There's just something about being a young, working class, working poor, person of color in New York City in the 80's that needs to be understood by people outside of that experience. The way I put it is that we created something really amazing, hip hop, when we weren't even supposed to survive.

When I say myself, I don't mean just as a woman of color, as a girl who's growing up in the Bronx, as people growing up in some way economically-challenged, not growing up with money. It was also even just the way we spoke. The vernacular. I learned that it's alright to say "ain't." My characters can speak the way they authentically are, and that makes for good story. It's not making for good story to make them speak proper English when nobody speaks like that on the playground.

A lot of times, people say that people read to escape. But I think if you come from any community that is underrepresented, in any kind of media, whether that's around race, around class, or sexual orientation, religion, whatever it may be, sometimes you read to be affirmed. To have your humanity rendered complexly. And sometimes seeing yourself on the page is affirming. And we know that for some young people, that can also be life-saving.

We work with tweens. Middle school grades. That's a key time in a young person's literary history. That's the time when they're still open to reading, but there are other things that are starting to interest them that can pull them out of their reading habits. It's a critical time to make the reading habits stick, but at the same time it's not pulling teeth to try to get them to read in the first place.

There's just something about being a young, working class, working poor, person of color in New York City in the 80's that needs to be understood by people outside of that experience. The way I put it is that we created something really amazing, hip hop, when we weren't even supposed to survive.

Sure, kids want to read whatever is the hot book, and of course they want to read fantasy and any kind of speculative fiction, but they also like to read stories with kids that look just like them, that have the same problems as them. And I've noticed that what they particularly want to see is to see those characters prevail. So they don't want sanitized situations. They want stories to be raw, they want them to be gritty, but they also do want to see the hope at the end of the story.

The one thing that always sticks out to me was how reading to young people - even if they're not that young, even if they're too cool for school, middle schoolers - what a profound act of love it is.