We were pleased to be able to share 2 special sessions with Hannah Alkaf. She talked about her life using books, as she loved to read, and gave us tips for writing. It was very interesting listening to her talk about her life in the first session. It was very obvious that she loved books and read a lot throughout her life. However, she was also trying to convey that while she loved books and reading, most of the time it was hard to mirror herself in books. The books she loved to read as a kid, almost always had white characters. All the books she used to represent her life were books with white characters in them. So she became an author and wrote books about Muslim like The weight of the sky, and Gila so that her children could grow up reading books with a diverse set of characters.

In our second session with Hannah Alkaf, she gave us tips on writing. She used a metaphor for the different components of writing a story, which was building a monster. She used the flesh and blood to represent the plot, setting, characters, etc. The base of the story. Then she talked about how the skeleton represented the structure of the story: rising action, climax, resolution, etc.  And lastly, the represented a  bolt of lightning as the components that bring the story to life. Such as dialogue, emotions, details, description, etc. Hannah then went through dialogue, emotions, and description and showed their significance in bringing stories to life. She said that, “Emotions is the most important one,” and to apply it well to your writing you need to feel what you want your reader to feel, showing not telling, write about how your characters react to each other, and varying your sentences to either give your story urgency or slow it down.