Cynsations is celebrating its 20th anniversary by switching to a quarterly publishing schedule, featuring in-depth interviews and articles. Thank you for your ongoing support and enthusiasm!
Today we’re visiting with author Zetta Elliott on a wide variety of topics: writing prequels, providing honest interpretations of historical events, and finding creative responses to book challenges. Her newest title is The Oracle’s Door, a prequel to the bestselling Dragons in a Bag series. From the publisher’s website:
Before Ma became the most powerful witch in Brooklyn…before Ma met a boy named Jaxon who helped her deliver three baby dragons to the realm of magic…long before Ma ended the war and vanquished the Scourge by choosing exile…she was just a curious, determined girl living on the South Side of Chicago. Lavinia Robinson, or “Vinny” as she’s called by her best friend L. Roy Jenkins, is always ready for adventure—even if it means breaking the rules.
So when a faraway voice dares her to open a rainbow-edged door in the sky, Vinny doesn’t hesitate and discovers a world filled with dragons and other amazing creatures! But when her own world threatens to burn during the Red Summer of 1919, can Vinny summon enough magic to save the ones she loves?
Told in alternating viewpoints—Ma as a centenarian and a nine-year-old novice witch—The Oracle’s Door reveals the parallels in Vinny’s and Jaxon’s lives while introducing young readers to tumultuous early twentieth-century Chicago.
Congratulations on the publication of The Oracle’s Door, a prequel to your enormously popular Dragons in a Bag series! What prompted you to write a prequel?
Thank you! I decided to write this prequel after a student asked me why Ma, the oldest and most powerful witch in Brooklyn, was “so mean.” I’d heard that critique before and dismissed it as a result of cultural differences. Nobody Black has ever called Ma “mean,” but she is brusque, and tired, and on the brink of retirement.
I started thinking about the many ways Black people–children and adults–are misread and decided it might help if I introduced fans of the series to early twentieth-century U.S. history.
Most kids in grades 3-5 probably know what racism is and they’ve likely learned about slavery and segregation. But race riots don’t make it into the elementary school curriculum (here in Chicago the 1919 riot isn’t taught until the tenth grade) and so I saw my novel as a remedy for that exclusion as well as a challenge for myself as a writer. My dissertation was on lynching and I wrote a picture book on the topic over twenty years ago.
The Oracle’s Door builds upon Billie’s Blues (Rosetta Press, 2016) and the two main characters share some character traits. Both are spunky Black girls who refuse to be sidelined and are willing to break the rules. In my stories, that’s fine because there are elders there to encourage and educate the girls. But in the U.S., daring to speak up or stand out as a Black person can have serious, even deadly consequences.
Black parents can’t afford to wait until the tenth grade to have “the talk” with their children. I hope this new novel can start a conversation about racial justice just as the other books in the series offer opportunities to discuss diversity, community, and belonging.
You included scenes set during the Red Summer of 1919 in The Oracle’s Door. What tips do you have for writers who want to provide young readers with honest portrayals of traumatic historical events?
I try to curate and calibrate. I’m selective about what I include in my story and I try not to get too graphic. I’m 52 and I tear up every time I read the last chapter of my novel!
It’s fine if kid readers get emotional, too, but I don’t want them to be afraid or ashamed. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 lasted over a week; I felt that was too much for my audience, which I imagine is likely seven to ten-year-olds. And ultimately, The Oracle’s Door is still a dragon tale!
I intentionally set it in 1919 and I always knew the book would conclude with the riot, but I condensed it to just one night.
I launched the book in San Diego and had a chance to present for a large group of fifth graders; I actually mentioned the Red Summer at the start of my talk and almost an hour later during Q&A, a student asked me to tell them more about it. So I recognize that kids are curious and I try to respect their curiosity by telling the truth. I don’t sanitize traumatic events, but I do carefully curate.
What was life like for African Americans before and after World War I? Can a lake have a color line? Why didn’t the police arrest the White man who caused Gene Williams’s death? Children from a very young age have a keen sense of what is and isn’t fair, so I try to appeal to their sense of justice.
In my author’s note, I also point to a great nonfiction resource: Claire Hartfield’s A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (Clarion, 2022). I acknowledge that my story is fictional and trust that there will be an adult available to help kids dive deeper into the history when they’re ready.
Most kids are drawn to my books because they love dragons and that’s what I deliver. But I find that fantasy as a genre can help kids time travel and access traumatic historical events. They don’t have to worry about Vinny facing a racist mob–she’s got a dragon there to protect her and in a way, I think magic shields the readers, too.
You write poetry, prose, and plays for all ages. When story inspiration hits, how do you decide what form it will take? Are there instances when that spark of inspiration has shown up in multiple works?
Definitely! Sometimes I feel like a broken record or that each book I write is a prototype for the next one.
After twenty years in New York, I left my beloved (but rapidly gentrifying) Brooklyn and moved to Philadelphia in 2018. I used to run in a cemetery that was in my new neighborhood and that’s how I found out about the Blockley Almshouse, which opened its doors to the poor in the early eighteenth century. Doctors paid for the privilege of treating (and experimenting on) the poor and I wrote a novel, Cin’s Mark (Rosetta Press, 2018), about the ghost of an African American woman who asks a teen to help her gather the organs that were harvested without her consent after her death.
