Marley Dias made headlines as a sixth grader when she started the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign to collect children's books featuring Black protagonists. Her initiative led to national media attention and served as a springboard to Marley's global literacy advocacy work and social activism. Dias's debut picture book, I Am the Dream Come True (Orchard Books), written with her parents, Janice Johnson Dias and Scott Dias, and illustrated by Islenia Mil, is available now.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
I Am the Dream Come True is a story about the hope each of us holds for our children. It reminds us that we are all products of love and longing.
On your nightstand now:
Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I picked it up because I've always been interested in stories about family, grief, and the quiet emotional worlds people carry.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan. This book stayed with me. I also have a deep love for Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson.
Favorite book to read to a child:
I Am Enough by Grace Byers. It does something quietly powerful, telling a child exactly what they need to hear in exactly the right way.
Your top five authors:
Octavia E. Butler: I love Octavia E. Butler because she offers a chance to see into the future, and that future is rich and includes people like me. Her writing feels like fortune telling and present-day description all at once.
Jacqueline Woodson: I love Jacqueline Woodson's work because it is always filled with hope. It anchors dreams and simultaneously gives wings to possibility.
Zelda Fitzgerald: I love Zelda Fitzgerald because her voice feels like a woman insisting on being seen in a world that tried to write her out. Her work blurs the line between art and survival.
Min Jin Lee: I love Min Jin Lee because she writes about the power of identity, migration, and belonging. Her stories hold generations at once, reminding us that history lives inside of us.
John Green: I love John Green's work because who doesn't love angst and the unraveling of complex emotions? He makes vulnerability feel universal and necessary.
Each of these writers has shaped how I think about story, identity, and what literature can do. Butler and Woodson, in particular, are writers I return to when I need to remember why any of *this* matters.
Book you've faked reading:
Pretty much any romance novel. I've read Romeo and Juliet, and I feel like that counts, but the contemporary love story genre and I have a complicated relationship that mostly involves nodding along.
Book you're an evangelist for:
William Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. King Lear deserves a place too, but those first three are the ones I'll argue for anywhere. I had access to them in high school, and I genuinely believe I'm a fundamentally different person because of it. They taught me about grief, desire, consequence, and magic before I had words for any of those things. More young people deserve that experience.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Severance by Ling Ma. The cover makes you feel something before you've read a single word, which is exactly what a great cover should do. The book delivers, too.
Best book an adult handed to you when you were a child:
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Receiving that book from an adult felt like being seen. It's also part of why Jacqueline Woodson holds such a permanent place in my reading life and on my top five authors list.
Book that changed your life:
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson.
Favorite line from a book:
"A woman simply is, but a man must become," by Camille Paglia. I wrote this line down, and it has stayed with me ever since.
Five books you'll never part with:
The Holy Bible: I love the Holy Bible because it is tradition. My grandmothers on both sides always kept it close to their beds, and the stories within offer me a way to stay connected to them. It gives me a language for grappling with big moral questions.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: I love The Things They Carried because it came to me at exactly the right time, when I was trying to let go and needed a roadmap. It helped me understand what it means to carry, and what it might mean to release.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I love The Great Gatsby because of the richness of the language and how it showcases the complexity of Black art and its commodification. It also offers lessons about capitalism and love that continue to unfold the more I sit with it.
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson: I love Brown Girl Dreaming for what is on the page, what is within the text, and what is left unsaid. It was an opening for me, an awakening. The words, the poetry, the pain, the joy, the hope, the white spaces--all of it stays with me.
Beloved by Toni Morrison: I love Beloved because it pushes me. It asks more of me as a reader, as a thinker, as a person. Toni Morrison is, in my view, the greatest. Beloved is the kind of book that doesn't let you go, and I wouldn't want it to.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Kindred by Octavia Butler. There's something about the way Butler builds a world and a reckoning at the same time that I wish I could experience fresh. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Malcolm X. and Alex Haley, also comes to mind, but I'm not sure I could handle it again.