Scholastic

In Anh Do's chapter book series, WEIRDO, the author created a character whose first name is Weir, and whose last name is Do. He’s a school kid who feels like he doesn’t always belong, but who learns to embrace his uniqueness.

When I was in the seventh grade, or eighth, or maybe it was ninth, I was presented with a brief bit on Reconstruction. The gist: Reconstruction was a terrible time in American history, terrible in part because a number of black men held political office and, boy, oh, boy, did they made a mess of things with their corruption, their ignorance.

I’ve been in love with writing stories since I was a tiny ten-year-old girl with a curious mind and big opinions. In those three decades, it has been through writing that I’ve come to understand the world and my connection to it.

I was five years old the first time someone called me "filthy" because of my dark skin. I went home and spent the rest of the day trying to scrub the brown off my body. I turned to books early on, finding an escape in the pages that I couldn’t get on the playground—never stopping to notice how no one in the stories ever looked like me.

What does the power of story mean to me? Entertainment. Expression. Escape. But, that’s only scratching the surface. The power of story is so much more. To borrow some gamer lingo, story can be “OP”—as in overpowered. And, that is a good thing. 

I was the child born into the loving arms of storytellers. Just weeks before I came into this world, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech as 250,000 believers listened to Martin’s hope for a better tomorrow. It was August 28, 1963.