I’ve always been wary of being called a writer. When I was in high school, my English teacher told me that calling one’s self a writer was the height of conceit, that one was mayabang if one called themselves a writer. Someone else had to call you a writer. Else, you can just describe your activity as a verb: you write.

Of course, now I recognize this kind of thinking as problematic: doctors call themselves doctors because it’s their job description and they spend an inordinate amount of years learning how to be one; engineers call themselves engineers because they do the job and they spend a lot of years learning and practicing how to be one. But writing, like many of the fields in the humanities, doesn’t necessarily need a college degree, or even a writing workshop. But because writing is actually part of my job description, and because I spent a handful of years in school, and outside school, learning how to be a good writer, I’d like to think that I’ve earned the title.

And then my first book came out, and now I feel even more of a writer than ever before. But that’s because it’s the best way to describe what I do – I put pen to paper and then I try and imagine entire worlds, and hope that when someone else reads them, they can imagine them, too.

So, if you’re here because you’re a friend of mine (hi friend!) or a stranger who just so happens to have picked up a small yellow book with a sorta-kinda anatomical heart on the cover (hi stranger!) – thank you. If you’ve never read any of my work before, but you’re still here, then that’s great! There’s a ton of places where you can get my work, online and in print. If you’re one of my students… go and do your homework.