Finding the Spark of Magic with Tomi Adeyemi

Tomi Adeyemi had to fight hard to be an author—even against some of her teachers. Long before the mega-selling author of Children of Blood and Bone was sharing a hug with Oprah or watching her work turned into a feature film starring Viola Davis, she had to endure all kinds of skepticism about her desire to build Black-centered fantasy worlds.

There was the creative writing professor who repeatedly denied her a spot in class, dismissing her work as unready. There was the teacher who told she was destined to work the deep fryer at McDonald’s. And there were the English instructors who insisted on formulaic essays about classic texts, so far from Adeyemi’s passion for fantasy and creative writing. 

“I needed someone to fall in love with my story,” Adeyemi recalled. “I needed someone to tell me I had what it took. But most of all, I needed someone to tell me that writing could be my life and my career.”

From a young age, she was drawn to fantasy and romance and adventure—genres that rarely featured Black protagonists and rarely showed up on the school syllabus. She felt an intense desire to write her own worlds, but also intense pressure to find a more reliable, more secure path in the world. “I was the daughter of Nigerian immigrants,” she said, “And our joke is that you grow up to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a failure.”

It wasn’t until Adeyemi reached 11th grade, with an AP® English Language and Composition teacher who turned the class into a workshop on creative nonfiction, that she found a teacher who fanned her spark of writerly aspiration instead of trying to douse it. “That was a teacher who completely flipped the script in my life,” Adeyemi said, joking that it felt like something out of a cheesy, “inspirational” movie when all of her classmates would find points of connection through their essays. 

“As teachers, you give so much to your students, and I don’t know how often the students get to come back and tell you how one conversation or one comment you made to them actually changed everything.”

It was a powerful message to deliver in a room full of educators and counselors at the 2025 A Dream Deferred^TM and HBCU Conferences in Los Angeles. Adeyemi had the ballroom laughing and cheering as she described the wild imagination that drove her to pen 200-page fantasy novels when she was in elementary school, kicking off a decade-long journey to figure out how to incorporate a Black identity into a genre that overwhelmingly featured white heroes and heroines. 

“For fifteen years, writing was the only way I could understand myself or make sense of the world around me,” Adeyemi recalled. And yet for years her draft novels and stories revolved around characters who were white, biracial, red-haired—nothing at all like Adeyemi. “To realize that you erased yourself from your own imagination for ten years, that’s how deep it goes. That’s how deep that knife cuts.”

Writing Children of Blood and Bone meant finding a way to “knit myself back into my own imagination,” to create worlds that featured beautiful and powerful Black characters, drew on African legends and religious traditions, and played with the iconography of lions and temples and Nigerian Yoruba culture. She hopes the book, and the sequels in what has become a best-selling trilogy, will serve as an outlet for young people who are weary of seeing the Black experience represented as a story of pain and suffering, not magic and adventure. The book, she said, are about “giving us escape, giving us magic, giving us beauty, giving us joy.”

Teaching should nurture the spirit in the same way, she insisted—looking beyond whatever frustrations or failures a student might be going through to find out what really speaks to them. “Find that spark inside of your students,” Adeyemi said. “Find out what that one kid is doodling in the corner of her notebook. Find that divine spark because that spark is their key.”