Tomi Adeyemi was listed in Times Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2020 and was even called the ‘The New J.K Rowlings’. Adeyemi is a novelist and creative writing coach best known for her award-winning novel, Children of Blood and Bone. Born to Nigerian immigrants, Adeyemi grew up in Chicago where she spent most of her teenage years. Her father was a physician in Nigeria but worked as a taxi driver and her mother as a cleaner. She graduated from Harvard University and set her path to Salvador in Brazil where she studied West African mythology, religion, and culture and got the inspiration to write her debut novel, Children of Blood and Bone.
Released in March 2018, Children of Blood and Bone is about a girl who tries to restore magic to her kingdom following years of suppression of magical powers by the kingdom’s rulers. Shortly after its release, it hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult Hardcover Best Seller List. In the same year, it was awarded the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and later became a finalist for the 2019 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. Her success was crowned by Disney announcing that Lucasfilm would be turning the book into a movie.
Her second novel, a sequel, Children of Virtue and Vengeance was published in December 2019. It was ranked #1 on The New York Times bestseller that same month. To add to her list of stellar achievements, Adeyemi also coaches other upcoming writers to hone their creative writing on an online course she calls The Writer’s Roadmap. As fans eagerly wait for the movie, a third book to the trilogy is rumored to be released later this year.