Tomi Adeyemi

Death is something that I am still trying to figure out a healthy relationship with.

I've been writing stories all my life. My very first story had two little black girls riding horses. They were both me, too, so that's how into me I was.

I spent 12 years of my life writing stories without black people. That's insane to me. It's insane that I could have believed in magical portals and dragons and all that stuff, but to believe a black person could be experiencing those things was unimaginable.

Children of color need a mirror to see themselves in. And then people who don't have that experience, they need a window. They need a really personalized way to see what people who are different from them are going through.

With the Internet, there are so many ways to connect with other writers who will be some of your best friends and best sources of support for your entire life.

If you want to write, just believe that you can, because it's about perseverance.

You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in.

In my perfect world, we'd have one black girl fantasy book every month. We need them, and we need fantasy stories about black boys as well.

As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there's a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers' success!

You need a community to succeed. In the back of every book is an acknowledgments page full of all the people it took to get that writer to the book you're holding.

The YA author community is generally pretty friendly, and they care.

I grew up in a predominantly white community - Hinsdale, Illinois - and given that, I feel blessed because I could still count my experiences with blatant racism on two hands. I thought racism was the substitute teacher picking on you because she assumes that you're a delinquent, and she doesn't know you have the highest score in the class.