By Suma Subramaniam

Your newest picture book, Why Is My Skin Brown? (Red Panda Books, 2026), is a chapter book about colorism, belonging, and a girl who learns to love the skin she is in. What was your inspiration for this story?

I wrote Why Is My Hair Curly? (Westland Books) in 2020. It was a commissioned book, so I had time to think through what I wanted to say. Adoption was front and center of my life then, so that book used adoption as an underlying theme.

But once I was done with that book, and I had mentally prepared myself to write for children, when I was thinking about the next book, I naturally fell back to my childhood. One of the things that I always struggled with is my weight, and the other is my skin color, especially as a child growing up in a joint family where my cousin was significantly lighter than I was, and there was this constant comparison. It was overt in some cases, but it simmered in the back of every interaction I had. So it became a recurring theme in my life that I was hyperaware of how I looked.

That ended up with me having severe body image issues, which I didn’t know then. Now, as a fifty-year-old, I can look back on my life and say, hey, this was the problem, or this is why I did what I did in my twenties. When you have body image issues, you end up becoming a people pleaser. You do things just for acceptance. You want to belong, therefore you reduce yourself.

All of that was at the back of my mind, and when this question about the second book came about, I knew I wanted it to be about one of the two things that impacted my body image. One was the skin color and the other was my weight. I wasn’t ready to delve into the weight part because that had a far greater bearing on my image issues, and I needed more space and time to think through what I wanted to say when that eventual book happened. So skin color it was.

Then I thought, okay, if I want to write about skin color, what else do I want to think about? I live in America, I raise three kids, and race is something that we grapple with every day. Two of my children are light-skinned, one is darker-skinned. And I wrote an essay about it too. When my child was born, one of the first things that came up was, “Oh, she’s dark.” It wasn’t malicious, it just was. And I felt like nothing had changed in the forty-odd years since I was a baby. So that again became a thread I wanted to weave in.

Then, racism. We have multiple terms for racism in this country. If you can label it, you can talk about it. In India, though, colorism is the closest I could get to, but it is far more than just topical color. It informs every aspect of the Indian way of life, at least as I remember it. Again, granted, I understand I’ve moved away from the country. The country has moved on.

Maybe I’m stuck in a bubble, but even now, when I go back to India with my three kids, it is obvious. People look you up and down, they rate you, they grade you on color. So it’s very much an issue in my opinion. I’m happy to be challenged on that notion.

All of those went into how this book came to be. Once I had those threads, I had the colorism thread, I had the racism thread, I had the India, the Indian-American child. I wanted this to be an amalgamation of my lived experience, plus it was a book that I wanted my child to pick up and read and say, “I see myself in Sarayu.”

Publishing in India has grown by leaps and bounds. We have tons of amazing books written by Indian authors for kids growing up in India. The diaspora is largely still neglected, I feel. It’s not that we don’t have Indian-American authors or authors catering to the diaspora, but I haven’t seen this niche being explored, so that was another reason I wanted to write this book.

You’ve written powerful essays about transracial adoption. How did your path lead you into children’s literature, and what drew you to create stories for young readers?

That’s a good question. My comfort space is writing about my lived experience. To give a little bit of background, I’ve always been a writer, meaning I used to write in journals. When emails became a thing in the late nineties in India, I used to write long, rambling emails to friends. It would just be a snapshot of my day: what I did, what was important to me that day. But I would fill it with details about my drive to work. I would write about the little annoyances, the momentary guilty pleasures of eating something that I know I should be staying away from. And I realized all of these little details were what made my emails relatable to the people who read them.

When I moved to the U.S. in 2001, I discovered Sulekha. It was a place where you could post your personal thoughts and people would comment, so some of it was validating, some of it challenged my views. But I discovered a love for the written word, and I also enjoyed the community that I was building. It became my go-to space to process for whatever I was going through.

Initially it was about being an immigrant woman, then it was about my job. I was looking for jobs, and right after 2001, it was very difficult to get back into IT, so I wrote my way through it. Then my husband and I grappled with infertility, so my blog became a place where I found community. Then as I navigated the process of losing my dad and turning to adoption to build my family, through all those years, I wrote my way through every single one of them. So the idea of a memoir was, I guess, in some corner of my mind, a living, breathing thing. I never acted on it, though.

Then in 2014, after my child was born and I made the decision to stay home to raise my kids, I signed up for creative writing lessons at Simon Fraser University. The whole idea of writer groups and being able to share your work and get feedback, that honed my writing process. I also got into Indian soaps. I was watching this show called “Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon?”, and I ended up writing fan fiction. So my writing evolved with time. It started with nonfiction, then veered into fiction.

