I would drive villages on a napkin and then I would write stories about the people I imagine living in those villages and and I 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 twenties and thirties 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 gets better as a writer.

When I started graduate school, I started working on a literary magazine called Hank and I became the coeditor and started writing on the block for the magazine, and I would just share my opinions about literature and the writing community and television and whatever and someone reading that block invited me to contribute to HTML Giant, which was a group literature blogged 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 response 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 re reported the story and corrected their attitude, which was great.

And that was the first time I realized that my work could have an impact.

I just kept writing, and I've been doing so ever since.

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 Ella Jay and to write about two black lesbians who fall 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, a 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 art, 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.

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 of the writer.

You may have to have a day job or three to do it, but creativity is incredibly important and it should always be nurtured.

And I think it starts with nurturing it in yourself before expecting others nurtured in you.