I’m seven and falling in love with Spider-Man. I learn everything I can about this kid who has incredible powers, but (unlike all the other heroes) his city hates him. He tries his best, and people are always knocking him down for it. Sometimes he wants to give up, but he doesn’t. Somehow, he keeps going. With addiction eating at my parents and slowly tearing my family apart, Peter helps me figure out how to keep going, too.
I’m ten, and it’s the first Show-and-Tell of the year. I bring the comic my Granny gave me, the first I’ve ever owned. A group of kids near the cubbies are giving each other sneak peeks of favorite toys, books, and other things before class. Thrumming with excitement, I join them and thrust my copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 out.
A boy snorts and mutters “What do you know about Spider-Man?” Before I can answer, his friends start in on how I’m just faking. How I should’ve brought my Barbie, the “ugly” one (they know I have it). Or maybe I should’ve brought my pet watermelon. I don’t present that day, or ever again.
I’m fifteen, waiting for the 4:30 bus with some other kids, since I had to stay after class and practice with the rest of the Symphonic Orchestra. Sitting on the front steps of my high school, I sing along to “Crawling” by Linkin Park.
Someone rips my headphones off. A boy from the class ahead of mine presses them to his ears. He sucks his teeth. “Man, you listening to that white boy music.” A girl behind him giggles. “That’s cause she white.” Their little group cracks up, and he drops my headphones on the ground. Shouts of Oreo, wannabe white girl, and worse follow me home. For the rest of the year, I only listen to Hip-Hop in public.
I’m twenty, and after spending most of my life playing video games, I decide I want to make them for a living. I spend weeks researching schools and programs before finally settling on one. I save up my pennies, I pack my bags, and I move across the country to live with one of my best friends while I go to school. She tours the campus with me and helps me buy my supplies.
The first day of class, I notice I’m one of three girls. I’m the only non-white person period. I sit in the back and try not to draw attention to myself. The teacher asks us to introduce ourselves and, for an icebreaker, say what we want to change about gaming. I say I’d like to see more Black characters. After that, it only takes two days for someone to ask why I’m not in the music program, because “that’s where all the other Black people are.”
It’s another two days before someone else says they didn’t know Black people even liked video games that weren’t NBA All-Star or Madden NFL. Before the week is out, someone says I’m making a big deal out of nothing, it doesn’t matter what race the characters are. Besides “doesn’t Donkey Kong count?” When the racism escalates to anonymous threats of violence that the school does nothing about, I drop from the program.
I’m twenty-two, and Spider-Man 3 is about to hit theaters. I’ve seen the first movies multiple times on my own. I have all of the DVDs, including the special editions. One of my friends catches me looking up locations for midnight showings. “I didn’t know you like Spider-Man,” she says with a note of amusement in her voice. Without meeting her gaze, I quietly admit he’s my favorite hero, as if I’m confessing to a crime. She grunts to herself and goes about her business.
That week she surprises me with tickets for us and another friend. We meet at my parents' place, put on Spider-Man t-shirts, and paint his mask on our faces. The theater cheers when we walk in.
I’m twenty-seven and on my way home from a Disturbed concert. I pull into a gas station, music blaring as I head-bang along. When the song ends, I climb out to go get gas. On the other side of the pump, an older Black man is staring.
It’s about to get awkward when he nods, scrunches his face, and holds up a hand, pointer and pinky fingers out. “Hell, yeah.” I return the gesture. He gets in his car and drives off, the wails of Metallica trailing behind his low rider Caddy. On the way home I roll the windows down, letting the wind hit my face, music pouring out of my car.
I’m thirty-four, and the developers for a video game I’ve been playing for a couple years, Paladins, drop a clip of their newest character: Imani.
She’s strong. She’s fierce. She’s a tamer of dragons, a wielder of magic, and she’s Black. I stare at my screen, fixated as I play the clip over and over again. I pause the video at different spots and take in every detail of her design; her wide nose, her full lips, her thick braids. I stare. I marvel. I bask. And I cry. I’m overwhelmed. There she is.
There I am.
L.L. McKinney is writer, poet, and active member of the kidlit community. She’s the creator and host of the bi-annual Pitch Slam contest and spent time in the slush by serving as a reader for agents and participating as a judge in various online writing contests. A Blade So Black is her debut novel.
