Photo: Collin Griffiths.

When I was a child, reality was a thing to escape from. I had an imaginary friend. I constructed elaborate soap opera plots featuring my Barbie dolls. I read books and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. In the worlds I created, bullies were humiliated and defeated. Handsome, popular boys fell for average girls. Magic waited behind every corner, waiting to whisk my characters away to the land where they truly belonged.

These days, reality is a thing to learn from. My books are no longer an escape but rather a radical response to the world around me. I am a Black woman in a world that has historically and currently been unkind to Black people and to women of all races, and my stories are my way of reckoning with that. I craft worlds where people are not legislated against because of the color of their skin, their gender, or their queerness, but it’s not because I want to disappear into those worlds. It’s because I want to write them into reality.

My debut duology, the Divine Traitors, is an example of that. It’s a Jamaican-inspired Joan of Arc story with dragons, everything I’ve always loved in a fantasy epic wrapped in the safety blanket of my culture. But the narrative is shaped by my lived experience. It’s about sisterhood, because I have a sister. It’s about being a burnt-out former gifted kid, because I’m a burnt-out former gifted kid.

It’s about dragons, because I love dragons.

As much as we may pull from our imaginations when it comes to writing fiction, the fact is that our stories are shaped by our realities. Our thoughts, beliefs, and politics color the way we craft a narrative. So Let Them Burn and This Ends in Embers may take place in another world, but their themes have real-world applications.

The younger version of me thought of books as an escape, but now I know that I don’t need to escape into a world where I’m a hero. I can be a hero in the here and now, with every choice I make and every book I write.

From the May/June 2025 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Perception and Reality. Find more in the "Reality Reimagined" series here.

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