Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnan Girimurthy and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. Now it's fair to say that people on this podcast

have usually lived a little bit. They are, or shall we say, around my age or older.

But my guest this week is anything but. In fact, she's just turned 20 and she is the

youngest writer to ever have a novel selected by Oprah Winfrey for Oprah's book club and her

debut novel has just gone in to the New York Times top 10 best sellers list. My guest is Laila

Mockley and her book is called Night Crawling. I think you're going to be hearing a lot about this

book over the next few months because it's already pretty big. And really my intention for this

book was to create a character and and her world and allow her to have full narrative control

because I don't think we often see, you know, young black girls in positions in literature where they

have that kind of complete agency. The book takes in a lot of big themes, racism, sexism, poverty,

injustice, policing and it's set in Laila's home city of Oakland, California, where she

has years of experience as a public artist because she was also the youth poet laureate.

Laila, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Well, huge congratulations first on the success of the book. It's an absolutely extraordinary thing

to go straight into that top 10 and perhaps even bigger to be selected by Oprah and you've been on

talk shows and, you know, interviews and all the rest of it. What's that like for you?

It's been overwhelming just the response to it has been incredible. I think there's just such a

long lead time between when you write a book and sell a book and when the world gets to see that book.

So it's been just such a crazy feeling to have people reading it.

What was that moment like when Oprah popped up on the screen to tell you you were in the book club?

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