Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of four books. Her children's picture book BLUE: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Daniel Minter, was named among the best of 2022 by NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, The Center for the Study of Multicultural Literature, Bank Street College of Education, and more. BLUE is on the 2023-2024 Texas Bluebonnet Master List; it has been honored with the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award® recognizing excellence in the writing of non-fiction for children; and it is an NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature for Children. It was named to the American Library Association's 2023 Notable Children's Books and nominated for a 2025 Georgia Children's Book Award. Brew-Hammond also wrote the young adult novel Powder Necklace, which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”, and she edited RELATIONS: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices. Kirkus Reviews called the anthology "smart, generous...a true gift." Her newest novel for adult readers was My Parents' Marriage. @nanaekuawriter
You were raised between the United States and Ghana? How do you feel it influenced your writing and your thinking about the world? I was born in Plattsburgh, NY and raised mostly in Queens, NY until, at twelve years old, my parents sent me to live and school in Ghana. That changed everything for me. Abruptly, my world expanded--exploded, really. Not in the sense that it was destroyed--though, it kinda was--but it got SO big so fast that I had to become new, and so I did.
In Ghana, I lived with my maternal grandmother, a born-again Christian. Our days started with Morning Devotion, and were woven throughout with prayer. Through worship songs, she taught me the Twi and Fante I had willfully eschewed in America, plus Ga, translating lyrics for me line by line. When my great-grandmother came to live with us, I learned the little Ewe I still have now, both of us determined to decode the sounds that came out of our mouths.
I hated leaving Grandma's house for school--a boarding school in Ghana's Central Region, two hour's drive from Accra (an hour and a half when Douglas, our driver was at the wheel). To attend Mfantsiman Girls' Secondary School, I had had to shear off my shoulder-length hair--only girls with foreign blood could appeal for an exemption to the rule in effect in most schools across the country. I was also mercilessly bullied. The American freak with the Fante name who couldn't speak Fante. The dirty American girl who didn't know how to hand-wash her uniforms or bedsheets. How funny it was to send the American girl to fetch a bucket of water...
I wrote it all down, in a trunk I forgot to lock, that my dormmates opened to steal my things. They let me have it when they found my letters to Grandma and my mother, but even as I cried, I thought to myself, outside of myself, "This would make a good story." And it did. Years after I returned to New York, completely confused about how to reconcile the God I had woken up every morning to worship, and the identity I was finally proud of, with the world I so desperately wanted to shrink back into, I wrote my first novel Powder Necklace.
How did reading shape your childhood? Any particular books that changed everything? I read way beyond my age. My sister's Sweet Valley High books. My mom's Harlequin and Silhouette romances as well as her Danielle Steeles, Judith Krantzes, and Sidney Sheldons. My mind was blown watching TV adaptations of If Tomorrow Comes and I'll Take Manhattan and Mistral's Daughter and Master of the Game, sometimes lamenting what the filmmakers had cut, in awe they could reshape a story that way. I wanted to do that. I knew in my bones that I could!
But all of the stories I wrote were about girls in split level ranch houses with green eyes and red hair. I started having a problem with that as I studied Political Science and Africana Studies in college and began to understand why I thought those girls' lives were more colorful than mine. Reading Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood in my twenties made me fall in love with reading about who and where I came from. and I knew I had to write stories like that.
What kind of structure do you give your writing hours when working on a book? There is no such thing as a typical writing day for me. Much of my writing life has been about trying to make the math of writing for a living make sense so on any given day, I'm writing copy for brand websites, launch campaigns, or marketing collateral in between bursts of mass email cold pitches to bookclubs (read my book!), educators (teach my book or invite me to read my book to your students!), and bookstores (host my book event!).
When I'm working on a novel, I try to write in the first hours of my day when I'm clearest and sharpest. If it's the kind of day when the words are flowing, and I have no other commitments, I just keep going. On those days, going to the bathroom or fixing myself something to eat only happens when my body absolutely demands it, when my bladder is burning and my head is throbbing. On days when the words are scarce, I give myself permission to read about the topic I'm writing about, i.e. follow the white rabbit down the Internet search hole. Almost always, I stumble upon some tidbit that directs me back to my writing.