Then Why Is My Hair Curly? was a commissioned work, meaning somebody who read all the work that I’d been putting out into the world said, “Hey, I’m starting a children’s imprint. Would you like to write a book for me?” That’s how my foray into kidlit began.

The essays helped me figure out how to say what I wanted to say in a way that made it relatable for people who were reading, and I think the same philosophy extends to my children’s books. As a child, I was a voracious reader, and I always enjoyed reading books where the protagonist was a good few years older than I was. It made me feel like I knew more than I should. There was something about reaching for something that’s a little above your age grade. And I bring that into my books too.

Why Is My Skin Brown is labeled for kids eight to ten, but it features a child who is a tween, and the topics that I handle in there include online grooming. It happened in our house. One of my children was solicited on a message board of a chess app, of all things. And while some people might think it’s too much for a children’s book, these are real for some kids. So I want my books to take on uncomfortable topics.

And I also want it to be grounded in what the average, or when I say average, I can’t speak for everyone, I understand that. I can speak to my experience and the sliver of this planet that I occupy. Having said that, I also think that if you go hyperlocal, you go global. The more grounded you keep your experiences to a particular segment, the more widely accepted it will be, because then everybody’s relating to their corner of the world. I know I’m rambling, but that’s how I started writing for children.

You and your family were subjects of the feature documentary Love Chaos Kin by Chithra Jeyaram. The documentary gives the world a window into your family’s adoption journey and traces what it means to build a family the world cannot easily read as well as the search for belonging.  How does that lived experience inform and influence you about the stories you choose to tell children?

Like I said, I’ve always worked through things in words, and Love Chaos Kin was born from that habit of putting my emotions, my vulnerability, online.

An essay that I wrote for Adoptive Families was picked up by Huffington Post, and it went viral. Then Chithra, who at that time was navigating her own path to parenthood, reached out to me. As we got talking, she said that she was a filmmaker and there was a story in here that needed to be heard by a lot more people.

And as someone who struggled to find relatable stories about infertility or about Indians adopting in the U.S., there were none, or next to none, online. I felt like, yes, this is a need, this is a space where my story can help people like me who are navigating these situations in isolation.

The filming started in 2017. It was supposed to be a short film. It then grew into an eight-year period of intense filming followed by lulls, and then the film hit the screen in May 2025 as part of CAAMFest. And over the past year, I’ve watched the film screen across the world and touch people in ways that I had not foreseen.

After most screenings where I’m present and people come up to me for the Q&A, sometimes it’s the adopted people, but mostly it is family members of people who have adopted, or the community or the village around people impacted by adoption. And they come up to me and say, “I had never thought of adoption this way,” or “I never thought it could be this complex or this deep.”

I think what touches people is that there is no good or bad. It is a complex process, and it’s not easy on any of the people impacted by it: the person giving up their children, the person who is adopted. They have no agency, they don’t have a say in what their parent decides for them or the people who end up being their parents decide for them. It is not easy on the adoptive parents, especially if they have not done their due diligence in processing their grief or being ready for the adoptive parenting experience.

There’s a lot of nuance, and what it reinforced for me was that while this is a hard decision, and a decision that I will be questioned upon, and a decision that I might at some point wonder if it was the right one, I feel I made it the right way at the time, and I still stand by it.

It also drives home the importance of these complex stories, and in mediums that are not just words. Not everybody’s a writer, not everybody is able to read. Stories are compelling, and real-life stories especially have that capacity to create lasting change. They help people feel seen. And I guess all of that is what I put into my books.

Why Is My Skin Brown? has lovely, food‑filled scenes that feel inviting. From a craft standpoint, what made food such an effective way for you to explore identity and connection for young readers?

Okay, I have to take a step back to delve into it because I’ve never thought of the food in my books as an intentional plot device.

But food is an integral part of how I process emotions, just like writing. When my dad died, I processed grief through food. During COVID, I processed anxiety through baking. And I enjoy the tactile feel of food in my hands as I make it. I am not a recipe follower. I cook by instinct, and I rarely ever taste food as I’m making it. All of these come into play when I’m creating my books. And after reading this question, I realized every book I’ve written features food prominently, so it must be a subconscious choice I’m making.

For this book, though, because I was writing about an Indian American kid, I was thinking of my children. One of the ways that we talk about culture in our home is food. I’m not religious, so I don’t talk much about religion as a practice. But in Hinduism, food is intricately tied to rituals. We celebrate festivals as much for the food as for anything else; at least in my case, I do.

For me, Navaratri is my go-to festival. And food is at the center of it, and my children relate to “Indian culture,” I say within quotes, as it applies to food. The only things they know about being Indian are what they eat at home, what I pack in their lunchboxes, and that becomes their barometer of where they fall on that Indian American spectrum.

