was a spoken word artist long before I imagined the first line for my young adult novel, THE SWEET REVENGE OF CELIA DOOR. “At fourteen I turned Dark. Now I’m Celia the Dark.”
For ten years before writing fiction, I wrote and performed poetry and was deeply involved in Poetry Slam, both as an organizer and poet. I competed on multiple slam teams, published two books of poetry, and toured both nationally and internationally. So, it makes sense that my first novel would feature an outsider, teen poet, who writes poems to deal with and understand her world. In the course of the story, Celia tells us, “I’ve been writing a lot of poetry since I turned Dark.”
I learned some lessons from writing and performing poetry that have helped me immensely in publishing fiction.
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