You, Jane releases next week, a story about the power of storytelling. Not just to reflect reality, but to create it, in all its glorious havoc and wicked humor.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of the first books I can remember reading that had the same effect. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade when I encountered it. That book created a reality that I could see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. I re-read it several times throughout my young adulthood. Who knows what direction my life (and so many others) would have taken without that book, without Angelou’s work, without her stories and poems to create a reality that held power and sadness and seriousness and laughter and above all, love.

For me, Angelou’s work created a world in which redemption is possible, laughter is inevitable, and being broken is never the end of the story.

Not a bad world to live in, not at all.