Meg Medina holds office hours as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Photo courtesy of Meg Medina.

I have been dedicated to writing for children since about 2006, when I began drafting my first middle-grade novel, Milagros: Girl from Away, which was ultimately published by Henry Holt Books for Young ­Readers in 2008. In the sixteen years since, a lot has happened.

I’ve written thirteen titles, soon to be fourteen, which have received many kind recognitions. For nearly two years, I have had the great honor of serving as our country’s National Ambassador for Young People’s ­Literature. I will conclude my term at the end of December, with the new ambassador installed in January 2025.

What I have planned for tonight is not a look back but rather a look forward. We’re going to look at my time as ambassador. Then, I’d like to turn to my most recent work, a picture book, and to a novel that is coming soon, both of which were worked on heavily during the pandemic. I hope the discussion about how I worked on those will reveal where I am at this precise moment in my creative life as an author, what I have learned the hard way, and how I plan to greet the second half of my career in a way that I hope will make it as meaningful and exciting as the first half has been. 

I want to start with a behind-the-scenes­ look at the ambassadorship. I am the eighth person in this role, the latest in a distinguished line of authors. It is an immense honor and an act of service to the nation’s children. It is a delicate task to represent both the Library of ­Congress and Every Child a Reader properly as well. This is not, as my wise predecessor Jason Reynolds told me, like a medal that you keep shiny in a cabinet. “You will work, Meg,” he said. He was kind enough not to mention the biggest, first challenge, which was how to follow him. Jason, as you know, is larger than life, a generational voice and aspirational speaker. In short: cool on two feet.

But we do share a common trait that shaped our work as ambassadors. Both of us had to deal with the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jason’s term was severely interrupted and occurred a great deal online, which is why his term was extended an extra year. And my term has revealed the very high price our young people paid during the pandemic. It has meant working with schools, parents, libraries, and kids as they try to reset. As the collective community of caregivers for children, we have returned to face learning loss not only in academics but in social and emotional development too. So, my term has meant meeting children after a period of time when many had checked out. The job, then, has been to re-engage them in their literary lives in a way that feels especially painless and does not overwhelm them. The job has been to try to make books and reading a tool in how they get knit back together. That sounds awfully big. But I have learned to balance both the gravitas of the role and my inner silliness.

Here are some highlights of what I learned on this quest to make my position something more than ceremonial. Having a bilingual platform — ¡Cuéntame! Let’s Talk Books — invited readers of multiple language backgrounds. This felt urgently necessary to me since anti-immigrant rhetoric runs high these days. Kids internalize these hateful characterizations, and I wanted to offer an alternative. As far as I know, it’s been well received, and for that I’m grateful.

Returning joy to reading has felt essential. ¡Cuéntame! has been about helping kids talk about books outside of the “school way,” which includes vocabulary tests and reading journals, high-stakes end-of-year exams, etc. I model for them ways to “book talk.” I’ve seen firsthand how a one-minute book talk between two people almost always leads to conversation and reveals things the book talker and the listener have in common. Relationship is built…not just with the book but with others. Book talking becomes a form of social practice, of speaking practice, and of course, a support for reading.

Libraries have been at the core of my work, specifically trying to close the perceived divide between school libraries and the public library. I targeted communities where they could demonstrate a partnership. Because video is a powerful force for this generation of readers and their parents, I’ve spent a lot of time making Instagram videos highlighting the cool things I’ve found in the school and public libraries I’ve visited. Why? To help families realize what’s available to them in their own neighborhoods — and for free. We have such great programs that are so often and heartbreakingly underutilized by the community.

All to say, my time as ambassador has been intensely gratifying and also exhausting. I will be very tired and very sad when it comes to an end. ­Cinderella’s coach will be back to a pumpkin. And I wonder how that will be, the sudden halt of this pace. I’m plagued by the question I often face when I’m writing a novel — only now it’s my own life: And then what happens? The answer is that I don’t know, except that one plus is that I will return a bit more to creative work, which has been so hard to do. 

I hope I will leave with a sense of completion of an important duty at a time when kids were feeling frail. When my family arrived from Cuba in the early 1960s, they were frail. They were in the midst of a turbulent loss of their own country and family. And while the immigrant journey was often very difficult for them, they lived with an undying appreciation for and gratitude to the United States for opening its doors to them in their hour of need. I hope my service has been a small way to return the favor. But even more, I fervently hope my advocacy and example will serve as a strong reminder of the many positive outcomes offered by newcomers to our country, including those who arrive today in their own dire hour and who need our support.

