In 2016, Chicagoan Tracy Occomy Crowder went on a mission to find an adventure novel with a Black boy protagonist for her son. She wanted him to see himself in a book that wasn’t only about the heaviness of being Black in America, and she came up empty-handed.

“You might have to write it,” a bookseller told her. So she did. This year, she published her debut middle grade novel, Montgomery and the Case of the Golden Key.

In this episode, host Erin Allen talks to Occomy Crowder about representation in children’s books, bringing recess back to Chicago Public Schools and what it means to be a kid in 2023.