and therefore how bad it is to be a Black woman. Of course, many of these stories are necessary, and important—but it only tells one dimension of our lives.

Black women do have voices, and we are capable of telling our stories ourselves. I’m one of them.

And I’m not just talking about literature, or even television and film. The news stories about Black women are similarly bleak: Black women are angry, they have no hope of getting married, they have a harder time getting jobs...you get the gist. And, again, this is not to say those stories shouldn’t be told; it’s important to shed light on how badly the world treats us so that we can fight back against all of these imbalances. But these narratives shouldn’t be the default.

In literature, even when there are novels featuring Black women and their stories, they often aren’t written by Black women. Whatever their intentions may be, there are many people telling our stories for us, rather than giving us our own voice. But we do have voices, and we are capable of telling our stories ourselves. And I’m one of them.

There’s also a lot of joy in being a Black woman, too.

Even as a kid, solely seeing negative portrayals of Black girlhood and womanhood have never rung true to me. This is not to say that I don't experience the challenges of being a Black woman in America; I do every single day. But there’s also a lot of joy in being a Black woman, too, and I strongly believe there aren’t enough stories out there that reflect that.



As a Black woman, there are some things you can only experience around other Black women. There are the times when we’re in a room together, dressed to the nines for no one but one another. Or the moments when I walk by another Black woman on the street and she tells me she loves my lipstick, and I tell her I love her shoes, and then we grin at each other. Or when we tell each other stories and laugh and laugh, so loudly that the whole restaurant hears us and smiles, too. And then there are the instances when we have good news—a new job, a book deal, a new relationship, a baby!—and cheer for each other. Nothing is more contagious than a Black woman's joy.



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So as a writer, I saw something missing when I compared the world of Black women around me to the Black girls and women I most commonly saw in written pages. Where were my picture books about Black girls playing with their imaginary toys? Where were my chapter books about Black girls having adventures? Where were my young adult novels about Black girls hanging out with their friends and gossiping about boys? And where were my lighthearted romances about Black women in big cities finding love?

Those books existed, sure—but you had to dig for them. While every bookstore shelf had rows and rows of books like those about white women and girls, maybe one or two–if any at all—housed lighthearted narratives starring Black women. I always read every single one I could get my hands on...and then was left wanting more.

Toni Morrison once said, “If you find a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, you must go out and write it.” It took me a long time to take this advice. I don’t know if it was because I internalized what I saw—or didn’t see—on bookshelves, or whether I thought that writing books just wasn’t for Black women like me. Or maybe it was because I didn’t think anyone but me wanted the kinds of stories I wanted to read and write.

After all, I had no idea if there was an audience out there for the kind of witty Black heroines I wanted to write. I certainly thought there were, but based on what I saw on bookshelves, it seemed like the publishing world didn’t agree with me. And then there was the question of, even if I did write a book, would agents want to represent it? Would an editor ever take the chance to acquire it?

It has meant so much to me to see how happy my work makes other Black women.

Still, despite all of my doubts, I started writing. I knew that even if no one else cared—even if no one else wanted to read my books—I would care. At the end of the day, I knew that a book about a Black woman cracking jokes with her friends and eating delicious snacks and succeeding at her job and finding love in the midst of all of that would make me happy to write. And the more I wrote, the more I found the same kind of joy in bringing to life Black heroines as I did when I was around Black women in real life. So I kept writing. And then I looked for an agent, and then a publisher, so I could share my story with the world.

My most recent release, , is a New York Times bestseller and was selected as one of Reese Witherspoon’s book club picks. As it turns out? Plenty of people wanted to read the same kind of books I wanted to read and to write.

It has meant so much to me to see how happy my work makes other Black women out there—and to see their light, their friendships, their laughter, their successes, and their happily ever afters reflected in my books. And I can’t wait to write more fun, joyful books about Black women and girls. But most of all? I'm looking forward to reading all of the yet-to-be-written books that other Black women will write about us.

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