Today we’d like to introduce you to Yasmin Angoe.
Hi Yasmin, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My basic story is that I have been writing since I was in elementary school. I was an only child of my mom who was working 2-3 jobs, so reading and writing were my babysitters, entertainment, siblings, and best friend. After graduating high school and eventually college, I couldn’t see a path to becoming an author. It took me over 20 years to become a published author, but the time between when I graduated high school and now was all a time of experiences that helped me to evolve as a writer.
I started off writing women’s fiction, but publishers weren’t interested in that manuscript then, so I put my writing away to focus on my family and finishing school. I became a middle and high school English teacher. And eventually moved to Columbia, SC in 2009 where I worked as an educator for nearly 10 years while raising my two kids.
I picked writing back up officially in 2011 when the idea of my main character, Nena Knight, started to formulate but I didn’t begin writing it in earnest until 2018, finishing in 2019 with the intention of querying agents in 2020 and hopefully getting an agent and then book deal. In January, I began reaching out to agents in hopes that one of them would offer me representation.
But again I was met with countless rejections. I began to doubt my writing ability. Even though they all said I was a great writer, that the voice of the character was great, etc., they wouldn’t represent my book. They told me they couldn’t connect with the character and I couldn’t figure out what that meant or how to fix it. I thought maybe everyone knew something I couldn’t recognize in myself, that I couldn’t write. I decided I was going to quit writing, to continue as an English teacher, be a mom, and give up on my lifelong dream of writing.
However one of my close writing friends, Kellye Garrett, suggested I submit for the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Emerging Writers of Color by Sisters in Crime, a national writing organization. Even though I didn’t believe I’d stand a chance, even though I was set to quit writing altogether, I told myself I’d do “just one more thing,” and I submitted and forgot about it because I wasn’t going to win…and I was going to quit writing. This was in April.
In early June, I got an email from an agent who wanted to talk to me about “Her Name Is Knight”. I couldn’t believe it because of all the rejections I’d had. Melissa Edwards of Stonesong Literary made an offer of representation and I was on cloud nine. So then I was like, “Well, maybe I won’t quit after all.”
A week or so later, I was cleaning my mailbox and see an email saying something about being a winner and about “sisters”. At first, I thought it was junk and nearly put it in spam. But something told me to open it, something rang familiar. Turned out it was an email informing me that I’d won the Eleanor Taylor Bland award. I couldn’t believe it! My agent submitted the manuscript for Her Name Is Knight to publishers right after it was announced that I was the 2020 recipient and a week after that announcement, we were talking to publishers who wanted to buy the book.
I got a two-book deal from Thomas & Mercer in August. Another couple of weeks after that, we were talking to several Hollywood production companies who wanted to adapt the book into a TV series and now my book series is being developed for TV adaptation by Endeavor Content and Ink Factory. It all happened lightning-fast.
Mine isn’t a conventional story. People may think this is typical and that becoming a published author happens quickly.
But mine was decades in the making. It was a dream deferred and deferred again. And when it finally happened, when I got an agent, won the award, the book deal, and then the TV option it all happened so fast and back to back that I still have whiplash.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It hasn’t been a smooth road at all. The onslaught of rejections from agents who couldn’t connect with my character’s voice or maybe didn’t get my story brought about nearly debilitating self-doubt. The life delays, changes in family dynamics, death of my dad for whom HNIK was written, juggling working full-time as a teacher, being a single mom and being present for my kids, and then trying to find time to write at night made the road tumultuous. Trying to find a community of writers who could encourage me and I could do the same for them was also a big factor in where I am now. You need a community, and I spent years looking for one…the writing community and also a community in this new town in which I knew no one…all of those factors were struggles I had to work through.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a writer. I write action/espionage thrillers, the Nena Knight series, which is published by Thomas & Mercer. The first book is Her Name Is Knight and came out in 2021. The second book is They Come At Knight which came out this year, 2022. The third book It Ends With Knight is set to release Sept. of 2023 and I have a standalone book coming out the following year.
I am most proud of writing books in which characters who look like me are doing things we aren’t typically known to do. I wrote Her Name Is Knight because, at the time, I first thought of the character, I wasn’t seeing many characters in books who were women that were Black and from foreign countries doing things typically expected of men. I wanted to highlight my Ghanaian culture as I am a first-generation Ghanaian American and I wanted to write about the power of a woman, of a Black woman, saving herself. I wanted to write about a culture of people many readers don’t know much about and I wanted to do away with some of the negative stereotypes placed on women, on immigrants, on African people.
I’m proud I was able to write the types of books I wanted to read, in a genre I devour as a reader and audience member which discussed the topics that mattered to me and many of the readers who connected with the books. I think that’s what also sets me apart from my counterparts.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
In the next 5-10 years, I hope to see more shifts toward making the norm, books that are written by diverse authors about diverse characters and stories that all of the readers can relate to. There are a lot more books that bridge those gaps out there now, but they’re not the norm. Right now, they are the exception. But I hope that eventually, books aren’t considered prolific because the book happens to hit on the “trending” topic or trauma of the moment, but because the story is phenomenal and the author’s writing is exceptional.
When readers pick up a book, I hope the shift is that they can connect to whatever character speaks to them, regardless of the character’s race, sexual identity, culture, ability, etc.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.yasminangoe.com
- Instagram: author_yas
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100072770917745
- Twitter: @yasawriter