Learn more about A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark, the first two books in L.L. McKinney’s Nightmare-Verse, a thrilling YA urban fantasy series that #1 New York Times bestselling author Angie Thomas calls “the fantasy series I’ve been waiting for my whole life.”
There are two Black queer girls from two different Black cultures in this book falling in love. What was it like writing a Caribbean and Black American protagonist?
As a first generation Caribbean-American author, I got to connect with the spectrum and multitudes of Blackness that shaped me through writing this book. Audre and Mabel represent aspects of who I am as a Black women who was raised in multiple Black cultures. My mother is Trinidadian and my father is from St. Croix, and I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I loved writing these girls, because they represented parts of me and the Black diaspora in a way that was eclectic, vibrant and healing.
In writing Audre and Mabel, I wanted to show them falling in love with a Black girl, that was a reflection of them, but also unique and magical in a way all her own. Their love is one that I longed to read as a young person. One that centered weird Black girls in a romantic love.
You traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to interview folks who are LGBTQIA on these islands. How did that research affect the story?
I wanted to depict with love, curiosity and expansiveness the experience of being queer in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). There are a lot of assumptions in the mainstream about the backwardness of attitudes towards LGBTQIA folks in the Caribbean region, and this isn’t the only truth. There is also the notion that folks in the U.S. are inherently more progressive and this is not the case. I learned from activists in T&T, that colonialism and religious evangelism from the west has fostered a lot of the homophobic sentiments that persist in the region.
I traveled to T&T to interview artists, students, activists, government employees, queer party organizers, etc to get their perspective on queer life in T&T. It was a true gift to hear Trinibagoans talk about their queerness and speak to the ways that they live out loud despite bigotry and ignorance about who they are. There were stories of people being exiled from family, as well as others who were embraced and accepted for their queerness. On a personal note, I traveled there with my wife, and was grateful for how we were embraced by my Trinidadian relatives in ways that was affirming and healing.
Ancestral spirituality, astrology and natural healing are all themes in this book. Why were these themes important for you to include in this book?
With Audre and Mabel, I wanted them to explore relationships with the divine and the sacred that helped them navigate the world and challenges they were up against. As a young person, I loved anything that was mystical and otherworldly, things that seemed connected to intuition and spirit. I wanted these Black girls to be spiritual seekers in a way that empowered and blossomed them. They have to deal with some heavy and difficult realities that required spiritual skill sets that were ancestral, organic and cosmic. I have always loved astrology and love the ways that it has helped me see other realities within myself. The character of Queenie, Audre’s grandmother, represents how Black people can be spiritual in a way that is shaped out of intuition and deep listening.
Who are the authors who inspired you in writing this book?
As an 11 year-old, I found a book called The Friends, written by Rosa Guy and it was the first book that centered a Black Caribbean girl as the protagonist, and I felt I could relate to. I had always been an avid reader but reading Black women authors in my teen years is what made me want to write and process who I was on the page. I read a lot of Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler and Jamaica Kincaid. I am deeply influenced by poeticism and lyricism from writers like Ntozake Shange and Nikki Giovanni. I fell in love with Alice Walker and the way she wrote Black women’s interiors in a way that was beautiful, sensual, and complex. Toni Morrison, who has just passed and is a literary goddess AND genius, taught me how to be unapologetically experimental and otherworldly. She showed how you could write Black life, while making it accessible in its mundane and honesty of who we are. I have discovered, Alexis DeVeaux and Sharon Bridgforth, in my later years who are mentors of mine and have helped me feel affirmed in writing Black queer stories.
The relationship between Whitney Houston and her best friend Robyn Crawford is a major theme in this book. What inspired that theme?
In this book Whitney Houston represents invisible queerness within Black memory as well as the greater culture. A couple months into writing the book, her legacy unlocked a dimension of the book that was needed for me to understand the erasure of queerness within Black life and memory.