* * *

Let’s turn to my writing life today. In September, I published a picture book called No More Señora Mimí — or in Spanish No mas señora Mimí — which has been beautifully illustrated by ­Brittany Cicchese. I began drafting this book in the winter of 2020, a couple of months before COVID sank its fangs, and I began editing it with Kate Fletcher in late fall of 2021. Brittany is a fairly new illustrator — and a librarian­ — so it feels like our collaboration during my tenure as ambassador was a perfect fit. But what stood out above all was that Brittany was an illustrator who could capture subtle emotion in small moments and bring it all to life. 

No More Señora Mimí focuses on a small moment in a child’s life — a shift in her perspective that reveals her wide capacity to love. This is a tale about Ana, a little girl who is happy about no longer needing her babysitter…until she comes face-to-face with the reality of what losing her will actually mean.

If they’re lucky, children are raised by many people, not just their biological families. They’re raised by friendly neighbors and good teachers. By their friends’ parents, by their scout or community center leaders. And, increasingly, by their daycare workers and “nontraditional hours” home care providers.

What is also true, according to the Urban Institute, is that much of the childcare being provided in our country is by Black and brown women, who do this essential work for very little salary and usually for no benefits, except time with little ones. Childcare, then, remains a huge problem area for our nation — both for those who need it and for those who work in the field. It is both unaffordable for many families and low paying for those who provide the service.

Does that make its way into the book? If nothing else, I have learned the power of drawing children’s lives realistically. I show the facts of their lives with a lens that feels appropriate to their age. While No More Señora Mimí is about a little girl changing her mind about firing her babysitter, it is also a story that lays out a very specific cultural and social reality. The story is set in an apartment building, not in a neighborhood of single-family homes. It features a Latina-led household — Ana lives with Mami. Señora Mimí is an in-home caregiver who lives upstairs and has her own little one to care for too. I use pon, the Spanish name for hopscotch. The snacks are buttered Cuban crackers, a favorite of Pancho, the toothless terrier. These are small choices I make that I have learned are massively important to children, families, and authors who wish to be seen in their full humanity on the page. To my fellow writers who are also writing very culturally specific stories, I say: keep going. It’s the truth, and the truth is the right way forward.

L to R: Meg Medina with her older sister, Lidia, and her mother, Lidia Metauten Medina; Medina with her grandmother, Bena; and in first grade. Photo courtesy of Meg Medina.

My mother was a working single mother her whole life in this country. In those early days after her arrival from Cuba and her divorce, she moved to New York City and found work. I was left in the care of another Cuban lady named — you guessed it — Mimí. Like Ma, Mimí was a recent arrival who lived in a building a few blocks away. She spoke no English and, being in her older, retired years, she found she still needed to earn some money to make ends meet. So, she ran a babysitting service from her apartment for several of us kids in the neighborhood. Mimí was plump and had bright dyed hair and freckles. Her first-floor apartment had a living room filled with things we kids could look at but not touch, which she considered an important skill to teach. She loved buttered Cuban crackers and taught me to dunk them in sweetened milk with a dash of coffee. Together, we enjoyed the same soap operas and radio stations I heard at home. She made me take naps on a little mat in her foyer, which I hated.

It was a comfort for my mother to be able to leave me with someone she could communicate with and someone who didn’t charge too much for peace of mind. But what I remember most about The Mimí Years was the day in 1968 that my mother received word that her own parents and her sisters had finally been granted exit visas from Cuba. “Your family is coming,” she told me. “Abuela will be your babysitter now.” Excited and buzzy-headed at the curious news, I fired Mimí that very day. “Lo siento, Mimí,” I told her gravely. “But I don’t need you anymore. I have a real grandmother now.” She laughed to her last gold tooth and told me she’d miss me.

L to R: Medina's babysitter Mimí, her tía Gera, her grandmother (Bena), her tía Isa, and another family friend, Maria Teresa, on Meg's first Holy Communion. Photo courtesy of Meg Medina.

