I never considered myself a very imaginative child, but I knew I wanted to raise imaginative kids.

When given the choice, I’d pick a science, geography, or history book over a fictional one. Just the word “fantasy” made me cringe, so, no, I did not read Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.

I was more of a Little House on the Prairie girl, using my daydreaming hours to travel back in time to the pioneer days without realizing, at the time, that I was indulging in a different kind of fantasy: one that focused on the gains of the colonizers and not the harms to the colonized. 

At some point, I picked up The Giver and discovered a love for dystopian fiction. Suddenly, I had the capacity to suspend disbelief and enter into futuristic worlds rather than historic ones to think about the ways our society might be causing harm that we can’t see and to imagine solutions that might free us from the consequences of those decisions. 

When I became a parent in 2007, long before I learned about “Afrofuturism” and the idea that imagination is key to abolition, I dabbled in worldmaking.

I created Juliandia.