That novel felt like an echo of an earlier book, Ship of Souls (Skyscape, 2012), that features ghosts of Revolutionary War soldiers and concludes at the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.
After Philly I moved to Lancaster in central Pennsylvania and developed a hybrid verse novel set in a halfway house for young Black women who were convicted of murdering their abusers. Ola can hear voices at night and soon discovers a neglected burial ground on the Amish farm where she and the other young women work; the poems are dramatic monologues written in the voices of actual Black women who lived in the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Last year I self-published two books about enslaved children who were trafficked from the Caribbean into Scotland, Blue Boy (Rosetta Press, 2023) and The Ship in the Garden (Rosetta Press, 2023), and now I’m doing the same for Ireland. I call this my “sankofa series,” because I’m guided by the West African principle “return to your source.” My ancestors come from islands that are bound together by Atlantic slavery and my goal is to produce picture books for younger children and more complex novels for teens.
Everywhere I go, I discover disturbing histories and try to develop fictional narratives that use ghosts, or time travel, or a magical object/creature to bring the past into the present. The British fantasy fiction I read as a child left a lasting impression on me but I try to decolonize my imagination by unearthing buried narratives that center Black people’s humanity, agency and resistance.
Your 2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture hinted at your love of research and your dedication to tracking down historical facts. Yet you use only a small percentage of that research. Could you expand on your process and offer insight for writers who would like to approach history with a wider lens than traditional white European interpretations?
I think the goal of every novelist is to tell a good story so that’s definitely my priority. That’s also why I use just 10-15 percent of my research–use more and you risk burdening the narrative and boring or overwhelming the reader with interesting but irrelevant facts.
I rely heavily on historians who are digging through the archives, searching for documents that challenge traditional interpretations of the past. James Watt is a famous Scottish inventor but Dr. Stephen Mullen found evidence that Watt also worked as a shipping agent who “procured” an enslaved child for a client in the Highlands. I had heard a misleading account about the boy while on a walking tour in Glasgow and wrote a fictional story that speculated on Frederick’s fate.
When I saw a spooky painting, The Brownie of Blednoch by Edward Atkinson Hornel, in the Kelvingrove Museum, I decided to incorporate the creature into my story and the brownie ultimately helps Frederick escape a life of enslavement in Scotland. In my author’s note, I try to describe the challenge of finding “the truth” when people willfully erase or distort the few facts we have about the enslaved.
I find the genre of historical fantasy empowering because I can start with limited parameters and then fill in the blanks using my imagination. I think it’s mostly a commitment to look beyond the “official” record. So many people have been excluded from history books and literature.
We find what we’re looking for so you just have to train yourself to always ask, “Who’s missing? Whose perspective is being privileged here?” Of course, the desire to fill these gaps is complicated by barriers of bias in the publishing industry as well.
Also in the Sutherland Lecture, you described nearly achieving “sovereignty and security” in your career, enabling you to write what you want, when you want, how you want, without worrying about sales – which sounds delightful! If finances allowed, would you publish all future works yourself, or would you continue to pursue traditional publishing for some works?
Ideally I would do both.
I think I bring a wealth of experience to any project; I have about a dozen traditionally published books and three times as many that I had to publish myself.
The Dragons in a Bag series (Random House, 2018 – 2024) has sold over half a million copies, funding my writing life for the past few years, but domestic sales are slowing down and the publisher hasn’t sold any foreign rights. Those will revert to me in 2025 but I don’t have an agent…operating outside of the system isn’t impossible but the gatekeepers do make it difficult.
Self-published books still don’t get reviewed by the major outlets, and most libraries won’t acquire books that haven’t been reviewed. Indie bookstores, in my experience, don’t generally support indie authors.
It feels like the children’s publishing industry is turning into a “pay-to-play” arena where even traditionally published authors are expected to hire their own publicist, print their own marketing material, and fund travel to conferences and festivals. I’ve got thirty unpublished picture book stories and can’t afford to publish all of them myself. Last year I self-published four books; this year I’ll do two.
My indie titles won’t ever go out of print and hopefully someday an earnest graduate student will write their dissertation on my body of work! Until then I’ll just keep writing the stories that matter to me and do all I can to get them into kids’ hands.
When your award-winning picture book, A Place Inside of Me, illustrated by Noa Denmon (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2020) was challenged, you had a creative response. Can you share with us the action you took?
Sure! One White woman at a school board meeting in Sumter County, Tenn. complained that my book made her son think that Black people were inferior. She asked, “Whatever happened to books about chickens?” so I wrote and published a picture book called Chicken Wonders…Why?
It was clear that she was pining for a “simpler time” when children read innocent, apolitical, race-neutral books about cute farm animals so I wrote a subversive, political, not neutral story about the importance of everyone on the farm getting an equal opportunity to tell their story, their way.
