- 2 days ago
A lively conversation about writing for young adults and Gen Z readers, exploring the unique challenges and rewards of crafting stories that truly resonate. The discussion focuses on capturing authentic voices, addressing relevant themes, and creating compelling characters that inspire and engage the next generation of readers.
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00:00Good morning Essence Fest! How are you?
00:05We high energy? We mid energy? What are we doing?
00:10All right! Love it! Thank you!
00:14I'm super happy to be here for our first panel of the day at the Penguin Random House booth
00:20with Mahogany Books as our designated bookseller and with these tremendous authors of young adult literature.
00:28So I'm going to introduce them one by one, but they're also going to talk about their books,
00:32why you write for young adults, what we see in terms of engaging with young people through our writing,
00:39and our experiences engaging with them in real life and why we write for them.
00:44So first I'm going to introduce Helena Haywood Henry,
00:54the author of Last Chance Live, which is coming out in October, right?
00:59And you can get a galley today while supplies last, so please don't be mad at any of us.
01:06Not enough, but you can pre-order the book and I highly recommend you do because it's tremendous.
01:12We have Tiffany D. Jackson, New York Times bestselling author.
01:17And you're pretty prolific at this point, Tiffany.
01:21So we're going to mention your latest books, Blood in the Water and The Scammer,
01:26but we have several of your titles here for purchase.
01:29But again, limited time.
01:31We have The Scammer, which I'm really excited about.
01:35I got to read a little bit was like intense.
01:38And we have Jamada Amil, author of The Black Queen, Wander in the Dark and I Don't Wish You Well.
01:45And I Don't Wish You Well comes out next year, right?
01:48Next year.
01:49But you can get Wander in the Dark today as well.
01:52And so all of these authors will be signing.
01:55Again, books are on sale.
01:56And you can get so many other wonderful books from authors that are present and not here
02:00because we're really doing a lot to represent the intersectionality of blackness here at Essence Fest
02:06and at Penguin Random House.
02:08So with further ado, I'd love to ask y'alls if you can intro your latest book or books.
02:15And if you could tell us who are the main characters are and how do you connect with them
02:20and or the story that you wrote.
02:22So I'll start with Jamada.
02:23Why don't you put me first?
02:25I am not prepared.
02:27You're in my direct line of sight.
02:29Okay.
02:30Well, I'll do I Don't Wish You Well.
02:32I Don't Wish You Well is the story of Price Cummings, who is an 18-year-old investigative journalist
02:37who investigates the murders of four football players that happened in his hometown four years,
02:44well, five years ago.
02:45He uncovers some evidence that throws the killer's guilt into question.
02:51And so as he starts to investigate whether the person was actually guilty, he learns that there was a lot more to the murders that happened five years ago.
03:00And it kind of sets him on a path to maybe possibly put him in the crosshairs of the real killer.
03:06And he may not live to tell the tale.
03:09So we'll see.
03:12Tiffany?
03:13Hi.
03:14So my book, The Scammer, is loosely inspired by a real case.
03:19But it is about a girl who, against her parents' wishes, heads to an HBCU in Washington, D.C., and dorms with three lovely ladies.
03:30But one of the roommate's brother, who was recently released from prison, moves into the dorm with them and turns their entire life upside down.
03:40Hmm.
03:41Helena?
03:42Hi.
03:43I'm Helena.
03:44And my book, Last Chance Live, is about teens on death row who compete on a reality TV show in which America votes for one contestant to win freedom and forgiveness.
03:56And things don't go well for the other contestants.
03:59It features a protagonist, a main character named Eternity Price.
04:03And I'll tell you more in a moment about Eternity.
04:07Oh, okay.
04:08It's gonna get spicy, y'all.
04:11And so it's Helena.
04:13Thank you for correcting.
04:15Helena.
04:16And so what's interesting, if y'all have listened to what they, just these great elevator pitches, is like, we've all written some dark tales.
04:24We've written some heavy stuff for young adults that features them.
