I loved reading as a kid. My mom used to take us to the library and, you know, every single week we would go and I would check out as many books as I could. I remember stacking them in my hands all the way up to my chin and you know that was as many books as I could carry and bringing them home. And I really love that experience of diving into a narrative, diving into a different world, you know, escaping into a story.
And I think that it’s definitely my love of reading that helps drive my interest in writing. It’s a delight to be able to create that type of experience, that immersion, that escape, that joy that I experience as a reader. To be someone who creates that as a writer is really, really powerful.
As a kid I would say I mostly read realistic fiction, I loved historical fiction. I probably read a little bit of fantasy. But for the most part what I was interested in was how do you make friends? How do you fit in? And so, I read a lot of books that were based in school and community and, you know, a lot of historical fiction as well, because I was interested in the big questions of, you know, how do I be someone who makes a difference in the world? What would it have been like to live in those intense historical moments, like the Civil Rights Movement? And that was something that I enjoyed imagining and fantasizing about.