Fast forward a couple of years to age seven, my first Holy Communion. Mimí had very large, sort of thick hands, as I recall. How they fit into those gloves, I’ll never know. But what’s more important is that she is standing here with my tías and my abuela. Mimí didn’t go anywhere after the ruthless firing at my hands. Instead, she became fast friends with my family, a bond created among women who were new and frightened of this country and all trying to help one another get ahead. They remained fast friends over a lifetime. I was to learn that being part of a Cuban community offered a lifetime membership to a group that supported you forever. Preteen and teenage Meg rolled her eyes at the “old ladies” and didn’t much want anything to do with her old babysitter who laughed too loud and wore knee-high stockings with her dresses. But, today, I can see the beauty in Mimí so brightly.

Community and love are at the heart of the story, and that is universal. It’s what children need to feel safe. I am glad to offer this story to kids right now, and I am glad to offer a story that invites all the caregivers in a child’s life to be seen and celebrated.

* * *

I want to turn now to a longer work that you will not see until 2025. Graciela in the Abyss will be a middle-grade fantasy with illustrations by the award-winning Balbusso twins, Anna and Elena, an artistic design duo who live in Milan. The setting is the deep ocean — the abyssal zone to be precise — far away from the reaches of the sun. Almost everyone in the story is already dead.

Sounds cheery, doesn’t it? Not really what one might offer to help kids feel safe and secure. But I want to do a deep dive, no pun intended, into this title because of three important facts. One, it has taken me fifteen years to write it. Two, COVID and massive personal grief were key to writing it. And, three, it forced me to relearn an essential truth about writing.

I guess the best place to start is with a small confession about one of my writing quirks. As I write a book, I keep a file called The Graveyard. The Graveyard is a grisly and sad place. It’s where I keep abandoned work that I found too hard to write. Sometimes it contains sections that my editor asked me to take out of a manuscript. And since I can’t bring myself to delete things that I’ve spent hours, days, or months on, I keep them there, buried but not exactly gone. Like most graveyards, it’s a place I visit only occasionally, usually when I am despondent and at a loss or making another deposit, so to speak. But every so often I come back in a different role: that of the grave robber. And that’s how it was for Graciela in the Abyss.

Back in 2010, I was a very new author with only one book to my name. Milagros hadn’t done very well in sales, and now I was facing the sophomore challenge. The book I wanted to write was a fantasy novel about two ghost girls, one of whom is captured and robbed of the pearl teeth that grow inside her mouth. Her companion, Graciela, finds herself alone and hiding in a cave, and she must figure out how to save her friend. That’s all I knew. There was something I wanted to say about friendship and about what is precious, but each time I sat down to write the story, it turned to ash. This was not for lack of trying. I took it with me to a writing group that I belonged to. But still I found myself with no real story. So, I buried it and vowed to forget it and move on. My publishing life was beginning to look sunny, anyway, with picture book Tía Isa Wants a Car and YA novel Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass both earning nice awards.

Ironically, as my career bloomed, my personal life was slowly unraveling. My mom had died of cancer in 2013, just before the publication of Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, and she left behind her youngest sister in my care — the same Tía Isa of Tía Isa Wants a Car fame. They had both come to live with me during my mother’s final eighteen months, and Isa stayed on, of course. For most of my life Isa had never lived farther than a few blocks away. But as the years ticked by, Isa’s needs intensified until in 2019 there was no longer any way to meet those needs with home health assistants. We made the difficult choice to move her to a facility a few blocks from my house where I could visit daily and where her home health aide, Maria, could continue to help bathe, dress, and feed her every morning.

It was a difficult time. I was trying to power through without thinking or feeling too much. I hadn’t been able to grieve my mother’s passing and found that I still could not afford the luxury. Seeing my aunt in a nursing home — generally a taboo in Latino culture — left me feeling guilty and in despair, no matter how often I visited. This is to say nothing of the exhaustion that came from caring for her daily and dealing with the million things that go wrong in a nursing facility.

And then in 2020 COVID appeared in our lives, and the bottom fell out of my world. Unfortunately, the nursing facility became infamous nationally for its unusually high number of COVID deaths. Nine people, nineteen, thirty, forty-nine by April alone, and while Isa did not die of COVID, she did suffer the acute neglect that the pandemic brought on as staff grew ill and the quality of care dwindled to almost nothing. I will spare us all the specifics and will say only that Ysaira Gregoria Metauten died alone in her room in August 2020.

My mother’s death years earlier, along with Isa’s death and my mother-in-law’s passing that same year, left a chasm inside me. I would not miss managing their details and illnesses, but the voices of the elders had vanished. Spanish was gone from my daily life, along with my connection to Cuba and all the ­relatives and stories of The Before. I felt unmoored, and there were the regrets that came knocking at night. Memories of my mother’s last days that I had blocked out as I had turned to care for Isa. Tapping on Isa’s window at the nursing home, when we were stopped from entering the facility, and seeing her blank expression. The utter rage I felt that I hadn’t been able to get anyone better care or an easier end.

