Taylor Nanea

"Mama look! She looks like me!" Eight-year-old me yelled at my mother as I pointed to our twenty-inch color television set. It was the early eighties and a re-run episode of the original Star Trek series was on. Uhura had just turned around in her communications chair. There was someone on my t.v. who had the same skin tone and hair texture (on a good hair day) as mine! It was rare, at that time to see a black woman on television, who was not playing the maid, prostitute or junkie. The memory still resonates with me today because on that day, the writer inside me was born. See, although I was enthralled by Uhura and the woman who played her. I wanted her to be to be captain, lead the excursions, have a passionate affair with Spock, however passionate a Vulcan could get, (yep, I thought of it first and if I can just find my old journals I can prove it! HA!) I spent hours and hours writing what at this time we call fanfiction. Fanfiction that grew into short stories, and then into manuscripts all of which I hid away until I allowed a friend to read one my stories. Once done, she had the nerve and the gall to call me a writer. Writer? Me? No, a writer is someone like Stephen King, Toni Morrison, James Patterson, Olivia Butler and Donald Goines. I wrote stories I wished to see on screen. Stories that reflected diverse cast of people I saw in my everyday life. I wasn’t a writer…I just wrote. It took me a couple of years to come to terms with who I am. And it took another friend, tired of hearing me complain about the lack of diversity in film and television, to tell me if I didn’t like it THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! So, I am! I have multiple scripts under my belt and a couple being considered for production.