04:28And I'm really curious about how you tackle that, especially when thinking about and featuring a teen audience and a teen perspective.
04:37So, should I go with Helena?
04:39Should we do the lottery?
04:40Helena?
04:41Sorry.
04:42So, I tend to believe that if a child can experience something in the world that we've created for them, then they can live it.
04:51And unfortunately, our world has a lot of brokenness.
04:55With my main character, Eternity Price, I think of her as what's known as an everyman character.
05:01And I say Eternity Price is all of us, kids, teens, and adults.
05:06Because, like Eternity, in a way, we are all on death row.
05:12And what I mean by that is we all are headed for a grave at some point.
05:18Hopefully not today.
05:19Sorry to be a downer.
05:21And we've all done terrible things, myself included.
05:25And we're all aware of our internal failures, the things that we know we've really missed the mark on.
05:33But in spite of that, we hold, with that awareness, a sense of hope in our worth.
05:39And that we are worthy of love, that we are worthy of rescue from this type of brokenness that we live in.
05:46And so in writing for kids, the human condition applies to them as much as it does to adults.
05:53And so I think that in my experience working with young people and listening to them and learning from them,
06:00they really are capable of engaging with intellectually the complicated nuances of being a human in this world.
06:08And so writing to that, I think, helps invite them into a dialogue about it.
06:14Thank you for that.
06:15So, yes, I definitely write about a lot of hard topics.
06:20I'm fairly known for that in my publishing career.
06:25But I don't care.
06:28See, the thing is, I oftentimes feel like people grossly underestimate children's intelligence and what they've been through.
06:37And oftentimes, like you said, if kids are living through it, then other kids should actually know about other kids living through it.
06:44Yeah.
06:45And experience it in a safe environment so that they can actually truly learn and build some type of empathy and compassion for the person that could be sitting right next to you or the state over or, you know, on the other side of the country.
06:57It doesn't matter.
06:58We ultimately need that.
06:59So I think that that's like it's so important for us to tell these stories, not in a sense of like telling, quote unquote, what I what has been used around me before black pain stories.
07:10It's not about that.
07:11It's about understanding and really getting to the root of that and letting kids really understand for themselves rather than spoon feeding those lessons.
07:19Yeah.
07:20I think for me, it's like to build off of all of that, what they've already said is that remember writing always mysteries.
07:27It's all it's all about black teenagers being able to be, quote unquote, the smartest kids in the room.
07:34And I feel like black kids don't ever get to have that in story in mainstream media.
07:39It's always like they're in service of a white character.
07:41And so I think a lot of times black kids need to understand that, yes, you are smart enough.
07:47You can do all these things that they try to tell you that you can't do or you're not smart enough to do.
07:53And let's just be honest, like the criminal justice system affects black people very differently than everyone else, whether you're a victim or a suspect.
08:01And so you're creating a situation where, you know, black kids probably will have to get justice for themselves.
08:08And obviously the teenagers, you have to try to give them some kind of motivation because most teenagers are like, I'm not solving a crime.
08:14Like, go ahead. That's what makes it fiction.
08:16But I think it was just very important because I know as a kid, that's what I wanted.
08:20I had to read about all these white characters like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Roys.
08:25But I always just imagined, well, if they were black kids, what would they be like?
08:29So I kind of wanted to show black kids how you can deal with the darkness of the world and still persevere with them.
08:38Yeah. And there's also a level of heroism, right?
08:41Like you were saying, when they're making, they're kind of taking charge of their own lives and recognizing the system is not playing fair.
08:49Exactly. And it's never going to play fair.
08:50Exactly.
08:51And so let me dip in here and control what I can within the systems that I create.
08:56Do you want to mention something or add?
08:59Yeah. You know, our pain and particularly our community's pain and our struggle has always, always reaped a harvest of black victory.
09:09And I think that when we write for young people or for adults, showing them the different facets of what that victory looks like is important.
