One time in particular was hard as the agent requested a partial, and then requested the full soon after, saying how much they were enjoying the read and how excited they were to continue reading. It’s not one moment that is the worst, but it is all the times that I got a full request from an agent, and allowed myself to get really excited thinking it was finally going to happen, only to get emails many months later saying the book wasn’t working for them. What were the best and worst moments in your publishing journey? I had to include all of that in a book about a Black girl living in 2019.Īs fate would have it, at the same time, there was a large call for more diverse representation and many more agents and editors were specifically looking to fill the huge representation hole in children’s literature. They didn’t understand the message of Black Lives Matter, thinking incorrectly that we were saying Black lives mattered more than anyone else’s, when all we were saying is that we mattered, too.Īnd I thought how horrible it might be to be a young person, seeing the same news reports and thinking that not only were people saying you didn’t matter, but also that you were so scary because of your skin color, that you could be killed.

They didn’t get how I could care so deeply when I didn’t know any of the people involved. Non-Black friends didn’t often understand.

I was so personally affected by these reports. The book moved away from any of my own experiences and started including more current issues.Īnd then it was 2016 and the number of Black young men being killed by police was being reported in alarming numbers. I worked on the book for years and all the while, my daughter was getting older and eventual started junior high herself, and I was shocked to see she experienced some of the same issues I had. It seemed like good fodder for a novel, but I definitely didn’t want to write a memoir, so I wrote a fictional story that included some personal details. There was also a lot of racial clashing, and as a kid who had friends of all different races, I didn’t know where I fit in or how to make sense of any of it. I grew up in the time of bussing and it was hard to tell if the racial divide I saw at school had to do with who was bussed and who wasn’t, or something more.

Initially, I started writing about my own experiences growing up in Los Angeles and how I struggled to understand certain race questions. What was your initial inspiration for writing A Good Kind of Trouble (Balzer + Bray)? Both of their middle grade novels debuted this month. Both are members of the Novel Nineteens author group. I am excited to share the publishing journeys of Lisa Moore Ramée and Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo.

Flannery lisa moore