Natasha Tarpley was born in 1971, in Chicago Illinois. She started writing when she was seven years old. She learned by watching her

Photo Credit: James Richards

mother, who, at the time, had dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother wrote on a clunky, electric typewriter, which she’d lug out of the closet every afternoon. The machine was stored in a hard black shell of a case that looked like a miniature suitcase. In fact, the first time her Mom brought the typewriter down, Natasha thought her mother was planning to take a trip. And in some ways, her mother really was traveling, for she would disappear into the breakfast nook after lunch, not re-emerge until dinnertime, the steady hum of electricity, and the tap-tap-tapping of typewriter keys taking her further than anything on wheels or wings ever could. It was when Natasha learned her mother’s secret that she began to use words to travel on her own.

Natasha continued to write throughout her adolescence, and began to publish poetry as a sophomore in high school. She enrolled in her first writing workshop as a freshman at Harvard University, where her relationship to her work began to change as a result of her growing awareness of race. As an African American on a predominantly white campus, she began feeling the need to claim and define her identity as a black person. She wanted to find out what other black students were thinking and writing about, to create a community. Her first book, Testimony: Young African Americans on Self-Discover and Black Identity (Beacon, 1995), a collection of writings by black college students, was her way of establishing such a community.

During this period, the form of her writing was changing. In her junior year, she switched her major from German, which she’d studied since the second grade, to African American Studies. But she found herself becoming increasingly frustrated with the way the Afro-American Studies courses were taught. Everything was objective or “politically correct.” She wanted to have a more intimate relationship with history, to get closer to her ancestors. She began writing a series of first-person narrative poems in the voices of people who lived at various points in history in order to more fully understand their experiences and to create a link between the past and the present. In 1994, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for this series of poems.

These narratives also provided an outlet for her to explore such themes as African American migration throughout history as well as the search for home and community in her own life. Her book, Girl in the Mirror: Three Generations of Black Women in Motion (Beacon, 1998), grew out of this exploration. Girl is a family memoir composed of a series of snapshots written in the voices of her grandmother, her mother, and Natasha. The book traces the steps of each woman’s journey from one geographical place to another, to independence, self-love, acceptance and fulfillment. She wrote the book as a way of finding her place in the line of women before her, and discovered a kind of mirror in the lives of her mother and grandmother, reflections of similar choices, pains and joys.

While she worked on Girl in the Mirror, she began to write children’s books. The experience of writing for children, not only helped her to grow as an author, but also enabled Natasha to see first hand the effects her work can have on young readers. She began visiting elementary schools as a writer-in residence and as a volunteer. Most of the schools Natasha visited had very few resources and were attended by children who came from poor families or disadvantaged communities. She was fortunate enough to grow up in a home while attending a school where curiosity and exploration were encouraged and where early on, an active relationship to books and reading was nurtured. She wanted to share this with kids who have few outlets for the expression of their immense creativity and imagination.

During the years which followed, Natasha published children’s picture books: I Love My Hair and Bippity Bop Barbershop (Little Brown), Jo-Jo’s First Flight (Knopf), and Destiny’s Gift (Lee & Low). She co-edited, with an 19-year old young woman, an anthology of writings by African American girls ages 12-19 entitled, What I Know is Me (Broadway). Presently, Natasha lives in Chicago, Illinois where she is working towards her MFA in Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois. For information concerning school visits and lectures, please contact us.