1. What inspired you to pursue writing, and how did you first turn your passion into a business or career? A: My pursuit of writing really started with a love for reading. I fell in love with reading when I was ten years old; my mother had just brought home the first Percy Jackson novel, titled THE LIGHTNING THIEF (2006). I remember being struck by that book. The main character sounded like a kid. He was funny. Sym- pathetic. Easy to read. The accessibility of those books kept me turning the page again and again. I loved reading those books so much that, in between releases, I started to write my own stories within that universe. Writing about something I loved reading about, helped me fall in love with writing. I loved cre- ating worlds, writing relationships, and building out conflicts. I loved the agency I had, to lead the narrative and define the story. But every original character I wrote was a white character with blue-green eyes. None of them looked like me, like my family, or like the kids I grew up around. They all looked like the literary heroes I grew up reading—and deep down, I wanted to look like my heroes. As I got older, I grew more assured in my iden- tity. I found my community (of Black nerds), I grew pride in my Blackness, and I no longer wanted to look like anyone else. And after seeing projects like Spi- der-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Black Panther (2018), I saw that there was a huge demand for Black characters to serve as the leads for their own fan- tasy, superhero, and science fiction stories. These projects proved to me—and to pop culture—that Black characters and stories were not only marketable, but they were lucrative. People wanted to see heroes that looked like them, which was exactly how I felt when I was younger. Since I still loved writing, I de- cided to take a leap and write the story that I would’ve loved to read when I was ten. A story with the voice, the whimsy, the fantasy, and the epic-ness of Percy Jackson…but with the mythologies of my family and with Black characters as the leads. I decided to take another leap and try to get it on shelves—after all, countless people have written books and tried to publish them, seemingly without any insecurity or doubt. Maybe they did it for attention, maybe they did it for fame, but I was trying to write a story for the kids who looked like me…so didn’t I owe it to them to pursue publishing with that same kind of confidence? I pitched my story to agents (a process called “querying”). Through this process, I got an agent, Emily Forney from BookEnds Literary, who was also passionate about championing Black children’s fantasy. Emily and I worked together to edit my story, make it stronger, and punch up the “voice” of the book. From there, the ball was in Emily’s court; she pitched my story to publishers like Penguin Ran- dom House, HarperCollins, Disney, etc. I decided to go with Macmillan Publish- ing/Roaring Brook Press, and that story I wrote became the Coretta Scott King Award-winning KWAME CRASHES THE UNDERWORLD (2024) and jump-start- ed my writing career.
Craig Kofi Farmer
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