I don't outline. I prefer the story to reveal itself to me as I go. However, with my novel My Parents' Marriage, I kept a single line synopsis in the footer of my Word doc as a way of keeping me from veering too far off.
Tell us about the creative process behind your most well-known work or your current writing project. My most well-known book is my children's picture book Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky. That book came to me. I was reading the Bible, about King Solomon's temple furnishings, and I wondered why the author noted that the curtain was blue. Why did the color matter? I started casually Googling about blue and I stumbled on a tidbit about a snail that was harvested to create blue dye in antiquity. I was so struck by the idea of a color coming out of a snail, that I turned to books on the topic. I read Baruch and Judy Sterman's The Rarest Blue and reread Catherine E. McKinley's Indigo. Then, I read Victoria Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette and basically every other article and research paper on blue that I could find. When I finished doing this deep dive, I was so blown away by what I learned that one night I woke up with the words to a poem. I kind of put it away, but I couldn't stop thinking "Kids need to know about this!" I ultimately pitched it to my now-agent who advised me to structure it as a picture book versus a poem, and soon after we sold it to the publisher.
Do you keep a journal or notebook? If so, what’s in it? I fill my journal with prayers, thoughts and feelings about what I'm experiencing in the moment, scraps of stories, and story ideas.
How do you research and what role does research play in your writing? Research is hugely important to my writing process. I write about history and culture so the details I learn from reading about a time, setting, and truths associated with a people really help me to develop characters and a world that feel materially and emotionally authentic. To that end, in addition to reading researched textbooks and papers on a topic, I look for sources and tidbits that immerse me in the context I am writing about, for example magazine issues, top 10 song charts, and photographs or art from the time period. I also read the observations of insiders and outsiders for insight about what the people and culture might take for granted or have become inured to, for example journal entries, newspaper columns, and Peace Corps accounts and diplomatic country reports.
Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with? I've had the great fortune to meet many writers I admire, for example Chimamanda Adichie, Paul Beatty, Zadie Smith, Ama Ata Aidoo, Gina Prince Bythewood...and I've gone completely catatonic fan girl, so I don't know that I'd want to have dinner with them. Rather, I would prefer to be a student in a master class about their insights on the business of writing taught by them along with Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, Jhumpa Lahiri, Janet Fitch, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines?
I am highly inspired by art of all kinds. I almost always come away from a day at the museum with a gnawing insight, idea, or line I need to explore in writing. I can't listen to music while I am writing as the lyrics distract me, but when I am having a day where the words aren't flowing, I do listen to music my characters would like.
AI and technology is changing the ways we write and receive stories. What does authorship mean in an age of AI and algorithmic creativity? When it comes to writing, AI reminds me a little bit of the iPhone camera. For those of us who appreciate photography but don't necessarily possess the skill, talent or discipline to learn the art and craft, the iPhone camera enables us to express ourselves with a level of polish and precision that we crave. For people who desire to translate their ideas into writing, but are not writers in the sense that they feel called to create and aren't willing to dedicate the time and energy to develop that muscle, AI offers a helpful solution. But, I think for people who do have the gift, talent, drive and patience to produce good writing, AI cuts off an important aspect of creating.
A big part of the creative process is the process itself. Trying and failing. Exploring tangents just to see where they will go. Revising and refining what you've written, and when necessary walking away for a while and returning with fresh perspective. If you go around that process, you lose the revelations that come with the experience of creating something new.
Tell us about some books you've recently enjoyed and your favorite books and writers of all time. Of my recent reads, I really enjoyed Yejide Kilanko's A Good Name, Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza's Freelance, Reem Gaafar's A Mouth Full of Salt, and Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer. They're all deeply specific and unexpected stories about family and coupling, and the impact of our choices and allegiances. As for my favorite books of all time, I love Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, Janet Fitch's White Oleander, and Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People. Each book is about how loyalty and allegiance develop or morph through personal growth and expanded understanding.
Why do you believe arts, culture, and creative expression matter—both personally and more broadly? Art and culture are our expressions of who we are, and they are our record of who and how we were for generations to come. Art and cultural expression is important in the present because it helps us to healthily examine and interrogate our ideas and experiences for collective understanding and growth as a society. It also enables those who follow us to understand that nothing is new under the sun--the challenges of their time may look different, but there are people who have thought through the fundamental problems they are facing, and they can be in conversation with them about the way forward.
