I just always wanted to write from when
I was like four years old I would drive
villages on a napkin and then I would
write stories about the people I imagine
living in those villages and I've read
voraciously growing up and I just
thought I want to do this I want to tell
stories and I just never wavered from
that I started trying to get published
in high school and met with abject
failure as I should have but in my 20s
and 30s I was really persistent a lot of
my early writing was erotica magazines
literary magazines would reject the
stories and say oh there's too much sex
as if people don't have sex in their
lives so I just gave up and during that
time I still wrote and I recognize now
that I just needed to get better as a
writer when I started graduate school I
started working on a literary magazine
called pink and I became the co-editor
and started writing on the blog for the
magazine and I would just share my
opinions about literature and the
writing community and television and
whatever and someone reading that blog
invited me to contribute to HTML giant
which was a group literature blog that
parlayed into writing for the rumpus and
the first essay I wrote that people
really started to pay attention to was
called the careless language of sexual
violence which I wrote in Spruce ponds
to a New York Times article about a
young girl who was gang-raped in
Cleveland Texas and the article was
deeply concerned with the town and what
would happen to the poor town
I was just incensed by that and in turn
the New York Times actually reported the
story
corrected their attitude which was great
and that was the first time I realized
that my work could have an impact and I
just kept writing and I've been doing so
ever since
[Music]
I was the first black woman to lead a
Marvel comic in 2017 which blows my mind
because it was 2017 and I was thrilled
by the opportunity to write about the
dorm Ellijay and to write about two
black lesbians who fell in love and to
be able to make them strong women human
women who are incredibly interesting and
incredibly passionate about what they do
and one another was just a thrill in
many ways storytelling is storytelling
and so the rules are different from one
genre to the next with comics there was
a learning curve because I've never done
it before and so I read quite a few
comics and I looked at scripts from
various comics both within the Black
Panther Universe and beyond and it
really helped me to sort of get a handle
on thinking through telling a story in
terms of panel and scene and then in
terms of issue and arc it was yeah a lot
to learn but I enjoyed it and when I do
signings people are always clutching
their copies of world of Wakanda and
it's just awesome to see that my words
are bringing people joy and expanding
the black imagination it's just a lot of
fun
I think that people have very low
expectations of black women and what
we're capable of
and it always just made me angry and it
just made me work harder and I'm very
ambitious and so for me it was fuel I
think I've opened up more avenues for
women of color and black women
specifically to write in ways that are
personal and also intellectual and I
hope to continue doing that moving
forward any time someone wants to become
a writer or any other artist I strongly
encourage them to do so we often hear
that it's impossible to make a living as
a writer or an artist and you should be
more realistic but we need art and we
need literature and it's absolutely
possible to make a living as a writer
you may have to have a day job or three
to do it but creativity is incredibly
important and they should always be
nurtured and I think it starts with
nurturing it in yourself before
expecting others to nurture it in you
[Music]
you