09:19And it doesn't always have to be victory in the way the world defines it or the majority culture defines it.
09:24Right.
09:25And so helping young readers or adult readers, particularly readers of color, understand there are other definitions for victory and these are attainable for you and no one can tell you otherwise is important.
09:37Yes. Yes. Thank you so much for that.
09:39So I remember talking to case and calendar about what the difference is for them when it comes to when they write for adults and then they write for young people.
09:49And case and said, well, one of my biggest things is hope.
09:52Like I need to place hope within the narrative and especially have it at the end of it, despite whatever the ending may be.
10:00So I'm throwing kind of a curveball question, but it's based off of just the impetus of such a wonderful dialogue that's going on already of how do you insert hope into your books?
10:11I don't think I always need to. I'm not a person that really advocates for it needs to be hope.
10:16It depends on what the story is. Like, obviously, if you're writing a mystery or a thriller, let's just say mystery, you need to have a resolution.
10:23The reader needs to have all the answers. And I wholeheartedly believe that.
10:28If you're writing it in horror, I don't necessarily think that it has to have hope.
10:33That's not what horror is about. That's genre, huh?
10:35That's genre.
10:36Yeah, that's the genre. It doesn't end positively for everybody. You know what I mean?
10:43So I don't think you always have to have that.
10:45That's valid. That's valid.
10:47And I often say that it's like the idea, like the fact that we are in the thriller slash horror genre, we are very much aliens.
10:55Like, people look at us like, what are you guys doing over there?
10:59Like, if you did a statistical analysis, right?
11:03Like, even in 2017, my first book allegedly came out. I was one of three black thriller writers in the entire children's publishing.
11:12Yeah.
11:13For horror, there was only two. Me and Justina Ireland.
11:16So, and then now that has increased tremendously. But the fact was, there was a lot of clawing in there. And then there was a lot of questions like that. Like, you know, oh, when are you going to put like, what message are you trying to portray?
11:29Or why is there hope in your book and stuff like that? I'm like, no one asked Stephen King this question.
11:34Exactly.
11:35No one asked Danielle Steele, when is she going to write a nonfiction? Like, no one asked us that.
11:40And so I think we should really truly celebrate the fact that there are black people in these genres, in these like sort of categories, that don't need to specifically have a message, but still can entertain and still uplift our people in the same way.
11:54So I think that like, I feel like sometimes we need to take that away from the conversation in terms of when you talk to genre writers, because only because of that, of the fact that you see our counterparts or the people that are in our genre, don't get that type of heat, but we particularly get that kind of heat.
12:11Interesting. Interesting.
12:13Yeah. And I think one of the beautiful things about having a diverse array of books, um, where all books are allowed in spaces and in the marketplace is there can be books where people can go to the text for hope. Um, and one of the ways I, um, aim to tackle that for adult and young readers is to help orient, um, our community in our history and our tradition.
12:39And, and, and we come from an ancestry of tremendous power, right? And so any young person or adult person reading my, one of my aims is that they walk away with a sense of, you know, my story does not have a predetermined end.
12:54I, it is, my trajectory is not inevitable, right? I come from power. I, I am, I have power within me. I have access to power. Um, and, and there is agency in that. And so even if on the page, the,
13:08you know, even if on the page, it doesn't look like a hopeful story in the conventional sense, um, there, there is a richer, more robust definition to hope.
13:19Yeah.
13:20And there's an idea of like resilience.
13:22Yes.
13:23Yes.
13:24Exactly.
13:25Because you're right. We do come from some powerful people. If other were still alive today.
13:28Yes.
13:29Really sort of draws that line.
13:30Yes.
13:31And so honestly, when I think about even like writing in horror, it's like, who knows monsters better than we do?
13:37Exactly.
13:38Yeah.
13:39Yeah.
13:40Yeah.
13:41Yeah.
13:42Yeah.
13:43Yeah.
13:44No, thank you for that.
13:45Because I think it's a really helpful way to like engage even further into how we look at it.
