The Stories Beneath the Surface: Why These Books Exist
People sometimes ask how I can write a children's picture book and a raw adult poetry collection in the same creative season. Don't they come from completely different places? Different readers, different registers, different emotional frequencies entirely?
Yes. And also, no.
The surface of the work looks different — the vocabulary, the form, the audience, the visual language. But underneath all of it, there is one question I am always, always asking: does the person holding this book feel seen?
That's the throughline. Not genre. Not format. Not demographic. Every book I've written, from Curls, Coils & All My Colors to A Year Inside Your Skin, has been an attempt to hold up a mirror to someone who needed one. To say: this experience you're having — the one you thought was too specific, too small, too personal to matter to anyone else — it's here. In these pages. I saw it too.
The first question
I didn't always know this about myself as a writer.
When I first started taking my writing seriously, I was focused on craft — on voice, on structure, on all the technical things that matter and take years to develop. I was reading everything I could find. Writing and deleting and rewriting. Learning.
But I wasn't yet asking the right question. I was asking: is this good? Is this publishable? Is this something that could find an audience?
These are not bad questions. They're just not the first question.
The first question — the one that has to come before any of the others — is: why does this need to exist? Not just "why do I want to write it," but "what will be missing from the world if I don't?" That's harder. It requires honesty about what you're actually trying to give someone.
When I started asking that question, something clicked.
Identity, healing, belonging
The stories beneath the surface of my books are almost always about one of three things: identity, healing, or belonging. Often all three at once.
The children's books are about belonging — about helping a child understand that they are not outside the story, not an afterthought, not a supporting character in someone else's narrative. They are the protagonist. They always were. These books make that visible, make it felt.
The poetry is about healing — the messy, nonlinear, deeply private process of moving through something hard and coming out the other side changed. Not fixed. Changed. There's a difference. The books in the Glow-Up Series are about the same thing, in a different key — more active, more forward-looking, more structured around daily practice.
Underneath all of it: the belief that the interior life matters. That what happens inside a person — the grief, the joy, the doubt, the becoming — is worth putting language around. Worth witnessing. Worth the care and intention of a book made with someone's whole heart.
The books I grew up without
I grew up reaching for books that didn't quite reach back.
Stories where I had to do the translation work myself — imagine myself into margins I wasn't written into, find myself in characters who didn't look like me or move through the world the way I did. Those books weren't without value. Many of them were beautiful. But there was always a distance, a gap I had to leap across.
That gap is tiring. Over years, it accumulates.
I write to close it. For the girl who needed to see her curls celebrated, not managed. For the woman who needed someone to describe what it feels like to love someone who leaves, and to survive it, and to find yourself again on the other side. For the child asking a question that no one around her has the language for yet.
I write the books I needed.
Not because my story is everyone's story — it isn't, and I know that. But because when a writer goes deep enough into their own specific truth, something universal tends to emerge. The specific and the universal aren't opposites. They're the same thing at different depths.
Go deep enough into one woman's grief and you find everyone's grief. Go deep enough into one child's longing to be seen and you find every child's longing to be seen.
That's the story beneath the surface of every book I've made. That's why they exist.
Navigating across forms
There's a practical question here that's worth addressing: how do you move between writing a picture book and writing a poetry collection without one contaminating the other? Without the children's book becoming too simple or the poetry becoming too accessible?
For me, the answer is that I don't think of them as separate modes so much as separate registers — the way a musician might play jazz and classical, using different vocabularies for the same underlying musical intelligence. The core sensibility is consistent. The tools change.
When I'm writing for children, I'm asking: what does this feel like from the inside? What does a child actually experience — not what adults remember childhood feeling like, but what it actually is? That requires a particular kind of attention. A willingness to slow down and inhabit a smaller, more specific world.
When I'm writing poetry or developing a guided journal, I'm asking different questions — about the shape of an adult emotional experience, about what language can do that other forms can't, about how to create enough structure to support a reader without closing off the space they need to bring themselves to the work.
Both require the same fundamental thing: honesty. Willingness to stay with a feeling long enough to find the right words for it. Resistance to the easy version, the version that sounds good but doesn't quite land true.
That's what I'm doing in every format I work in. The children's books and the poetry are just different instruments playing the same song.
Every book I write is really one book: a permission slip to become.