My family and I immigrated to the US as political refugees when I was a child, fleeing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. I spent much of my childhood trying to evade being seen as an immigrant by insisting I was called Tanya (instead of Tatyana) and never speaking about being born in another country or speaking another language.

Although migration was a big part of my history, it was not initially something I wrote about explicitly. But after I was selected to write a book for the “It Happened To Me” series, which deals with issues that directly impact youth, I was inspired to begin an extensive focus on immigration in my work.