Storytelling & Narrative

Houghton Miflin Books

M+O = 4EVER

M-O= TROUBLE

O-M= HEARTACHE

What happens when the equations of your life just don’t add up? When the plans you’ve made since you were a kid all come tumbling down around your ears? What happens when your best friend leaves you forever before you even get to say goodbye? Before you can get to tell her how you really feel? 

In one of the first LGBTQIA+ YA novels about young people of color grappling with sexual identities, award winning author Tonya Cherie Hegamin explores race, sexuality, history and family for two not-so-typical teens growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Tonya’s first novel for young adults exhibits the power of unconventional, unconditional love.

Candlewick Press 

In 1848, an educated slave girl faces an inconceivable choice—between bondage and freedom, family and love.

On one side of the Mason-Dixon Line lives fifteen-year-old Willow, her master’s favorite servant. She’s been taught to read and has learned to write. She believes her master is good to her and fears the rebel slave runaways. On the other side of the line is seventeen-year-old Cato, a black man, free born. It’s his personal mission to sneak as many fugitive slaves to freedom as he can. Willow’s and Cato’s lives are about to intersect, with life-changing consequences for both of them. The award winning author's moving coming-of-age story is a poignant meditation on the many ways a person can be enslaved, and the force of will needed to be truly emancipated

Houghton Miflin Books

The mother in this long lgtbqia+ inclusive poem is an enslaved field worker on a big plantation by day, but at night she is a secret agent for the Underground Railroad. Mama makes a very special gift for her daughter so that even if they can’t be together, her child will always remember how much she is loved.

I wanted to write about the lengths mothers will go to for the sake of giving their children a better life. So many mothers today work and can’t stay home with their kids. Many mothers are forced to leave their children for extended periods of time with family or trusted friends in order to provide.

Scholastic Books

My book for middle-grade readers is told in both poetry and prose. Marilyn Nelson and I wanted to write a book for a friend of ours, Mr. Abraham Haqq, who, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, has accomplished an incredible amount of research about African-Americans contributions to the historic town of Colchester, Connecticut.The story begins with 15 year old Pemba, who gets uprooted from her home in Brooklyn, New York to live in small town New England. She’s anything but excited. She’s not only missing her boyfriend, Malik, and her best friend, Raysha, who seem strangely unable to communicate with her once she’s gone, but the house they’ve moved into gives Pemba the creeps. To make matters worse, her mom has volunteered Pemba to be Abraham’s assistant at the library. But as the days go on, Pemba keeps having the feeling she’s being watched, and she can’t shake the weirdly vivid dreams she’s been having, even in the daytime. Only by confiding in Abraham can she unravel the mystery of what’s been haunting her and why.