hometown love

I don’t generally think of Toronto as my hometown, but I did grow up in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and lately they’ve been showing me a little love. Today I have an article in The Toronto Star and last week Booktuber Njeri Damali Sojourner-Campbell posted this wonderful review of CIN’S MARK on her channel Onyx Pages. She has a keen critical eye so it means a lot that my novel resonated with her.

A few days ago I turned in my revised poetry manuscript (yay!). I’m heading to Sweden in a few hours and love the anonymity that comes with travel. But being invisible in Canada isn’t something I enjoy, so it feels good to finally have my voice heard. Here’s a bit of what I wrote for The Star:

It’s not easy being a Black child in the Great White North. I grew up on the outskirts of Toronto; in the 1970s and ’80s I had no Black teachers and no one working at the library looked like me. Black children were largely absent from the books I read as well. I adored fantasy fiction but fairies, unicorns, and magic carpets belonged to White children in England — not awkward Black girls in Canada.

So when I wrote my first picture book as a teen, my adventurous little girl was White and her family looked nothing like mine. Like Mary Poppins with her remarkable umbrella, Violet grabbed hold of a kite and sailed away for the day. I had been invisible for so long that I automatically erased myself without ever considering that I had a right to create and inhabit magical worlds.