I wrote This Is My America to tackle serious topics and give hope to the next generation. For my son and daughter, who will one day need to find meaning. In 2014, my then-six-year-old son burst into uncontrollable tears in public after seeing video footage of Eric Garner take his last breath, held down by police officers, with no one attempting to resuscitate him. “He couldn’t breathe,” my son cried. “He couldn’t breathe, and they didn’t stop.” He worried, what if someone called the police on me because he was crying? What if the police held me down, his asthmatic mother? Then I wouldn’t be able to breathe. In that moment, I knew my son’s days of innocence were over. Corinne Beaumont’s character represents my children’s fragile innocence on the line.

This Is My America seeks to expand the now very public conversation on police brutality that the Black Lives Matter movement made possible through activism. One in three Black boys born today will be incarcerated in their lifetime. After the 1960s War on Crime, the 1970s War on Drugs, and the Crime Bill of 1994, mass incarceration skyrocketed. The prison-industrial complex is a $182 billion industry that feeds off the lives of Black, brown, and poor people caught up in its vicious cycle.

While mass incarceration is a complex problem, I wanted to simply (ha ha) focus on how it’s almost impossible to prove someone is innocent without adequate representation. Bryan Stevenson’s incredible legacy, Just Mercy, was the first nonfiction work that made me realize I could explore topics I care most deeply about in my young adult stories. I based my character Steve Jones on Bryan Stevenson, and the fictional Innocence X on the incredible organizations Equal Justice Initiative and the Innocence Project.

Tracy Beaumont was written in honor of all the Black girls and womxn leading movements and the young womxn I advise and mentor, who are powerful beyond measure. I envision “Tracy’s Corner” as a way I would call other students to action if I were in high school today. I was a lot like Tracy, full of idealism and a desire to make the world a better place. I was president of my multicultural club and the local youth NAACP chapter in high school, and we held many meetings in the NAACP’s downtown office. In college, as a student organizer and co-president of the Black student union, I worked to bring my peers together to talk about important issues and try to effect change. Now I work on a college campus as an ally and advocate, and I bear witness to my students’ active engagement.