In this case, Sarayu moves from Malvern to Bangalore, just for a short while. But she finds it an opportunity to brush up on her cooking skills because Anita akka clearly is a good cook and is a good teacher as well. Coming to think of it, it makes sense, right? Food is a part of our lives. Food holds memories. Food is culture.

How long did it take for you to make this book, and how did you find joy in the process?

Getting from premise to an outline, I’d say, took about a week. Once I had the chapters outlined and a rough idea of, okay, Sarayu is going from here to India around Thanksgiving and she’s back by spring, once I had the logistics of the trip planned out, I had time to focus on what would go into each of the chapters.

Once I had the outline nailed, I think it took me about a month to get all the words down, what I call my vomit draft. Then I let the book sit. I think it sat for almost a year or a year and a half before I picked it up and finished it.

The joy is in reliving or trying to recreate the kind of book that I want my child to read. Each time I’m thinking about, okay, Sarayu is flying, what would Sahana see when she’s sitting in Sarayu’s seat? Or, okay, we are in Bangalore, and we are in this apartment complex, what would Sahana see? How would she react to something? Or how would she respond to a particular circumstance?

I tried to situate the events in the book and the experiences in the book from the eyes of my twelve-year-old. And I find great joy in it because, for a moment, it also takes me back to being the twelve-year-old Lakshmi and seeing how the world that twelve-year-old Lakshmi navigated is so different from the one that twelve-year-old Sahana is navigating. I’m a writer, right? Reflection itself is the fun part for me.

This book is published by Red Panda Books in India while you’re living here in the U.S. On the logistical side, how do you manage the distance from connecting with readers to staying involved in launch activities, and supporting a book that has physically come to life halfway across the world?

That’s a very good question, and something that I’m struggling with currently. When Why Is My Hair Curly? came out, again, it’s by the same publisher, but at that point it was part of Amazon India. The marketing felt completely different. There were tons of school visits, like virtual school visits, there was a lot of press, and I felt like everybody was talking about the book. But the book came out during COVID, so all that marketing had no place to land. Literally, people couldn’t come out to buy the book.

But I had a lot of fun interacting with young readers over Zoom, and there were a lot of kids who wrote to me saying they enjoyed the book. For me, it was very validating as an author. The second time around, like six years later, around the same time as Why Is My Hair Curly? came out, Why Is My Skin Brown? also released in summer. And this time around, I was hoping for a similar kind of marketing and outreach, but I’d say it didn’t work out that way. The publisher has changed hands, and I guess that’s also impacted how their PR works.

The paperback is not yet available in the North American markets like Canada and the U.S. However, it’s available in the rest of the world. So that puts a lid on how much I can do within the U.S., because I can’t reach out to schools or libraries and ask them to stock my book if it’s not available through global distribution channels.

Having said that, the publisher’s been great about having me be part of literary festivals in India. So I’m headed to India this November and December. I’ll be at the Orange City Literature Festival in Nagpur, where I’m doing a thirty-minute session. Then I’ll be at the Bangalore Literature Festival in December, doing a similar session for kids. I was at the Bangalore Lit Fest a few years ago for Why Is My Hair Curly?, and I enjoyed that experience. So I’m really looking forward to the India trip.

And while in India, typically I also do school visits. Those are some of my most favorite memories of book promotion, because I find children are extremely articulate, they are engaging, they ask the most beautiful questions, and it literally makes me feel young at heart to be interacting with the young readers.

But my ultimate hope is that the book will be received the same way in the U.S., and that whenever I reach out to schools and libraries, they will welcome it. So I’m hoping my publisher will make it available for the North American audience soon. And when that happens, I’m going to literally manifest a U.S. school visit itinerary, I guess.

To coordinate marketing in India, we have a WhatsApp group with my publisher and my PR person, and it’s pretty informal, actually. I reach out to them when I have questions, and they message me when they have anything to share. We rarely get on the phone. And I think with every passing book, it feels like communication is just on an as-needed basis.

What were some craft decisions you made in the story to help young readers understand identity in a way that feels both honest and accessible?

I’d say the primary decision was to include what I call contemporary music. K-pop is something that I’ve gotten into in the past four years, and I notice my children are as much into it as I am. I felt like that would be the great unifier.

This book features Taylor Swift as an artist that the protagonist likes and listens to, but her friends in the U.S. listen to Stray Kids, and her cousin and her cousin’s friends in India listen to BTS. So music is what connects Sarayu’s American life and her Indian experience.

BTS also then forms part of a mystery thread, so to speak, in the book, which I had fun writing. Food is obviously the other craft decision.

