托米·阿德耶米

托米·阿德耶米（英语：Tomi Adeyemi，1993年8月1日—）是一位尼日利亚裔美国作家和创意写作教练。她生于美国，父母是尼日利亚移民。她有约鲁巴人血统。她的著作曾登上纽约时报畅销书榜榜首。2019年，她入选福布斯30位30岁以下精英榜。

Tomi Adeyemi (born August 1, 1993) is an American writer and creative writing coach. She is best known for her novel Children of Blood and Bone, the first in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, which debuted #1 on The New York Times Best Sellers List, and won the 2018 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, the 2019 Waterstones Book Prize, and the 2019 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and in 2020, she was named to the TIME 100 Most Influential People of 2020 in the "Pioneers" category. In 2022, Paramount Pictures was developing Children of Blood and Bone into a major motion picture with Gina Prince-Bythewood attached to direct.

Early life

Adeyemi was born on August 1, 1993 in the United States to parents who emigrated from Nigeria. She is Yoruba. Her father was a physician in Nigeria but found employment as a taxi driver while he waited to transfer his qualifications. Adeyemi's mother worked as a cleaning woman. Adeyemi grew up in Chicago and was not exposed to her Nigerian heritage or Yoruba language as her parents decided not to teach her or her siblings their native tongue. She would later embrace her heritage as an adult, explaining, "I didn't think too much of it and I think that is the kind of an experience of the first generation. You're just trying to fit in. You don't realize how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in." She would later describe one of her novels as a love letter to her culture.

Adeyemi wrote her first story when she was five years old, and continued to write throughout her teenage years. She graduated from Hinsdale Central High School in Hinsdale, Illinois in 2011. Adeyemi was qualified into the Hinsdale Central High School Foundation's Young Scholar Program in 2008 and went on to win their "Young Scholars" scholarship in 2010–2011. During her senior year, Adeyemi also received the Rani Sharma scholarship. She went on to graduate from Harvard University with an honors degree in English Literature, then studied West African mythology and culture in Salvador, Brazil, on a fellowship. It was this experience that inspired her to write Children of Blood and Bone, the breakthrough novel that would launch her career.

Career

After Adeyemi moved to California, she worked at a Los Angeles film production company. When she decided to reduce her hours there to write a book, her parents were not entirely accepting of this idea. Adeyemi said, "I'm first-generation Nigerian so I came out of my mother's womb and I was supposed to be a doctor, a lawyer or engineer, and I was like 'oh hey, I'm quitting my very well-paying job at a very stable company that has many future job opportunities for me' ... I'm so lucky that my parents were like, 'obviously we're not crazy about this but we love you'."

Adeyemi's first written novel did not yield positive feedback. She instead set herself a year to write another book that became Children of Blood and Bone, and she entered it into Pitch Wars, a competition program in which emerging writers are matched with editors and authors to revise their work before they submit it to a literary agent.