Stone finally wrote her first novel for young adults four years later. “She was kind of the spark that relit my ‘liar fire,’ as I call it and made me want to tell stories,” she said. Interacting with the young woman and her family opened her eyes to the number of stories that she hadn’t heard, leading her to think that if she wasn’t hearing them perhaps she needed to tell them. Because she was a resident of the West Bank and “had no country of citizenship,” she was unable to get a passport. There she encountered a family with a daughter a year younger than her who wanted to go to England to pursue her education.

It was during a 2008 trip to Israel that Stone discovered she needed to be a storyteller, she said. Reading changed from something she enjoyed to something she had to do. However, during grades eight through 12, she read three books in school that had black characters, all of whom were male and “didn’t exactly get the best endings,” she said. Piggle-Wiggle,” she said, and she was “hooked” by the Harry Potter books when the first one came out while she was in seventh grade. “I like to tell people that I get paid a pretty significant amount of money to make things up.”Īs a kid, Stone’s favorite book series were “Encyclopedia Brown” and “Mrs.

“That is what storytelling is: knowing how to put a sentence together and telling really excellent lies,” she said.

Along with being a reader, Stone told the audience she was a “compulsive liar” as a child, a combination that signals a future as a storyteller, she said. “We don’t do adolescent temperatures in Georgia,” she joked. The Atlanta native, who engaged her audience throughout the program, drew laughs early with her comments on the far cooler Mahoning Valley climate. “For me, the most important thing is you don’t experience what I did when I was in high school.” “I write my books for you,” she told the students. During her presentation, she covered topics ranging from her published and upcoming works to the mechanics of writing. It was one of two presentations by Stone as part of the Public Library’s Black History Month programming, her second taking place in the afternoon at the Campbell high School auditorium.ĭuring the program, which lasted about 80 minutes, Stone offered brief remarks but mostly fielded questions from the audience in the branch’s large meeting room. Stone, whose works include New York Times bestsellers “Dear Martin” and “Odd One Out,” addressed an audience of 75 students and members of the general public Tuesday at the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County’s Newport Library.

Dearmartin