My interest in international cultures and stories sprouted early. I grew up in a blended, multiethnic, and multilingual family in Los Angeles. I was named after each of my grandmothers, Rebecca and Nicolasa, and the confluence of Nigerian, Mexican, and African American cultures formed the backdrop of my formative years. When I noticed my parents’ shifts in language, between speaking English to my siblings and I and Igbo and Spanish with relatives, countless questions would ignite inside of me. They compounded when I started elementary school and encountered other kids and adults who labeled me based on complexion, not knowing what to do with all of the parts of me that did not fit their preconceptions. Discovering the written lives of fictional characters and the endless variations in language and ways of being in translated, British, and American literature, films, and television, was a cathartic awakening. 

Whenever answers were not forthcoming from my parents or not as simple as my child self imagined, I delved deeper into books, movies, and television. I continually searched for something tangible to help me make sense of things and found connection in unexpected places. As a child and teenager, I obsessively read Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Sandra Cisneros, Zadie Smith, Milan Kundera, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, Christopher Pike, V.C. Andrews, and the Sweet Valley High series. I enveloped myself in classic films on TCM; foreign and indie films on IFC; Ugly Betty; Grey’s Anatomy; Doctor Who; Pushing Daisies; the films of Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha, Cédric Klapisch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Edgar Wright, Colin Firth, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Audrey Tatou, Reese Witherspoon, and Drew Barrymore. I ate up sooo many BBC America series and Masterpiece Theater adaptations.

Each book, film, and TV show offered something that I needed at various moments throughout elementary, middle, and high school. I found comfort, interesting conversations, hope, laughter, a balance of comedy and drama or dark and light, three-dimensional protagonists of color, depictions of different types of relationships, multiple languages, and inspiring female characters. Yet there was something else that I craved and didn’t find, something that I couldn’t quite name then.

I was looking for myself in these stories: for other dark-skinned, bespectacled, nerdy girls with mixed African and Latin American heritage who hesitated when checking just one box for ethnicity. Without fully realizing it at the time, I began writing poetry and fiction in part as a form of release, but also from a strong desire to hear the voices of multiethnic heroines who had families and experiences like mine and were perpetually the invisible “Other” —always just a little bit on the outside.

I decided that I would become a professional writer and studied Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. At SFSU, I joined a study abroad club, took a broad spectrum of courses in women and gender studies and world, British, contemporary Raza, African American, and African literature. In creative writing workshops, I learned how to open myself up to constructive criticism and be a better reader. I quickly discovered that one’s writing skills, reading skills, and capacity for vulnerability were all inextricably linked.

I took multiple playwriting courses, stretching my imagination and writing muscles. Having always expressed myself first in verse or prose, I was surprised at how much fun writing dramatic dialogue could be. Faced with the constraints of space, beats, and a tight structure, I was challenged to say as much as possible in fewer words—something I still struggle to do! Playwriting prepared me for an introduction to screenwriting. Trying my hand at screenwriting was both exciting and intimidating in equal measure. It pushed me and gave me a newfound appreciation for cinema, the medium that had been a second haven for me after books.

In undergrad, I reveled in and analyzed the texts of writers and artists such as Zora Neale Hurston, August Wilson, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Harold Pinter, John Okada, Kara Walker, Angela Carter, and Haruki Murakami. Then I found Jhumpa Lahiri and Helen Oyeyemi. Reading their words for the first time was…seismic, like being reunited with pieces of myself I had not known I’d lost.

There in the pages of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake was Gogol Ganguli, a son of Indian immigrants, who like me, had chafed under his name each time it was butchered or met with bafflement. He spends his adolescence and early adulthood grappling with questions of identity and a sense of disconnect from his parents. Through love and loss, he slowly comes to understand the significance of his name, see his parents in a different light, and define his relationship to his culture for himself. In Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, White Is for Witching, and The Opposite House, I found something beautifully strange and incredibly liberating: a key to fairytales and uncanny realms starring casts of characters from all over the African diaspora, penned by a young British-Nigerian woman who loved Emily Dickinson. Her writing was a refreshing embrace of Blackness, the dark and speculative, and the literary. It wasn’t just one thing but many, defying easy categorization. 

I went on to New York to study Publishing at Pace University. There I enjoyed learning about the many facets of the book world, from acquisitions through distribution, and fell in love with foreign and subsidiary rights. While in New York, I interned and worked in foreign rights at the literary agencies Writers House and InkWell Management. Working on the agency side, I got a small taste of the inexplicable, electric rush that comes from being behind the scenes helping to make a writer’s dreams become reality. I saw how dedicated agents were to partnering with their authors in bringing amazing stories to readers far and wide. And holding a published translation of an author’s book is nothing short of magical. After New York, I could not imagine not being a part of this process and the book world.

I found a home in words first as a young reader and then as an adult working in publishing, thousands of miles away from my city of birth. Now spending so much time quarantined with family, I find myself thinking of the word “home” quite a lot and all that it contains. I think too of the many journeys that have had to occur to get me to this moment in time. The paths I’ve taken and the separate journeys of my parents and grandparents, spanning not just different cities and states, but countries and continents. How their stories began in such disparate places and that but for one inciting incident personal to each of them, they would not have made a life in California or in the United States, and I would not be here endeavoring to tell my own story. 

I believe stories can give readers and audiences a chance to feel seen, safe, and understood and can encourage them to take leaps in their thoughts and actions. Stories can connect people across time, language, geography, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and ability. They bring us closer to ourselves by teaching us to empathize with others. 

I’ve reached for books, films, and television all my life, searching for ways to fashion my own meaning out of all of the languages and cultures that shape my heritage and to own every piece of my identity, including those that may not always be convenient for others. Through this gradual, ever-evolving process of engaging with art and history, I’ve hoped to have a deeper sense of my links to other people and my purpose in the world. Being able to find refuge in translated literature by incredible writers from South America, Asia, North America, and Europe; international films and television, told in their original languages, created by, and centering the people and cultures they depict; and English-language American, African, Caribbean, and British literature, film, and television produced by and featuring marginalized creators and people of color, was as elemental to my development as a writer, reader, and individual as having access to the content I’ve loved by members of traditionally represented groups.

I believe making space for stories that resonate and celebrate the dynamic multiplicity of life only enriches the lives of readers and the world at large. I envision a world that embraces narratives that spotlight marginalized characters who are vibrant, complex, flawed, and fundamentally human, written by people of color. I want to help bring stories like these to life in multiple translations, in film, and on television.