13:51Because I think even when talking to Kacen, Kacen writes very bloody sci-fi and Kacen writes romance.
13:57Yeah.
13:58Yeah.
13:59Yeah.
14:00And if you think about like one of our original writers, right, I've been thinking about Frederick Douglass a lot, particularly this week because of his famous, what to the slave is the 4th of July.
14:09Yeah.
14:10And I think that one of the things that has robbed us of a sense of hope is our broken understanding of our ancestry.
14:17I know for me, I can go back a few generations.
14:20I go back to Edisto Island and the enslaved communities that came from Charleston.
14:25But I know there's people who chose the sea, right, in my lineage.
14:29I know there's kingdoms, right, in my lineage and I can't access that.
14:34And so I think that one valuable way to just help young people and older people attain that sense of power is to recreate that sense of ancestry within our community in a horizontal way today, right?
14:50We have aunties and uncles and aunties that are not blood like JL here.
14:55And it's a way to recapture that sense of family and belonging and spirit that gives us hope.
15:01Yeah.
15:02Yeah.
15:03And I'm really grateful just to be able to share space with y'all this morning because it's like reviving me and not just being an Essence Fest, but also in the work that we do, right?
15:14And the work that we do with engaging with young readers, but also there's the crossover mentality of, like, who we're thinking of, but also who's also allowed to just access, access story.
15:26Yeah.
15:27I don't know if you wanted to say anything.
15:29No, Tiffany.
15:30Oh, Tiffany.
15:31Is the, no, I was like, yes.
15:32That's the teacher in me.
15:33I'm like, what do you want?
15:34My bad.
15:35What do you need?
15:36My bad.
15:37But when you, for those who've engaged with young readers already with your work, what have been some of the conversations that have happened with like any particular book that's kind of surprised you or kind of stood out to you or kind of been like, wow, this is like why I write.
15:54This is what I do.
15:55Yeah.
15:56I think for me it was my debut book because like the black queen is told from the perspective of like a black girl and a white girl.
16:02And I have the white girl confront her privilege in the story.
16:05And I remember I was at like a festival and a whole bunch of white girls came up to me and they was like, thank you for letting us have it.
16:13Because honestly, like I have a lot of friends that are like Tinsley and like they need, and I gave them your book, but they need to understand like they are living in these echo chambers and they don't understand what privilege is.
16:22And I gave you a book and it helped us have a conversation about it.
16:24And I was like, oh, okay.
16:26Well, great.
16:27I wanted that conversation to happen.
16:30She was telling me about a whole conversation they had in their classroom about it.
16:34This is a predominantly white school.
16:35And so that made me feel good because honestly, I felt like one of the reasons I did that, I chose to do that is because I felt like a lot of people in YA, a lot of white authors in YA, they love to have like what I call perfectly PC white characters.
16:51But they don't ever take the, do the work to have white characters perform privilege.
16:56And I think that's a better use of their time because that's what needs to be happening.
17:00And there weren't, they weren't doing it.
17:02And so that's why I kind of did it and chose to do that.
17:05Oh, so my books, one of the, one of the privileges of being an author in this space is being able to go to schools.
17:16I travel and I do school visits all over the country.
17:19And one of the privileges of that is being able to meet kids who are featured in my books and say, thank you for writing.
17:26Like, so I've met like the Mondays and Monday's not coming.
17:29I've met the Marys and allegedly I've met all these kids or a kid adjacent or even teachers who say I had students, like some of the kids are in your book.
17:38That has been a tremendous privilege for me.
17:41And I never even really truly thought about that, like the significance of meeting kids who are in these type of environments.
17:48And so when I sat down to write Scammer, Scammer takes place in a college and there's not many young adult novels that feature like college characters.
17:58And I think that's a tremendous disservice to kids.
18:01It is, yes.
18:02Because this is, it's a huge leap from being a senior to a freshman in college away from everybody, away from your entire bubble and everything that you know.