When I was growing up in the 1980s I idolized Whitney Houston. She was beautiful, elegant and had a voice and presence that was bewitching. She was one of the Black celebrity icons that took the grit and gospel of Black life, and made it into an expansive and tender world for the mainstream. I didn’t learn until 2006 when I was in my twenties living in New York City about Whitney and her long-time best friend, Robyn and how central a figure she was to Houston’s life and career. Learning about this bond that was deep and most likely romantic, made Whitney make more sense to me. I loved re-imagining them in ways for this book that wasn’t tinged with stigma and controversy, but instead love and sweetness.
Junauda Petrus is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker and performance artist, born on Dakota land of Black-Caribbean descent. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife and family. You can visit her at www.junauda.com.
As a white-presenting, multiracial Jewish woman, I looked like most of the protagonists in the books that I read growing up (aka white girls), but I never related to them. I didn’t understand why all the characters somehow came from families that seemed exactly the same. These casually all-white, anglo universes weren’t a part of my reality, and as much as I appeared as though I should, I did not I see myself mirrored in the pages.
When I got a little older, I realized that if I searched, there were books that featured mixed-race and Jewish characters. If it was a Jewish narrative, the book was almost always about the Holocaust. In the stories I found with characters of mixed race, more often than not, biracial and multiracial narratives focused on their external appearance and exoticized the character’s “European features” praising “light eyes” or “silky hair” or “thin noses,” reinforcing the sentiment that the lack of visual connection to their Black or Brown heritage made them special or more beautiful and desirable. The stories rarely delved into the internal struggle so many people of mixed heritage experience with feelings of unworthiness to themselves and their histories. Biracial and multiracial characters were written as victims of their “light-skinned plight,” often bullied by darker-skinned people in their families and communities. (I should pause here to state for the record that not all mixed or biracial or multiracial people have a white parent, and not all people with mixed racial and ethnic heritage, even those who do have a white parent, look white or are light-skinned. There are many mixed people who present as Black and Brown and are subject to the same prejudices that monoracial people of color experience.) But it seemed as though all mixed people were being portrayed in one way. And as readers, we were asked to pity and empathize with the hardship of not fitting in as a result of a lighter skin tone without ever acknowledging the negative impact that perpetuating these colorist ideas has on communities of color.
When I decided to finally write the book that would eventually become Color Me In, I promised myself that I would create a world on the page that my younger self needed. One that looked and sounded the way mine did when I woke up every day, filled with a blend of races and communities that didn’t shy away from the uniquely complicated experience of being multiracial and white-passing, as well as Jewish in ethnicity without much connection to Judaism as a religion. I wanted to write a character who learns not only to take pride in her various cultures but also to take responsibility and accountability for her privileges as she tries desperately to make herself feel whole. I wanted to write something messy, the way the world is, especially when you move through it as a gray area personified.
I wrote Color Me In because I want young people to know they have a right to take ownership of their identities, and that when they do so, it is important to recognize where they fit within the cycles of systemic injustice that plague our country. I wrote Color Me In because I want young people to find strength in their unique backgrounds and experiences and to use that power to rise up and be loud in the fight for equality because we need them now more than ever.
Natasha Díaz is a freelance writer and producer. As a screenwriter, Natasha has been a quarterfinalist in the Austin Film Festival and a finalist for both the NALIP Diverse Women in Media Fellowship and the Sundance Episodic Story Lab. Her personal essays have been published in the Establishment and the Huffington Post. Color Me In is her debut young adult novel. Originally from New York City, Natasha now lives in Oakland, California.
natashaerikadiaz.com @TashiDiaz on Twitter @NatashaErikaDiaz on Instagram and Facebook.
Both Isle of Blood and Stone and its standalone companion, Song of the Abyss, are about mapmakers and explorers. Why did you decide to write about these topics?
It really came down to writing what interests me. I’ve always loved adventure stories and historical fiction. The Count of Monte Cristo, Jane Eyre, and Anne of Green Gables were favorites growing up. Additionally, I’ve always loved old maps, the beautiful ones with the sea serpents and sailing ships painted onto them. And growing up, I was obsessed with the Indiana Jones movies. With this duology, I wanted to create characters inspired by Dr. Jones, young men and women who were smart and funny and who used their intellect to solve the mysteries that were at the heart of these stories.
Did any particular place inspire the maps in your book?
