Black History Month is a time to remember and put black Americans in the spotlight for using their lives and legacies to benefit their community at the US.

To that end, I wish to introduce an author I have been fortunate to read a book from called Dear Martin. She uses her work as an author and public speaker to share stories of the black community with students and young adults. Her name is Nic Stone, and she is a young adult contemporary author changing the world one book at a time.

Nic Stone was born and raised in a suburb of Atlanta, GA. After graduating from Spellman College, she worked extensively in teen mentoring, having lived in Israel for a few years before returning to the US to write full-time. Growing up with a wide range of cultures, religions, and backgrounds, Stone strives to bring these diverse voices and stories to her work.

Stone has the ability to combine life experiences and observations about what happens in black communities to create poignant stories about young adults living with the hardships of being black in a predominantly white community. Her debut novel, Dear Martin, is about a young Justyce McAllister writing letters to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after being put in handcuffs. The turning point of the story and the moment Justyce realizes just how cruel the world could be to a kid like him is when his best friend (also black) gets shot and killed by police for having loud music playing in the car.

While Stone was put into a gifted program in her school in fifth-grade, she couldn’t really connect with any of the books she was required to read. While she could appreciate the beauty of the English language and the way authors laced words together, she struggled to engage in the actual stories because she could never seem to identify with the characters. It wasn’t until she moved to Israel at 23, that she began to get a real grasp on the role of story in the human experience.

She got to step into the shoes of so many different people and experiences, some good and some bad. As she listened and tried to empathize with the people of Israel, life became less about right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, and more about complexity and nuance. The stories she heard, like her own, were the ones she hadn’t encountered in her language arts classes. They changed the way she approached people with beliefs that differ from her own. They changed the way she voiced her opinions. They cleaned the lens through which she view the world.

She discovered that once she put on all those different pairs of shoes, she wanted to share those shoes and their impact with others. She wanted to tell the stories that weren’t being told, the ones featuring diverse characters in non-stereotypical roles, the ones that blurred the line between “right” and “wrong,” the ones that reveal the humanity in those who are underrepresented or misunderstood.

Nic Stone is now thirty-six and has written three novels about young black children and how they live their lives. You can find out more about her and her novels at http://www.nicstone.info