18:11And I think it's incredibly, and that is your most vulnerable place.
18:15So of course, people would try to attack you and prey on you in your most vulnerable space.
18:21So I think that that was one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to kind of like dip into that.
18:26Because I know there's going to be a ton of other kids who are going to say like, I needed to read this.
18:31I needed to know this before I got into school and know what I was supposed to look out for.
18:35So as a debut author, I have not yet had the privilege that Tiffany and Javada have had to tour schools.
18:44But I have had the tremendous privilege of working closely with a focus group of young readers of color with whom I share my books and listen to their thoughts.
18:54And two things have really struck me in working with these young kids.
18:58And the first is that they're ready.
19:00They're ready for the material.
19:02They're ready for the text.
19:03And they're ready for the challenges that our country is foisting on them.
19:07I personally am of the belief that America probably is at the precipice of a third founding or in need of a third founding.
19:16If the first founding was 1787 with an animating principle of all men are created equal, right, but not everybody.
19:22And then 1865 was the second one.
19:24I think this country is teetering towards it's time for something else.
19:27It's time to figure out what this anchoring principle is going to be.
19:30And the people who are going to do that work are the young people I work with, the young people, Tiffany and Javada see in schools.
19:36And they're capable.
19:37And, you know, my one hope for them and for adults, too, is as they engage with these questions, the questions of reckoning with privilege.
19:47You know, the questions of how do we navigate spaces in our vulnerable times and all these forces are coming at us.
19:53My hope for them is we don't outsource our analysis.
19:56And what I mean by that, and I see them doing a great job in this.
20:01I think it's very tempting to come to a conclusion about whatever issue or topic because my community thinks it, my party thinks it, my such and such, my neighbor, my friend.
20:12And we're really needing to come to a place where we can independently assess and analyze and come to conclusions about what we think has to happen so that we can do the work that this country is going to need.
20:25And these kids, they're up for the task.
20:29They really are.
20:30They're no joke.
20:32They're very inspiring.
20:35And they just they know so much, too, that like someone mentioned, like the underestimation of the young adult audience and whatnot.
20:44And so I feel like you kind of touched on already some aspects of my next question, because we have like four minutes yet left.
20:51And I also want to encourage I don't think we'll have time for a Q&A.
20:54We haven't been doing those consistently.
20:56But again, please talk to these authors, buy their books, get in line for a copy for a galley as much as possible.
21:03But kind of where we are right now.
21:06It's been a week.
21:08It's been a it's been a year.
21:10It's been a century.
21:11How do you see how do you well, what kind of advice would you offer to others if you feel inclined to do so for how we continue to engage with not just each other, but young people in terms of literacy in terms of sharing our stories in terms of whether that means getting active in different ways.
21:33So if you would honor us with any any response to that or anything kind of like you want to leave us with as we exit the stage today.
21:42Yeah.
21:43Get active.
21:44That's the biggest part.
21:45I would say 100 percent get active, get active in your community, whether it's you're donating to your local charities, your food banks, whether you're spending time with kids.
21:58I know it's really hard because we don't have a lot of time just in general, but there is online platforms that you could do.
22:03There are zoom meetings you can have.
22:05I 100 percent wholly believe that putting books like ours and kids hands definitely rewires a lot of things that are happening in their brain because just because they can't see it physically doesn't mean they can't imagine it and can understand and use all five of your of their senses to sort of process it.
22:22I truly feel that books like at this point I'm sort of done explaining myself to adults.
22:28Like I don't bother with them.
22:30I kind of just go straight for kids like, you know, as adults, we're done for the literally children are literally our only hope and future.
22:37And so my goal in every single one of my books is to really lay the foundation of what is happening in our country and lay it out in a way that's very palatable so that they can.
22:47Like I said, like don't get like spoon fed lessons.
22:50So please, please, please get involved wherever you can.
22:56I can't follow that up.
23:01I think what Tiffany said is absolutely right.
