Guest Column by Jill Tew

Jill Tew grew up immersed in speculative fiction, inspired by shows like Farscape and The Tribe and the Animorphs books. Now, she writes stories featuring Black heroines who save the world, tackle big questions, and find love along the way. A co-host of Afronauts Podcast, Jill supports Black speculative fiction writers while anticipating the release of her debut YA dystopian romance, The Dividing Sky, releasing from Joy Revolution in 2024.

My Writing Journey

I loved storytelling as a kid, in all its forms (books, musicals, video games). My favorite book growing up was my rhyming dictionary. I’d make silly poems or parodies of songs. I just really enjoyed the power of words and wordplay. But when it came time for college, I knew I needed to major in something more “practical”. I enrolled at a top undergraduate business school, and put away my love for writing. After graduation, I had a series of very high-demand, stressful jobs. I should have known something was off when I was doing exercises from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in my Manhattan apartment, instead of working on the PowerPoint slides I should have been making. But again, I was trying to carve out a career for myself, so I pushed ahead.

A couple of years later, at a new high-demand, stressful job, some coworkers suggested we go see a movie after work. That movie was Divergent, and walking home from the theater, I felt a spark reignite in me. I remembered the love I had for stories growing up, especially science fiction stories (I loved the Animorph series as a kid, and grew up watching an amazing sci-fi show called Farscape with my dad). I suddenly realized that that was how I wanted to make people feel. I didn’t want to spend my life making spreadsheets. I wanted to spend it telling stories. That night I went home and started work on my very first novel. Seven years later, that book got me my fabulous agent, Jennifer Azantian. The next spring I wrote the book that would become The Dividing Sky, and the rest is history! We sold The Dividing Sky to Joy Revolution, an imprint started by writing power-couple Nicola and David Yoon, dedicated to love stories starring people of color, written by people of color. Working with Joy Revolution has been a true dream come true, and I can’t imagine a better home for the hopeful, swoony dystopian adventure that is The Dividing Sky.

About The Dividing Sky

The dividing sky

The Dividing Sky is set in a hyper-capitalist, near-future Boston, where everyone works for a massive corporation called LifeCorp. The wealthiest residents (Uppers) work at their computers pretty much 24/7, while Lower class people called Proxies modify their brains and bodies so that their wealthy clients can keep working. Proxies raise the Uppers’ children, run errands on their behalf… but using the neurochips in their brains, Proxies can also go on dates on their clients’ behalf, or read books for them, or watch a sunset, so their clients don’t have to stop working.

Liv is an EmoProxy, whose job is to have these emotional experiences, and transfer the memories to her clients. She deals a few of these memories illegally to her fellow lower class workers to make ends meet, but she’s still only scraping by. So when a client offers her a huge sum of money for a dangerous assignment outside the city’s borders, Liv accepts. Now she just has to survive.

Meanwhile, rookie LifeCorp Forceman Adrian Rao is on the trail of a mysterious new drug that seems to be altering the Lowers’ brain chemistry, making them less obedient to LifeCorp. He traces the source to Liv, all the way out in the wilderness. But when he finds her, there’s a problem: She’s wiped all of her memories. Can he bring himself to arrest her for a crime she doesn’t even remember committing? You’ll have to see where the story goes from there!

Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble 

Why Dystopian Books?

As I mentioned above, Divergent and other books in the 2010s YA dystopian boom were essential to my becoming a writer. I’ve always loved dystopian stories (even going back to 1984 and Brave New World), because they ask these huge questions about society. Where are we headed, if current societal trends continue? What do we really value? They have big things to say about the universal human experience.

I wanted to write a story with questions just as big, but which happened to feature a Black main character, a Black love interest, and an all-BIPOC cast. It means so much to me to be able to contribute to this genre I adore, with characters that look like me. We, too, are part of the universal human experience, and we have things to say about where society is headed.