Playlist: How To Write the Book You Want to Read

“I wanted girls of color to feel validated and to know they matter,” Erika L. Sánchez explains why she wrote I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Reflecting on her book Hidden Figures Margot Lee Shetterly notes, “I wanted the protagonist of a big story to be someone who looked like me.” As for Mikki Kendall: “I didn’t like history when I was a kid,” but women’s history told through a graphic novel like Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists? That’s “informative, educational, and frankly more fun to read.”

“If we aren't teaching kids to see everyone as human, we're just passing down the same bigotry” —Mikki Kendall

When Kendall was a kid, she “ate comic books for breakfast,” and now she writes graphic novels about the intersectional history of women’s rights (the kind of topic rarely taught in school). Did you think that ancient cave paintings were only crafted by men? Or that women never fought with the Amazons or sailed on Viking ships? That Rome was never ruled by an empress? Kendall is here to correct the record: “You, my friends, are wrong.”

I came from all these threads, these filaments, and this history. I get to tell my own story and I don’t even have to be in the story. —Margot Lee Shetterly

Shetterly grew up at NASA (her dad worked there). Now she writes about the Black women who helped win the space race. She hopes Hidden Figures expands our ideas about who can be scientists, so that “something that really did happen will also be seen as something that can happen...and is happening.”

I wanted to show that young girls of color can have ambition, that they can dream and be storytellers and want big things for themselves. —Erika L. Sánchez

Why did Sánchez write I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter? When she was a kid, the only book she had about a girl that looked like her was Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street. Sánchez felt like it was time for a new story: “I want people to understand the experience of being a child of immigrants and how navigating two cultures could be really stressful. I want people to understand the humanity of immigrants.”

Watch our CHF archival playlist to learn how to write the book you want to read.