Oh, this is a story that I wrote in the third grade and I illustrated it too and I still have it in my little treasure chest. And it was a horror story where horrible things happened to this little girl, but the big climactic moment came at the end where she would scream “Ahhhh!” And it was so funny because the teachers encouraged me to go to all the other classrooms and tell the story. I read my story and I was so hooked on being an author. I was so hooked on having that combination of me sharing something that I had written with an audience.
But, unfortunately, because I had never read any books written about people of color or by people of color, I didn’t actually know that it was a career. So, I quickly forgot about it and it wasn’t until I was a junior in college when I saw a book by Gayl Jones called Corregidora that I went, “Black women write books!” And I switched my major the very next day to English and began in earnest to become a writer and to fulfill the promise of The Last Scream.
