We Build Stories. We Build People. We Build Communities.

community;I have a story to share with you.

It begins at a dinner table in a Jamaican household, where the meal was never the point. We'd eat, and then we'd keep sitting there with our empty plates. Someone would clear them. Dessert would arrive. And we'd still be there, still talking, still laughing, hours after the food was gone.

This happened on weekdays. It absolutely happened on weekends, after church on Saturdays, when our house was full the way it always was. My mother would start a sentence about growing up in Jamaica, my father would correct her details, and the two of them would take us somewhere neither had planned to go. Storytelling was how we passed things down. It shaped everything creative in me long before I understood it was doing so.

Then in 2019 I had my daughter, and a year later the world closed its doors. We were home. So we read. Book after book after book. And somewhere around the hundredth one, something stopped me cold: not one of those characters looked like her. Not one looked like me.

I started digging, expecting to learn I'd simply been unlucky. I hadn't. The Cooperative Children's Book Center has tracked this since 1985, and of the children's books it received in 2022, just 13 percent had a Black author, illustrator or compiler, while 71 percent had a white one, which meant, to me, there is a shortage of doors.

So I built my own. The Amazing Zoe grew out of watching my daughter grow, out of my own life, and out of the small everyday things I noticed. Four books later (and more on the way), Zoe is in classrooms and libraries across the country, and I now spend as much time helping other authors publish their stories as I do writing my own.

I'm also determined to end the assumption that self-published means poorly made. That myth keeps good books off shelves. Every book we produce at Zou Zou Media House is built to traditional industry standards, because a story should never be dismissed for the route it took to reach the reader.

There's another thread running through all of this. In 2016, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and I became her caregiver. After my daughter arrived, I understood something urgent: memory is not permanent, and an unrecorded story is a lost one. I began photographing everything, not for the album, but so my daughter would one day know exactly who her grandmother was. And then I watched my little girl become an age-appropriate caregiver herself, small hands and all. She would offer my mom water or offer her grandmother her slippers to keep her feet warm.

That is what stories do. They hold people in place. They tell a child she belongs. They give a family something to keep.

Which is why I didn't stop at books. Today I lead literary and cultural programming across the GTA and beyond, in schools, senior residences, hospices and communities, so that more people get to tell their story and have it kept.

Everyone has one. I just make sure it survives.