What made you decide to start an imprint at Plume?

I was inspired by the way Toni Morrison provided a platform for authors, editing books while writing her own. When shopping my first book, You Can’t Touch My Hair, in 2015, I got rejected from so many places. They said things like, “Books written by Black women don’t sell,” “This isn’t relatable,” “Black female comics aren’t interesting.” We got rejected from every place we pitched except Plume. At the beginning of 2020, with two books out, it felt like it was time to start an imprint. I revisited Plume, and they were like, yes, let’s do this.

What have you learned about publishing since then that has surprised you?

How quickly things move when there’s interest in a book—having to read hundreds of pages in a couple days to decide if you could do a book justice. And how we’re fighting for eyeballs and attention when you never know what’s going to break out. That can kind of be stressful, but it also makes things exciting.

How have you kept up your mission in an era of hostility toward diversity efforts?

We’ve doubled down and fought for our books to have space in the marketplace. It’s important, in moments in which the powers that be are trying to erase the contributions of people from marginalized communities, that we become historians ourselves—making sure that those contributions are not ignored or lost, putting a spotlight on people who have done the work so that we can live to have the rights that they’re trying to take away now.