I’m Ashlè Colston, a two-time published author, designer, and marketing strategist. I’ve spent my career thinking about storytelling, how an idea is communicated, how people experience it, and what makes it stay with them. Whether I’m designing a brand or writing a novel, my creativity has always been rooted in looking at something familiar and asking whether there is another way to see it.

I wrote my children’s book, *Strong Enough?*, after becoming a mother and recognizing a cycle I had watched throughout my life. I grew up surrounded by Black women who carried the title of “strong” regardless of their mental health, physical health, or actual capacity. They persevered, they provided, and they kept pouring, even when the jar was empty. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had become one of those women. I wrote *Strong Enough?* because I wanted something different for my daughter. I wanted her to know that strength does not have to mean silently carrying everything until there is nothing left of you. The book became my attempt to interrupt that cycle before she inherited it.

*Superlunary* began with a very different question. In 2019, I found myself thinking about the history of Black people being targeted, hunted, exploited, and hated, not only in America, but throughout the world. I allowed myself to take that thought somewhere imaginative: What if we were never simply hated? What if there was something about us that was extraordinarily valuable?

The world has a history of extracting the things it considers precious. We mine diamonds. We dig for gold. We fight for resources. So I began imagining Blackness through that lens, not as something inherently cursed or destined for suffering, but as something divine, powerful, and worth possessing. *Superlunary* grew from that idea and asks what the hunt for Black people might mean in a world where our value is far greater than even we understand. What if the hunt was never just a hunt? What if it was a harvest?

Those two books may appear very different, but they come from the same place in me. I create by questioning the narratives we inherit. As a Black woman, a mother, a designer, a strategist, and an author, I’m interested in taking ideas we have been taught to accept as ordinary and turning them slightly, just enough to reveal another possibility.