23:03Like it's just it's really about young people having access to all kinds of stories and not just one type of story that, you know, so often what I saw, even when I was a journalist covering like school boards and school districts, it was that there was a lot of black kids that could not dream outside of their environment.
23:26And they would they didn't think certain types of people existed because they had no access to that.
23:32All their teachers were white.
23:33They didn't think that certain things were accessible to them.
23:37I always tell people all the time that it's very easy for a white parent to tell their white child you can be anything in this world when they can look out in the world and see themselves reflected in everything.
23:49But you can't just tell a black kid because we had one black president that they can be anything in this world.
23:55That's just not how it operates.
23:57And so books are a gateway for them to see themselves as other.
24:01We're like agreeing with you.
24:05Yeah.
24:06I just need to give a quick church cut.
24:09Like, yeah.
24:10Right.
24:11Like, hmm.
24:12But yeah, they have to see themselves.
24:13They have to be able to see themselves in everything.
24:15They have to see themselves being the hero, being a mermaid, being a sci-fi character.
24:19They have to be able to be allowed to be anything that they want to be if you want them to truly believe that.
24:24And they need to see the doctor.
24:26They need to see the lawyer.
24:27They need to see teachers that look like them, that understand what they're going through.
24:31If you really want them to be able to go out into the world and really have the mindset that they can be anything besides an athlete and a rapper.
24:38Which is all they see in mainstream media.
24:40So we have to do a better job of giving them access to everything in the world that they have a lot of avenues they can take.
24:47Yeah.
24:48Yeah.
24:49I echo much of what Tiffany and Jamada said about being active and helping to create a world where kids can see themselves in different spaces.
24:56I would add to that.
24:57I think it's time for adults to orient themselves in our rights and our constitutional structure and develop a deep understanding of what we are entitled to as Americans and help communicate that to the young people in our community and outside of our community too.
25:15And I think that without that orientation, we're going to suffer.
25:22One of the earliest ways in a book sense that we could do that is help understanding our right to read.
25:29Right?
25:30So particularly when book bans are all the rage and there are states that are not going to let kids read certain things and whatnot.
25:36We're being a little bit deceived about what our rights are here.
25:40The Supreme Court has already spoken to this book banning issue decades ago in a case called Island Tree of Life versus Pico.
25:47And they noted that the young person has a right to hear.
25:51Right?
25:52Kind of following up on that Frederick Douglass mention earlier, he talks about our First Amendment right including a right to hear in addition to a right to speak.
26:02And the Supreme Court has noted in 1980s or so that that right to hear is not, it is subject to some school board discretion, but it's not subject to total school board discretion.
26:13And so as long as we continue to exist in a system where we let people tell us what we're allowed to do and let people define our rights for us without us accessing the primary information that will help us educate ourselves, we're going to continue to see sliding like this.
26:28So I think that would be one good way to do it and one good place to start is books.
26:34I love that.
26:35She's a lawyer, y'all.
26:36She's a lawyer, you can tell.
26:39And an author.
26:40And an author.
26:42Well, we went to church this morning.
26:44I appreciate y'all coming to our services.
26:47And again, I cannot thank y'all enough for being here this morning.
26:52Thank you all.
26:54Thank you, Jamada Amil.
26:55Thank you, Tiffany Jackson.
26:57Thank you, Helena Haywood Henry.
27:00Again, books are on sale.
27:02Oh, I'm Jennifer Baker.
27:03I totally forgot to say that.
27:05But I'm Jennifer Baker.
27:07She, her pronouns, author, forgive me not, editorial director of Storehouse Voices.
27:12So if you come to the activation booth outside of here and want to learn more about publishing, our upcoming contest at Storehouse Voices,
27:20we will publish a book by at least one person who will earn up to $100,000 advance.
27:27And if you submit through Essence Fest, we have all the info outside of this booth.
27:32So everyone signing out here.
27:35Again, limited copies for Helena and Tiffany's.
27:38But again, everything else is on sale.
27:41Thank you so much.
27:48You
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