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" Everyone has a story that they read when they were younger that influenced them. "

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" If I went to any other college, I probably would have been pre-med. But I felt like I had freedom to do what I wanted to do at Harvard. "

" I want a little black girl to pick up my book one day and see herself as the star. I want her to know that she's beautiful, and she matters, and she can have a crazy, magical adventure even if an ignorant part of the world tells her she can never be Hermione Granger. "

" At every writers' conference, you have the opportunity to hear from best-selling authors, top literary agents, and excellent editors who will demystify the publishing industry and give you great advice, no matter where you are in your writing career or what you're currently struggling with. "

" Imagination is a funny thing - we sometimes need to see something before we can truly picture it. "

" There's so much talk of representation in politics and entertainment - it's everywhere - but I didn't realize representation was important until really my senior year of high school. "

" We like epic stories, we like adventure, we like epic fights, so if you can mix a great story that can also really teach someone about a different experience, you have the potential to really help people. "

" If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have. "

" What's demanded from us black creatives is both a blessing and a curse, because it pushes you to be your absolute best. You cannot be anything less. "

" With a fantasy world, it's like, this is my world. I literally made it. So if I tell you something, you do have to sit back and observe more. You need to sit back and listen more to understand what is going on or what's happening in the world. And I think there's a lot of power in that. "

" My freshman year of college, 'The Hunger Games' movie adaptation came out, and I was really excited about it. This was maybe 2011. I loved it, but there was a lot of hateful backlash against the black characters in the film. "

" I had a lot of different reasons for writing the book, but at its core was the desire to write for black teenage girls growing up reading books they were absent from. That was my experience as a child. 'Children of Blood and Bone' is a chance to address that. To say you are seen. "

" Part of the reason everyone is freaking out over 'Black Panther' is because we've never seen it. We have two thousand years of stories, and we've never seen it. "

" As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there's a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers' success! "

" You can make something out of every unfinished story and every rejection if you work at it. "

" I'm a huge 'Harry Potter' fan, but I still think there is a lot of anime that is crazier than 'Harry Potter,' and that was a seven-book masterpiece. "

" You're never wasting your time as long as you learn from every single thing you do, whether you feel like those attempts are successful or not. "

" I will always be my hardest critic. Nobody else will ever be able to come at something I do harder than I come at myself. "

" The knowledge and insights you can get in just one day at a writers' conference make it worth the trip. "

" I deeply believed that I wasn't worthy - that I couldn't be in the stories even I was creating. I don't want anyone else to feel like that. "

" You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in. "

" With the Internet, there are so many ways to connect with other writers who will be some of your best friends and best sources of support for your entire life. "

" Children of color need a mirror to see themselves in. And then people who don't have that experience, they need a window. They need a really personalized way to see what people who are different from them are going through. "

" In my perfect world, we'd have one black girl fantasy book every month. We need them, and we need fantasy stories about black boys as well. "

" For readers of color, and especially black readers, black girls, I just want them to feel seen. And not just seen - I want them to feel epic and know that they are epic. "

" The YA author community is generally pretty friendly, and they care. "

" The power of fantasy is that you can make people understand the deeper realities of our world in a way that they wouldn't normally be able to because of all the things in our world that closes them off. "

" If you want to write, just believe that you can, because it's about perseverance. "

" In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was. "

" I am a firm believer that the craziest stories that have been told and are being told are in anime. They have character arcs that go over, like, 400 episodes, like a 400-episode character arc. "

" You need a community to succeed. In the back of every book is an acknowledgments page full of all the people it took to get that writer to the book you're holding. "