I'm Linda Holmes. Welcome to NPR's Book of the Day. A lot of us get our best ideas in the bathtub, Nicole Cuffie did. She's the author of the debut novel Dances. It tells the story of C.C. Cordell, a fictional black dancer who becomes the first female principal at a major ballet company. Cuffy talked to NPR's Juana Summers about the book,

about its wrestling with race in the context of the very white world of ballet, about how

Cece watches people watching her, and about how the novel acknowledges Misty Copeland,

the very real first black female principal at the American Ballet Theater.

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Nicole Cuffy loves to dance and the art of ballet. She also loves a nightly bath where sometimes ideas come to her, like in May of 2015.

I just had this craving to immerse myself in the world of dance.

Cuffy decided to turn that craving into a novel about the first black woman promoted to principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, an idea that quickly proved prescient.

I kind of thought to myself at the time, well, what about Misty Copeland, you know?

But I was like, I don't think they're going to promote her anytime soon.

And then in August of that same year, Misty Copeland was promoted as the first black female principal at the American Ballet Theater.

So Nicole Cuffy switched gears and placed her protagonist to 22-year-old C.C. Cordell at another company.

There is a lot of sort of contending with the fact of Misty Copeland in this book because I did not think that I could write fiction about a black ballerina without acknowledging the reality. I thought

that would be too big and a suspension of disbelief. Between the very real Misty Copeland and the

fictional dancer C.C. Cordell, Nicole Cuffy had a lot of space to explore tensions in the dance world,

the lack of diversity, the push and pull of creative freedom, the preferred aesthetics

for dancer's bodies. As a young girl, I took ballet classes, and there just weren't a lot of

other young black girls at the time who were taking ballet and being taken seriously in ballet.

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