Most definitely. The map at the front of Isle of Blood and Stone depicts the fictional island kingdom of St. John del Mar. But if you were to google the island “Guam,” where I was raised, you would see that they are a near perfect match. Why not? I needed an island and I thought it would be fun to use the one I know best.
How do you choose your character names?
For Isle of Blood and Stone, I was looking for old-fashioned names that were Spanish in origin. I started with ‘Mercedes,’ which I first came across in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Then I followed up with Elias, Jaime, and Ulises. Some names had a more personal connection. Reyna is the hero in Song of the Abyss. Reyna also happens to be my favorite cousin’s name. The village of Esperanca is named after my grandmother. And the Sea of Magdalen…well, Maggie was my mother’s name.
If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?
I have a library degree so I would most likely head over to the nearest public library if they’d have me. But part of the reason I became a writer is because there are so many things that fascinate me and, as a writer, I get to explore them all within the pages of a book. I would like to try my hand at being a spy, a time traveler, an arborist, an architect, a medieval military engineer, a 20th century physician. So many things!
What does being a diverse author mean to you?
I am part African American, part Pacific Islander, born on the Northern Mariana island of Saipan and raised on the neighboring U.S. Territory of Guam. I didn’t know a single Guamanian children’s author as a child. No island version of Laurie Halse Anderson or Jennifer Donnelly where I could say, “When I grow, I want to be just like her.” I hope that my story helps change that. That an island kid, thousands of miles from the New York publishing houses, will see that writing stories for a living is a possibility for them, if that is their dream.
Can you recommend any recent diverse lit titles?
I really enjoyed Sleepless by Sarah Vaughn. You rarely see people of color as the main characters in medieval fantasy lit, and this graphic novel, about a king’s daughter protected by a member of the elite Sleepless Order, is just so well done and lovely to look at.
Makiia Lucier grew up on the Pacific Island of Guam and holds degrees in journalism and library studies from the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of A Death-Struck Year, Isle of Blood and Stone, and Song of the Abyss.
A Normal Pig: A Picture Book that Takes on Microaggressions
By K-Fai Steele
A Normal Pig is a picture book about a pig named Pip. Pip considers herself to be a “pretty normal pig” who “does normal stuff.” But when a new pig shows up at her school and makes fun of Pip’s lunch, her identity—and sense of normalcy—is turned upside down.
A Normal Pig is somewhat autobiographical: I grew up in a town with little diversity and my parents are of different ethnicities. If physically standing out wasn’t enough, no one else had the same seemingly unpronounceable names as me and my brothers, and I have yet to meet another person who shares any of our names. There was little else I wanted as a kid than to pass as normal; I wanted a normal name, a normal house, and normal parents who had normal
well-paying jobs and drove nice normal cars. I internalized and accepted that I was not typical, a reality that was reinforced regularly by my school and my community.
I think there’s a correlation between the immediacy of the themes in A Normal Pig to my drawing style and line (I used watercolor and ink). I’ve been told that my line carries boldness, humor, and sincerity. I use humor in visual and written storytelling as a tool to describe character responses to traumatic experiences, because that’s how I’ve personally processed similar experiences: they can be sad, funny, and awkward all at once.
I hope that many things about A Normal Pig resonate with readers! And specifically, I hope that readers use Pip’s story to question the very concept of the term “normal” and how that term can be used to include or exclude or split the world up into binaries that are deeply unnecessary and limited in regard to the richness of individual experience. Questioning things and getting opportunities to see the world from a different perspective can give you freedom and power, and that’s where we find Pip—and her friends—at the end of A Normal Pig: “weirdly enough, feeling pretty normal.”
K-Fai Steele is an author-illustrator who grew up in a house built in the 1700s with a printing press her father bought from a magician. She is currently a Brown Handler Writer in Residence at the San Francisco Public Library and is the 2019 James Marshall Fellow at the University of Connecticut. A Normal Pig is her author-illustrator debut with Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins Childrens. K-Fai lives in San Francisco.