Medina's daughter, Sandra, working during the pandemic. Photo courtesy of Meg Medina.

Death was everywhere that year. On the news. In refrigerated trucks holding corpses. In government tallies. My daughter, Sandra, a new nurse, was assigned to the COVID unit at her hospital, where the mortality rate was soaring, and there were no vaccines in sight. All of which kept me up late into the night. I wasn’t alone, of course. This whole nation was facing death and mourning. Collectively we were in terror, hunkering in our homes as best we could.

Among writing creatives, so many found they couldn’t write. The pandemic was, and in some cases continues to be, an ordeal that has exacted a heavy price. In lives. In learning. In emotional health. In economics. In trust. In our ability to feel hope. Children lost friends and loved ones and just the ordinary pleasures of growing up. Everything precious seemed at risk. And, of course, our national rancor climbed.

As 2021 rolled around, I was beginning to feel haunted. I desperately needed a place where I could escape the forces that were bigger than what I could control. I wanted to make sense of the rage that was everywhere. I needed to come to terms with regrets and find a sense of hope again, even in this very dark time. I wanted to think about what makes us go on. And so, my friends, I went to The Graveyard to search among the bones I had buried.

* * *

Fun facts about Meg Medina. One, I love the beach. There is something about the ocean that offers me a deep sort of psychological rest. It gives me a place to deposit my worries and revitalize when I need it the most. Coincidentally, I share a birthday with the famous oceanographer Jacques Cousteau! I don’t know how I came to that fact about Mr. Cousteau, but I know it was during childhood because I remember that it made me feel special. I decided that it somehow explained my love and respect for the ocean.

Anyway, when I returned to The Graveyard, I reached for a story whose setting was a place of comfort for me. I read the many versions of Graciela that I had worked on since 2010 and realized that I hadn’t really given much thought to the setting, which suddenly seemed essential. My auspicious birthday notwithstanding, I knew astonishingly little about the ocean. Slowly I began to research, discovering that the sea goes down between two and almost seven miles, depending on the ocean. The deepest part that we know today is Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific.

As part of my research, I read books about women scientists who worked in the sea, with specific focus on the abyss, the deeper regions. What do we know about the abyss? Almost nothing. It is a place that is inhospitable to exploration, much the same way, perhaps, that the deepest spaces inside us resist excavation and reckoning. But the abyss, like people, is full of mystery. Slowly all of this reading began to create a firm setting in my mind, a sense of place and therefore a sense of characters.

You may already know the map by Bruce Heezen and geologist and oceanographer Marie Tharp, who was named by the Library of Congress as one of the most influential cartographers of the twentieth century. It’s the first complete map of the ocean floor, published in 1977, which seems so shockingly recent. This helped prove the theory of plate tectonics, which as late as the 1960s was ridiculed. Again, I marveled at the tenacity of Tharp, who began her work in the 1940s when it was still believed that the sea floor was utterly barren. Her life’s work, however, would show that the ocean beneath us is marked by mountain ranges, canyons, and valleys. That there are lakes and chimney vents and life that exist in the utter darkness.

I began to do world-building for my story. I could now imagine the utter darkness of the abyss, its winding caves, opening up like porous sponges, leading through tight twists and turns inside undiscovered canyons. I considered the sheer scale of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an immense mountain chain extending for about ten thousand miles in the shape of a gigantic S from the Arctic Ocean to near the southern tip of Africa. I thought of shipwrecks and whale falls and all the beings — human and otherwise — that find their burial in the sea, how they are recycled, reborn in a way in the endless pattern of the world. I marveled at the idea of lakes, underwater waterfalls, entire ecosystems growing along the noxious overheated gasses of chimneys churning, churning, churning. I pored over photographs of the life forms being discovered, each looking like Hollywood monsters, all rising from the depths at each sunset to feed in higher waters as the darkness expands. It is, I read, the largest migration of animals on earth.

But what snagged my attention most was bioluminescence. This light produced by living things looks like what we imagine to be neon signs, with all the gaudy, blinking dazzle of chasing lights. The flashes can provide disguise and protection during the nightly migration. It is a sort of language in the deep. Mostly, though, it is light that is made inside oneself by necessity. The creatures that find themselves enveloped in darkness cannot count on the sun to shine a light. Instead, what dwells in an abyss must make its own light.

