#book publishers
How one book influencer championing Black authors is changing publishing
by Maayan Silver
Many years ago, Milwaukee-based book influencer Cree Myles first picked up Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and found the validation she didn’t know she needed. The book affirmed many of her experiences moving through the world as a Black woman.
“I’m reading it and I was like, yes! And yes! And yes! And I was like, I’m not crazy,” she remembers. “That was a seminal moment in my life for sure.”
Myles immersed herself in other pioneering works by Black authors: James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. She read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me. “I emerged from the ashes a new person, and I just needed to tell the whole world about it,” she says. “And that’s how it kind of all started.”
Now, Myles curates the Instagram account @allwaysblack, on behalf of publishing giant Penguin Random House. Myles says the goal of the account is “to celebrate Black writers and the readers who love them,” and Myles is voracious in her ability to come up with fun and innovative ways to do that.
READ MORE