My literary influences come from disparate sources. I studied a wide variety of theory in college and graduate school — everyone from Roland Barthes to Judith Butler to Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga to Bell Hooks to Mikail Baktin to Subcomandante Marcos. I also read poetry voraciously including everyone from Waslowa Simbroska to Lorna Dee Cervantes, Audre Lorde, Rumi, Wole Soyinka, Juan Felipe Herrera. I was marveled by the fiction of Milan Kundera, Arundati Roy, Elena Poniatowska and all of the Latin American magical realists – Asturias, Garcia Marquez, Allende, Esquivel. But also, American writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Helena Maria Viramontes, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez and Christina Garcia. I was drawn to authors from the margin almost exclusively. In a sense, I created my own canon in this way.
It wasn’t until I became a mother that I truly started reading children’s literature. My children and I found an oasis in our weekly visits to the library. In Oakland, we are fortunate to have a comprehensive Spanish language collection at the Cesar Chavez Library and we often checked out the forty-book limit! However, many of the books were authored by non Latinx writers and were translated into Spanish. While these books served to reinforce the Spanish language in our family, I saw the huge lack of writings from Latinx creators. I wanted to be a part of filling that gap. I wanted for my children to not only see their language reflected in books but their cultures and their sensibilities. That is why I always praise the work of those Latinx authors who forged the way so that new Latinx kidlit authors could have a seat at the table. We stand on the shoulders of giants and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention their work. Authors such as Pura Belpre, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, Alma Flor Ada, Pat Mora, Carmen Lomas Garza, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Victor Martinez really set the stage for us to be able to tell our stories to young audiences too.
What was the first book you read where you identified with one of the characters?
As a young child, I didn’t understand that I was missing in the narratives of books that I read. I loved Judy Blume. I loved Shell Silverstein. I loved Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventure books. I connected to those books by default, in a similar way that I connected to mass media that also didn’t include me in their blond-haired blue-eyed middle-class, English-only narratives. There was no other option. It wasn’t until I was eighteen and in college that I enrolled in a Latino (we called it that back then) literature course that I saw myself reflected in a book. I remember reading the short story “My Lucy Friend That Smells Like Corn,” in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and feeling a moment that I can only describe as grace. I realized that I had been missing in almost everything I had read up until that point. My experiences were alive and validated in that story. It was exhilarating.
Did that experience lead you to want to write books for readers with diverse backgrounds?
I was so inspired by reading all of the books in that Latino literature class. It was an awakening not only to the world of Latinx literature but to the possibility that I too could be a writer. I had been writing poetry and stories since I was a young teenager but those writings remained in my notebooks and journals. After reading their work, I began to take myself seriously and began to understand the writing that lived in my heart could be something I could aspire to do as a living someday. However, my awakening is one that should have not taken eighteen years and I want to be part of making sure that doesn’t happen to other children.
Your characters in The Moon Within have interesting intersections. Could you speak to why this was important to build into your book?
I did this intentionally. My children are multi-racial and bi-cultural like two of the characters, Celi and Iván. It is not uncommon to see many different mixed children in the San Francisco Bay Area where we live. I find it beautiful how they navigate multiple cultures – sometimes with a sense of wonder and pride and sometimes with neglect or shame and every feeling in between. It’s complicated and certainly isn’t always seamless given so much discussion over racial and cultural purity that is happening today. Through those characters, I wanted to show this negotiation, how they deal with these fusions. I wanted to show readers what it might look like for someone to celebrate and embrace all of who they are. Similarly, I wanted to show with the gender fluid character, Marco, the intersectionality of his identity as a gender fluid Mexican that happens to be in love with playing bomba (a Afro-Puertorican form of music). It was important to show readers that we could be queer and Mexican, Black Puerto Rican Mexican, and Black and Mexican. The range of identities are part of the beauty of who they are, and serve to strengthen and not weaken them.
Music infuses the whole world of The Moon Within …can you speak a little on that, a little on what role music plays in your own life?
Ironically, I am not a musician though I have a good ear and I love to dance. I am married to a musician and there has not been one day in the eighteen years since we’ve been together when we did not engage in some way with music – listening, playing, singing, dancing or just being in a house filled with instruments and an extraordinary recorded music collection. Our children were naturally born into this environment and took to music right away. I realized that this was a unique experience and that it could be a wonderful world to explore in this book. I wanted to normalize music and the arts as a way of life but also, wanted to inspire readers to seek out the arts as a way to find agency as the children in the book did through traditional music and dance. These are superpowers that unfortunately, with the cutting of the arts for decades now, we don’t have access to as much.
