Sometimes we find  our calling a little later in life but it’s never too late to follow it. Kamichi Jackson didn’t choose to be a writer,it chose her and now she is taking her novel to the next level. Check out our interview below:

CR:Why did you want to be a writer?

Kamichi: I actually never had the plans to become a writer. I didn’t know I could write. As a child I lived across the street from our library and I spent a lot of time there reading. I actually did not start writing until I was about 23, it came out of nowhere. I always did well with writing assignments in school but it never even occurred to me that I actually could write something. I kind of stumbled into it.

CR: What is your inspiration when writing?

Kamichi: Things that may have happen in my own life, things that I’ve heard about that have happen in other people lives that are close to me. There are stories everywhere. Just something that strikes me and I feel like there is a story to be told and I have to tell it. If I’ve moved by it that much than I’m inspired to build a story around it.

CR: I know you are promoting your teen novel K my name is Kendra, can you give us some background information regarding the novel and what it is about?

Kamichi: It’s actually a book that started out years ago, completely different cast of characters. It was called Queen of the Scene. I decided to polish the main character and do something different with her. Basically, this young lady has depression and it’s undiagnosed because in our community, in every community, but in the black community people get depression and you think of the person being crazy. So often we don’t get the help we need and so in this case because she’s fifteen years old and here family is not getting the help she needs things start to happen in her life that she can’t handle and there is no one there to help her.  There’s a little bit of drama, some family history. There’s an uncle who’s shady and have tension towards her and basically she’s dealing with all these things and things are getting out of control. It’s like a coming of age story.

CR: I know that your book is a contender for the Amazon breakthrough novel award, tell us about that experience.

Kamichi: I spend a lot of time on amazon.com. Because I’ve been ill I’ve had a lot time to spend there. I just happened to logon one day and to see that this competition was still open. This is the first year that I had some actually ready to go and I thought well let me go ahead and enter it.  I don’t usually enter contest. I love my work but your kind of afraid of how people will react to it. I decided to bite the bullet and go ahead and enter. So we started out with five thousand entries in our genre, they cut down to a thousand, I made that cut. They cut down on March 22^nd, they cut down to 250 and I survived that cut. The next cut is April 26^th at which point only 50 in our genre will go on to be semifinalist.  So it’s been fun. I don’t know that I’ll win but I’m enjoying the fact that people are responding well to the book already.  It validates what I feel about my writing. That I should do this. I should focus on this being my career.

CR: Do you have any advice for young writers?

Kamichi: I actually do. I took something that was in the book and kind of made it a live workshop for teenage writers. My program is called ScribbleSesh Through it I am hoping to nurture teenage writers who are perhaps looking for it as a career. The biggest advice I can give is just write. Free write, pen to paper or however you choose to do it, just write. Worry about the story later but express yourself and go after it. Perhaps one day it will turn into a career. Just do it and don’t let anyone discourage you from doing it.

CR: Thank you for your time and good luck!

Kamichi: Thank you!

For more information check out:http://www.kamichijackson.com/

UPDATE: Kamichi made it to the semi-finalist today!