Just after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I went down and volunteered and was working at an arts camp, a performing arts camp at theater, dance music, and also poetry. And I was there as the poetry person to help young people cope with what had just happened that originally we had planned to just do a performing arts workshop and camp, but because of Hurricane Katrina, we realized we cannot just carry on as usual. We really need to address what’s happening. And I was taking creative arts therapy courses at the new school and was thinking about and learning how the arts can help young people cope with trauma and how some of our young people may never go to therapy or get counseling, so how can we bring that to them through art making? And so this camp was powerful and heartbreaking and everything in between, I have fell in love with these young people who were sharing their stories, not just about what happened during the hurricane, but who they were before and what their neighborhoods were like before.
So I got to really know them and came back the next year. So I went back three times and worked with young people and they wrote these amazing poems. And when I was in class writing and working on a picture book for a class assignment actually that was about, whoa, write a story about an issue that might bring a child to therapy, so maybe a divorce or death of a loved one, something like that. And these stories were on my mind. And so I began what now is A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, but that was first a class assignment that I was just writing to think about how do you deal with heavy topics in picture books? So their voices were still with me, their stories were with me. I wanted to honor my time with them. And in that class, my professor and a classmate encouraged me to send that out.
And so the long story is that that’s the first book that got published, but the inspiration behind it was the real work that I did with young people. And I’m really proud that I got to go back and once the book was published, Shadra Stickland and I, who I love and adore, and she did the illustrations for that book. The two of us went on a book tour, we went to New Orleans, gave books to the kids who inspired the story and got to see them in a better place. This was five years later, a lot of restoration have begun. And so it was nice to come back and see them and honor their stories, give them the book and spend more time with them when they weren’t so deep in the hurt and in the trauma of it all.