What do you want readers to take away from Why Is My Skin Brown?

I would like for my readers to know that they don’t need to look into a mirror to know that they’re beautiful. They are enough just the way they are. Whether it is skin color, body shape, neurodiversity, there are a lot of things that set people apart from others, and what we consider the norm is really not a norm.

For every bucket we find ourselves in, there are plenty of other people navigating those same challenges, going through life, encountering the same kinds of situations. It’s up to us to find our community and our tribe, and we will thrive. We have to believe it, and it will happen.

What do you love most about the creative life/being an author? Why?

For me, it is about being myself. The other parts of my life, when I’m not writing, I am in a way role-playing certain identities. I’m a partner, I’m a mother, I’m a daughter. At work, I’m an analyst. Every public-facing role is defined by others, but the author hat is one I define for myself. And over the years, I’ve found that’s why I love it.

I don’t sit down with an intention saying, hey, I have a timer set for twenty minutes, and I write. That’s a legitimate way to practice writing, but for me, writing comes from a place of spontaneity. I’m usually in the shower, I have an idea, I either come down and type it out or I use my phone to dictate my notes. Then these ideas coalesce into something more coherent, something more tangible, and then find expression in an essay or as a seed for a book, things like that.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I literally woke up at four a.m. thinking about a story I had written a long time ago. And I felt like that story, its core elements, could be transmuted into a place that feels more familiar. And I could incorporate a lot of other elements that I couldn’t the first time around. And, Pearls on Marble was the result. From idea to execution, it probably took me less than a month, because the story was already there fully formed in my head.

So, yeah, the creative process is a thing of joy. And putting constraints on it, like thinking that I must have X number of books by this year, or I must make this much money, or I must be agented, I feel robs the joy out of the process. Which is why I’m actively avoiding anything that would make it feel like a chore. I write when I feel like it, and I don’t write when I don’t feel like it, and that’s it.

What are you working on next?

I have two children’s books that I’m hoping will find a contract soon. One is called Why Is My Body Changing? And the other is called Why Is My Brain Fuzzy? Or at least these are working titles.

Why Is My Body Changing? has to do with body image, but it is also something that is deeply rooted in my experience as a child, and it was probably the most vulnerable piece of writing I’ve ever done.

Then Why Is My Brain Fuzzy? is about neurodiversity, and it’s something that I deal with on a daily basis, and I feel like we don’t talk about it enough in the South Asian community. I want this book to help young readers feel that it’s okay to be whoever they are. I guess, in a way, all of my children’s books are centered around identity and being comfortable in your own skin, whatever it takes.

And then for the adults, I am working on a book about this middle-aged woman who goes on a train trip around America and in the process finds herself and, in a way, finds freedom. It’s a book that is still a premise, and I really want to go on the train trip before I write the book. So I don’t know when that book will be done.

Then there’s a graphic memoir. I’m still playing around with the outline, trying to find out what this book is about or what I want to tell in this story. Yeah, I have a lot of fun projects that I’m concurrently working on. I don’t know which one of these will see the light of day first, but as I said before, this is a project of joy, and there’s no deadline on it.

Cynsational Notes

Lakshmi G. Iyer is a Tamil American children’s book author, novelist, and essayist writing about open transracial adoption from the Indian American adoptive-parent side, motherhood, identity, and belonging. Her books include the middle-grade Why Is My Hair Curly? (Westland/Red Panda, 2020) and its companion Why Is My Skin Brown? (Red Panda/Westland, 2026), the essay collection The Smudged Hyphen (2026), and the novels Hindsight (2024), A Star Keeps Its Distance (2026) and Pearls on Marble (2026).

Her essays and reporting have appeared in The Hindu, Huffington Post, Motherwell Magazine, Adoptive Families, The Week India, Verve India, and Mutha Magazine, among others. She has spoken on transracial adoption and South Asian American life on NPR’s The Takeaway, BBC Asia Big Debate, and BBC Radio UK, and at CAAMFest, the Prabha Khaitan Foundation, and Oxford Book Stores. She lives in Exton, Pennsylvania, with her husband and three children. Find her at lgiyer.com and on Substack at lgiyer.substack.com.

Suma Subramaniam is a recruiter by day and children’s book author by night. She writes picture books, middle grade, chapter books, and poetry. Her works include Crystal Kite Award winner: Namaste Is A Greeting, New York Public Library Vibrant Voices Selection: She Sang For India, ILA Notable: My Name Is Long As A River, and the V. Malar series. When she’s not recruiting or writing, Suma volunteers with SCBWI and We Need Diverse Books or blogs about children’s literature. Learn more at https://sumasubramaniam.com.