I made a playlist on Spotify that includes all of the styles of music that inspired The Moon Within – bomba, indigenous Mexican music, Caribbean music, and lots of moon related songs in Spanish and in English. It can be found here: https://spoti.fi/2FSnZgM . I hope that you enjoy it!
This Author Spotlight appeared in the April 2019 issue of the CBC Diversity Newsletter. To sign up for our monthly Diversity newsletter click here.
Aida Salazar is a writer, arts advocate, and home-schooling mother who grew up in South East LA. She received an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts, and her writings have appeared in publications such as the Huffington Post, Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory, and Huizache Magazine. Her short story, By the Light of the Moon, was adapted into a ballet by the Sonoma Conservatory of Dance and is the first Xicana-themed ballet in history. Aida lives with her family of artists in a teal house in Oakland, CA.
The word “noor” in Urdu means light, a divine light found on the faces of those who have been enlightened, or in places that are pure and full of an uncomplicated joy. However, I named the fictional city in THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME Noor not because it is pure nor because it is a place for unconstrained joy. Rather the name came from my desire to portray the happiness that is possible once we, as a people, as human beings, can set aside our hostilities and embrace each other’s differences. You see, the City of Noor is also a city of hope. A hope for what can be.
The nearest city to the village I grew up in Fiji is Lautoka. Its streets and corners marked the passing of my years. By Western standards, Lautoka is tiny. An ambitious person can walk around it twice in an hour. In certain parts the city is filled with the scent of the sea and in others, the scent of sugar from the sugar mill. The vegetable and seafood markets are always crowded. When I was growing up, the bus station was a shabby little building accompanied by various mithai vendors selling all sorts of mithai in their vibrantly red carts. Stores and restaurants blared the latest Hindi songs under the relentless attentions of the Fijian sun. I borrowed the heat and the colour of the city of my birth and gave it to Noor which blooms both on the desert side and on the forest side.
I now live in Vancouver which is known for many things but especially for its unapologetic foodie culture. Cuisine from many different cultures are sold and enjoyed in the city. Vancouverites take pleasure in discovering new restaurants to try and new types of food to taste. The citizens of Noor reflect this attitude. Food is a simple pleasure; it is a language everyone speaks. While eating is necessary to life, in Noor, eating well is a luxury that is affordable to even those who cannot claim much else where material possessions are concerned.
Descriptions of food appear very frequently in THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME and there is more than one reason for this. First, I use food to show the diversity of the people present in the City of Noor and secondly, I use food to show relationships between people. How two people eat together and the food they choose to share with each other says a lot about the kind of feelings they have for each other. The Djinn in THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME exist almost entirely on sweets not just because all of them have incredible sweet teeth but also because their metabolism requires twice the amount of sugar that humans intake daily.
Every city has a song and this is undeniably true for the City of Noor. While its past is bloody and tragedy is always a threat in the horizon, the city and her people refuse to give up. It doesn’t matter whether her people worship in a masjid, a mandhir, a synagogue, a gurdwara, or a church. It doesn’t matter how her people identify themselves. It doesn’t matter who they love. In the City of Noor, what matters is your ability to respect people regardless of their beliefs and lifestyles. The city is a celebration of differences. That is the reason why it is the City of Light, the City of Noor.
THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME is about the fight to protect the City of Noor from those who have ill intentions towards her and the people she calls her own. For Fatima, the protagonist of THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME, the City of Noor is the only home she has known and she will do whatever it takes to keep it safe.
NAFIZA AZAD was born in Fiji and spent the first seventeen years of her life as a self-styled Pacific Islander. Now she identifies as an Indo-Fijian Muslim Canadian, which means she is often navigating multiple identities. Nafiza has a love for languages and currently speaks four. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Children's Literature from the University of British Columbia and co-runs The Book Wars (thebookwars.ca), a website dedicated to all things children's literature. Nafiza currently lives in British Columbia with her family.
