This week on Black & Published, Nikesha speaks with, Arriel Vinson, author of the YA romance novel, Under the Neon Lights. It’s a story that sets the budding love between Jaelyn and Trey against a backdrop of their shifting community landscape and Jaelyn’s fight to maintain her safe place.

In our conversation, Arriel explains the reason she grounded this book in her own good memories as a way to explore the harm of encroaching whiteness. Plus, how she believes the oral storytelling tradition can save us in this time of book bans and attacks on libraries, archives, universities, and museums. And, the reason she says she wasn’t really a big fan of poetry even though she wrote her debut novel in verse. 

Mahogany Books

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