ABOUT ...

As a child I always wanted to be something beginning with A. I went through the phase of wanting be an artist (I still draw and paint now), an acrobat (Don’t ask!), an architect (architecture still fascinates me) an athlete (I trained for years and then gave it all up) and finally an author. Funnily enough it was being an author that seemed the most ridiculous to me!

When I was in Primary School I would spend hours creating little books filled with poetry and stories. I was very good at writing the beginnings of stories but getting them finished was never my strong point. In some ways this is still the case, but I am getting better. I was always too scared to share my poems of stories with anyone so I kept them hidden in my hundreds of notebooks - I wish I could find them now as I would love to know what I used to write about.

In 2009, I went to university and studied journalism. It seemed like the closest (real) job I would find where I could write until my heart was content. I quickly gave that up after graduating upon realising that it really wasn’t the career that I wanted and within a year I retrained as a Primary teacher. A job which I instantly fell in love with!

In 2014, I self- published an adult colouring book filled with inspirational poems and abstract artwork all created by myself. All of the proceeds that I made from these adult colouring books went to Mind Mental Health Charity.

In 2020, I wrote Being Amani. I have been a Primary teacher for nearly 10 years and I am so busy at school that I never have any time to write and I had almost forgotten about my dreams of becoming an author until I had my first son. When I was off work looking after him as a little baby, my life slowed down a little bit and during that break from the busy classroom is when Being Amani was born. I submitted my manuscript to Hashtag Blak publishing agency in 2020 and Being Amani was published in 2021. That’s when I had my first taste of being traditionally published.

Since then, I have fallen back in love with writing. I now have 3 children and we all live in Manchester with my very supportive husband. When I’m not taking photos of my children looking adorable or planning my next meal, you can find me cooking, drawing or writing in one of my many hundreds of notebooks.