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author
Ivis Wonlah
I came to the United States at the age of seven, and I was pretty much a very odd kid to most of my peers. I looked funny and I talked funny, with my native accent; so I was pretty much isolated, t...view moreI came to the United States at the age of seven, and I was pretty much a very odd kid to most of my peers. I looked funny and I talked funny, with my native accent; so I was pretty much isolated, teased, and bullied, for the most part. As a result of not fitting in at school and being left alone most times—both my parents worked full-time jobs—I became a heavy reader. I would read ten or more books in a week’s time, at home and at school, so I became very imaginative. I started to imagine that I was a character in books—the princess trapped in the castle, the princess that was treated badly by her stepmother—or even imagining becoming a plant! As that lonely adolescence, I began creating my own stories. I wasn’t an expert with grammar, and I couldn’t formulate sentences well, but I knew my story. I began writing short stories and poems as I grew older until writing longer stories became more of a hobby. As friends and family began to notice my love for writing, they encouraged me to become a more serious writer so that I could someday become an author. The thought had crossed my mind. I wrote and published my very first book, The Perspectives of an African Female . . . It’s My Opinion, Deal with It, in 2010. An adult book wasn’t the route I really wanted to take, but it caught the interest of a publishing company. So after publishing that book, I just couldn’t stop there until I published a story I really wanted to tell. A story that every kid would enjoy. Being that my career path was childhood education, I loved working with kids. Telling stories and reading them books was a very rewarding thing for me. So if writing a book that a child I once read to could pick up and read for themselves and say, “Hey, Ms. Ivis wrote this book,” would make every bit of my hard work worth it. Especially, a story never told in America. Being from West Africa, Liberia, we were told folk tales as kids, but none of these stories were ever written for record so that our kids could hear them some day too. As a result, I decided to tell one of my favorite folk tale in the way I remember, along with a lot of my own imagination. Coming from a third war country that suffered a thirteen-year civil war, I know this will be an opportunity for those, like myself, who made it out alive to finally see this story being brought to life.view less