Want to make a comment about this book and the timeline of how I got here. When I graduated from HS, I was told it was good I wanted to be a physicist because writing wasn’t going to be my thing. That was 1999. https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1275544536643768326
In my frosh writing class in college, I was considered to be the worst writer. That was fall 1999.

Fall 2002 I applied to some creative writing classes and didn’t get into any. I applied for an NSF fellowship and a Ford and for honorable mentions for both.
Fall 2003 I reapplied for the NSF. This time I showed my mom my broader impacts essay. She shredded it. I remember how much was crossed out and all of the notes.

I revised. My white officemates joked about that essay’s insignificance. I won. No one else in my class did.
2007. I was invited to expand on a blog comment I made into an essay about the importance of not just diversity of ideas but diversity of people in physics.

Around that time I started a blog, Disordered Cosmos.

My PhD advisor told me to stop wasting my time on it.
I blogged until about 2009 or 2010 when it became clear it was easier to just get people to read Facebook posts. 😂 Friends can tel you I wrote many long posts. I also had a tumblr. And I wrote for my friend Paul’s experimental online magazine.
2014, I got invited to write for the women in astronomy blog about why saying “women and minorities” excludes women of color. Along with Jedidah Isler’s blog around that time this is the first time ideas about Intersectionality were being openly advanced in astronomy discourse.
March 2014. I send Kiese Laymon a difficult essay I wrote about a bad thing that is happening in my family. He asks if he can publish it.

7 years after my first time writing for a general audience in public, I was paid for my writing.

I didn’t get paid again for 2 more years.
In 2015, my blog on medium started with a short statement against racism in astronomy, composed by me and Sarah Tuttle. Because the leadership of AAS refused to take a stand. We were not paid for this. People were pissed at us.
Since then I’ve published around 40 pieces addressing bias in science. I’ve been paid for it maybe 10 times?

In the meantime I spent all of my drinking money on books that advanced my analytic abilities. I trained myself to be a feminist theorist.
In 2018, I signed with an agent and got a book deal. We talked to a lot of editors about the book. They all wanted “pure science” or “a polemic” or a memoir.

I could have made more money by agreeing to it.

I chose a non-profit publisher that shared my vision instead.
2020. I revealed the cover for my book yday. 13 years after I first started writing about racism, sexism, & science. 15 years after I started working on these issues. Only a year after I started my first regular science writing gig.

https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1275544536643768326?s=21 https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1275544536643768326
I was in my mid-20s when I first started writing regularly. I probably wrote over a hundred essays that were never paid for and not widely read. I literally have a library on my couch.

I’m not saying this to show off. I’m saying: this is hard work and doesn’t happen over night.
When you see someone who has made it somewhere or is in the spotlight, what you don’t see is how hard they worked. I did all of this while earning a masters and PhD and traveling the world giving talks and making my academic work happen — and that gave my commentary legitimacy.
I will be 38 when my book comes out.

This takes resources that not everyone gets access to and even when you have those things ... it takes time and patience and won’t happen overnight.

Put in the work.

https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1275964838427189250?s=21 https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1275964838427189250
I feel that too often the time we put in and the struggle we went through isn’t visible
You can follow @IBJIYONGI.
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