Purple Wong illustrated the book and I donated copies to groups in the county that formed to fight book bans. The local news station interviewed me and A Place Inside of Me was ultimately left on the shelves. Self-publishing allows authors to produce books more quickly than the traditional publishing industry. I probably won’t earn enough in sales to cover the cost of production but it was a very satisfying creative experience!
You have a tremendous body of work! Do you have a set writing schedule? When and where do you write? Why does that space work for you?
I have a writing agenda but I rarely manage to complete all the projects I list at the start of each year–partly because I keep coming up with new ideas!
I usually begin the day and end it in my office, but I also write in front of the TV in the living room sometimes. My apartment is on the top floor so I get a lot of light but in the office, the two windows are covered by rice paper blinds so I don’t get distracted by gazing outside. My treadmill is just a few steps away and that makes it easy to get up and take a break.
When I’m trying to finish a novel, I aim for a thousand words a day but I might write them all at 11 p.m.! I always tell kids that for me, writing is 70% dreaming so by the time I sit down at my computer, I’ve usually got an outline and a clear sense of my characters’ voices. When I’m dreaming, I might be on the couch napping or watching TV, I might be reading in an airport or going to a matinee.
Art feeds my dreams so I’m always looking for murals and museums. I look for herons in the park. I guess you could schedule all of that but over time it just becomes sort of routine.
That’s been my writing life for the past decade. Of course, you also have to hustle to make a living as a writer and I suspect that next year I’ll need to look for at least a part-time job. But leaving New York City made it possible to save money and buy an apartment here in Chicago, and I’m grateful that I’ve had at least a few years as a secure, sovereign, not-starving artist!
What can your fans look forward to next?
I am preparing a new picture book for publication–The Witch of the Woods! I wanted it to come out before Halloween since it has a spooky feel but it’s really about environmental justice. Noa Denmon won the Caldecott Honor Award for A Place Inside of Me and I’m thrilled that she’s illustrating A Song for Juneteenth, which will come out in 2026 from Little Brown Young Readers.
And I might write one last dragon book to reunite Jax and Ma. I’ve started the outline and settled on a title: The Map of Doors…
Cynsational Notes
Zetta Elliott is a Black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children. She was born and raised in Canada, but has lived in the US almost 30 years. She earned a PhD in American Studies from NYU and has taught at several universities.
Her poetry has been published in New Daughters of Africa, We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices. Her essays have appeared in School Library Journal, Horn Book, and Publishers Weekly. Her short story, “The Ghost in Her Bones,” was published in a 2020 special issue of Obsidian.
Her picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest and the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Her young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, has been called “a revelation…vivid, violent and impressive history.” Ship of Souls was published in February 2012; it was named a Booklist Top Ten Sci-fi/Fantasy Title for Youth and was a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Her YA novel, The Door at the Crossroads, was a finalist in the Speculative Fiction category of the 2017 Cybils Awards, and her picture book, Melena’s Jubilee, won a 2017 Skipping Stones Honor Award. Zetta received the Children’s Literature Association’s Article Award for her essay, “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks.”
Zetta advocates for greater diversity and equity in publishing, and has self-published numerous illustrated books for younger readers under her own imprint, Rosetta Press; three were named Best of the Year by the Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature, and Benny Doesn’t Like to Be Hugged was a first-grade fiction selection for the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Dragons in a Bag, a middle grade fantasy novel, was published by Random House in 2018; the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) named it a Notable Children’s Book and it was selected for the 2021 Global Read Aloud.
Say Her Name, a young adult poetry collection, was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in January 2020; it was named a 2020 Book of the Year for Young People by Quill & Quire and a 2020 “Best of the Best” YA Title by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association; it was also a nominee for the YALSA 2021 Excellence in Nonfiction Award and a Top Ten title for Rise: A Feminist Book Project. Say Her Name won the 2021 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. A stage adaptation of Say Her Name is underway.
A Place Inside of Me: a Poem to Heal the Heart from FSG was named an ALA Notable Book and a Notable Poetry Book by the National Council of Teachers of English; it won a 2021 Skipping Stones Honor Award and Noa Denmon won the Caldecott Honor Award for her stunning illustrations.
Moonwalking (FSG 2022), a middle grade verse novel co-authored with Lyn Miller -Lachmann earned four starred reviews and was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection; it made the NYPL and Bank Street College of Education’s Best Books of 2022 lists, was one of Kirkus Reviews’ 100 Best Middle Grade Books, and made the 2023 Notable Books for a Global Society list. The National Education Association has selected Moonwalking for its 2024 Read Across America program.
Zetta was a 2023 nominee for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and delivered the 2023 Zena Sutherland Lecture. She currently lives in Chicago.
Gayleen Rabakukk holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma. She has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and two regional interest books for adults. She is represented by Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management.
She serves as board member for Lago Vista’s Friends of the Library and also leads a book club for young readers at the library. She’s active in Austin SCBWI and has taught creative writing workshops for the Austin Public Library Foundation. She loves inspiring curiosity in young readers through stories of hope and adventure. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.