The Blue Star series is a graphic novel series that I’m co-writing with Cynthia Leitich Smith, a good friend and colleague of mine. We came to this project because I was visiting her, we were having fun, we were writing our own projects and we kept kind of imagining what if we had known each other when we were kids, what if we had been friends when we were in middle school? You know, would we have been friends? Would we have found each other? Right?
Would we have connected at that age the way we connect now? And so, we started talking about well, what were you like as a middle schooler? What was I like as a middle schooler? And we ended up, you know, one thing leads to another and suddenly we have these two characters, Maya and Riley, one of whom is based on me, a bi-racial girl and one of them is based on Cyn, a Native girl.
And we made them cousins, so they’re part of this big Black and Native family and they are going to meet and, I mean, they know each other because they’re cousins, but they’re going to meet and live together for the first time when they’re starting sixth grade in a new city with their grandma. And they realize very quickly in their new school that there are some grownups who are up to no good and it’s going to be up to them to save the day.
And so Maya and Riley become superheroes in their community, starting with their own school. And they are very, very grounded in sense of community and family and sisterhood. They’re cousins, but the larger concept of sisterhood. And they are ready to save the day.