How Anna Nyakana is empowering youth with the ‘Niyah Zuri’ book series
Anna Nyakana wants kids to discover who they really are
March 6, 2024 - ATLANTA, GA — Anna Nyakana had an overwhelming need to empower youth and focus on literacy in order to give kids a foundation of knowledge of self versus trauma, which led to her creating the Niyah Zuri series and the two children’s books, Niyah Zuri and the Pharoh’s Throne and Niyah Zuri and the Mayan Eclipse.
Nyakana spoke with rolling out about the Niyah Zuri series and why Black representation is important in children’s books.
What inspired you to create this book series?
The understanding and the purpose of writing the Niyah Zuri series was to ensure that every child had a way to have an identity. I realized that growing up in the US, although I was born and raised in Berlin, Germany, and my family is from Uganda, there was not a real sense of culture here in the US, and that was something that I battled as a youth. Even encountering the things in my environment that were actually failing me, I saw that systematically boiled down to the fact that we didn’t really know ourselves. That was something that never truly left me, the fact that we didn’t have any sort of representation in the books that we were reading.
There’s a lot of indoctrination in the classroom, like “here’s what we want you to know, but we don’t want you to know this stuff that could actually benefit you long term in your life as you’re developing into an adult and figuring out who it is that you are, and what it is that you have a right to believe and go after in this world.” That’s what gave me the inspiration to create the Niyah Zuri series, a series that follows my fearless hero, Niyah Zuri, and the Gonzalez twins, her BFFs. They’re literally going back through time and space to go back to ancient legacies that have built this world. That is something that creates love, empathy, and understanding in every classroom, every household, and every community.