I am fully aware that my path to Patrice was relatively short in the grand scheme of things. I covered the start of my writing career (if I may be so bold as to call it that) in THIS BLOG POST. That post ends off in mid-December of 2020, when I learn that I was selected to be Andrea Wang's mentee in our regional SCBWI mentorship. I describe that mentorship HERE. At the end of December 2020, I learned that I had also been accepted into #WNDB's mentorship program with Alan Grat

In October of 2020, I applied to the We Need Diverse Books (#WNDB) Mentorship Program. The program summarizes itself as: The Mentorship program aims to support writers and illustrators by pairing them with an experienced professional in the field. Our mentors work one-on-one with a mentee and their completed draft of a manuscript over the course of a year, offering advice to improve craft and to better understand the publishing industry. I was applying with my middle-grade n