I began drafting the story of these two children — Graciela, a ghost, and Jorge, a living boy — reluctant companions who are each struggling with darkness in their world and in themselves. Growing up can feel like we are in a lightless abyss, especially in a pandemic. It’s a time filled with winding caves that can lure you in and get you lost. It is filled with unknowns and noxious forces. And above all, coming of age is a process of figuring out how to activate your inner light and use it. It is an act of learning how not to depend on something else to illuminate you, but to do it yourself. The search for that light and the ability to believe in it and manage it is necessary for survival. What blocks that, our ability to feel illuminated? My answer at the moment that I was writing was despair, regrets, mistakes, bad luck. How do we find our light again when that happens? I decided to let Graciela and Jorge struggle to find out. 

* * *

A few things have always been true of me as a writer. The first is that I resist plotting and outlining, which I find ruins the search and fun for me. The second is that I write from a place of uncertainty. I am never sure what I’m going to find in a book I’m working on. In the beginning, I’m not sure what I’m going to say or what I mean to say. I mostly start with the characters and more or less let their strengths and weaknesses guide me through the general problem that I’ve set up for them. This means that I can be a nervous writer, notoriously unsure of myself and nitpicky. I find it very difficult to write a terrible passage or skip around with a vow to come back to a section, although both seem like very sound strategies that I often suggest to my students at Hamline University.

The work on this novel has been hard. I do not write fantasy and am not an expert at world-building. It took many more back-and-forth rounds with Kate to get it to our satisfaction, and my self-doubt spiked throughout. But maybe that’s what brought me to an understanding I couldn’t have had in 2010. I needed to try new strategies.

A collage Medina created while writing her latest novel. Photo courtesy of Meg Medina.

One was faux outlining! I drew a bell curve and plotted the major ascending and descending action plot points. I made family history trees for the characters. I drew a map of the abyss where Graciela, Amina, and the other sea spirits make their home, so that I could keep my descriptions straight. I ordered sea glass in the mail for tactile help. And I lived the book.

All to say, fifteen years into my career I found myself having to adopt practices that were new to my writing skill set. I had to let myself feel like a beginner again and see everything about the writing process with fresh eyes. As I was ­shaping the book, the book was reshaping me as a writer. Every book teaches us.

By the time this novel is in your hands, it will have taken fifteen years. It will be a book I honestly couldn’t have written in 2010, because I hadn’t yet lived the experiences necessary to write it. I had not yet lost my most precious people. I hadn’t been plunged into my own abyss. We hadn’t yet seen the rise of distrust and hate to the level we see now. All of that had to happen at the same time for this book to come to be. I have learned that a book comes in its time.

Graciela and Jorge will take you on their journey to save the world from a horrible spirit armed with a potent harpoon that could ruin the world’s balance. I hope these characters will offer kids a way to talk about how they face the dark unknown, the unfair, the intolerable. I hope it will let them consider values like courage and loyalty and a sense of community­ — and why those old-fashioned sounding things make life worth living.

As I look into the second half of my career, I am filled with questions, maybe even more than I had when I first started. I still wish I were a more confident person, but I am beginning to accept that maybe this lack of surefootedness has its place. It allows for search and self-inquiry. What will I write now in my older years as an author? What will I write that feels authentic to my perspective now and still relevant to someone whose eyes are far newer? How can I not be cringey? How do I give them something worth reading? How can I keep expanding and not contracting? And more, in practical terms, how can I take up the space I’ve worked for and still lend a hand to and make room for others at the same time? These are the concerns of the second half of a writing career, and for which I have no answers yet.

Here’s what I do know. Books nurture us and they test us, both as readers and as writers. They help children grow, and they help us writers make sense of what we’ve lived. The key that holds it together is finding the through line to the questions young people and old people ask themselves, alike. What we owe young readers and ourselves is our best creative exploration, even when it’s a frightening mess. That’s where art is made and where peace of mind is found. That’s where we grow and connect.

And that is what I’ve decided that children most need to see in me right now — and learn how to do themselves. They need to see what it looks like to strike out in the world as themselves, with courage, with doubt, but also with hope and light.

This article is adapted from her 2024 Zena Sutherland Lecture, delivered in Chicago on May 3, 2024, and available on YouTube. From the November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.