In today’s episode of Black Writers Read featuring Kaija Langley. Kaija will share the first chapter of her non-yet-published Middle-Grade Novel, Call Me Early, which is a coming-of-age story about a Black 12-year-old girl who spends her summer unexpectedly straddling family, friendship, and identity.
Born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Kaija Langley has been writing since she fell in love with words at age seven. She knew she was onto something when she wrote her first poem and her grade school classmates thought she’d copied it from a book! A proud alumna of Morgan State University, a Historically Black College and University in Baltimore, MD, she received her MFA in Fiction from St. Mary’s College of California in 2005. She’s called many places home over the years — NJ, MD, DC, CA, LA, and MA — and currently lives, writes, and plays in Cambridge, MA with her two bonsai and her Beloved.