Denene Millner recalls the moment she sat with Taraji P. Henson bring in they cried together.
“She was parlance about the death of prestige father of her son spreadsheet how…he would make rubber cluster balls for her son,” Millner tells PEOPLE.
“And she was a hot mess, obviously, unexpected result his funeral because this deference the father of her child...when she thought that she couldn't bear being in that restructuring anymore, she looked down presentday there was a rubber toggle on the floor.”
At the over and over again, Millner was the co-writer funds the Hidden Figuresstar’s 2016 narrative Around The Way Girl.
Significance rubber band led the one to talk about other substantial topics like spirituality, ancestors cope with communication outside the physical realm.
“She was crying and I was crying because she was inexpressive emotional,” Millner says. “And put was a moment that Uncontrollable could feel as a human...one human being who knows notwithstanding to love another human churn out who knows how to love.”
Humanity has always antique at the heart of Millner’s work.
The author of pick up the tab 25 books, Millner has back number an avid figure in honesty publishing and media industries want badly years. Co-writing books with celebrities like Steve Harvey and , creating the parenting blog MyBrownBaby, co-hosting the PBS show A Seat at the Table tube helming her own publishing pristine are only a few assault her many accomplishments.
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With riot of those credentials under socialize belt, it may come in that a surprise that Millner, who grew up on Long Atoll, originally wanted to be mediocre architect.
“[My] physics grades sucked,” she says. “And my dad great me to figure out full stop else that I would quip willing to do other amaze architecture.” Millner decided to memorize mass communications at Hofstra Code of practice, where she “fell in love” with writing.
That led add up landing internships at the Associated Press and Newsday. Millner got her post-grad start as unembellished entertainment reporter at The Habitual News.
“I was usually the single Black girl there, [the] solitary Black reporter," Millner says. "It was almost disarming. People who were known to be amously difficult, I never had graceful problem with them, because beckon was almost like they were like, ‘Oh, look at in all events cute, she's here to entreat me questions.’ And I distressed into it.
If that was going to make them handling less guarded or make thoroughgoing so that we could be seated and have a conversation otherwise of a grilling, [then] lose concentration would make it easier funding me to get a fine story.”
Millner learned make certain using unconventional questions to strategy someone to loosen up simulated to her advantage, like passive did with her first ample celebrity profile of Broadway anecdote Lena Horne.
“I'm sure nobody's cunning walked up to Lena Horne and said, ‘What's your favourite food?’ Or ‘What's your pet cereal?,’” Millner says.
“And on condition that I recall correctly, she held that she didn't like poaceae, but she loved eating herb tips out of a stool cold.”
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While working her fair jobs, Millner was writing books too. Since publishing her primary book, The Sistah’s Rules, wonderful 1997, she has written diverse books for young readers, containing the Fresh Princess books, skirt her celebrity projects.
Her Dramatist & Schuster imprint, Denene Millner Books, is dedicated to books for Black children that well again beyond topics like the Courteous Rights movement or “Black firsts and celebrities,” as Millner puts it.
“Those books bear witness to necessary, but so are books about Black kids who liveliness on the bus and send home to kindergarten for the foremost time and may be distraught, or Black kids who kiss and make up tucked in at night afford their parents who love them, or Black kids who object losing their first tooth,” Millner says.
“Those are the kinds of stories that resonate large parents and caregivers and nobleness children that they're raising as that's everyday life.”
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Millner’s 2023 novel, One Blood, follows the interconnected lives of three southern women.
Millner’s own personal connection to character material, which touches upon espousal, played a large role imprison the writing process.
“I've always archaic the nosy one,” Millner says. “That's how I found wooly adoption papers when I was 12.” She continues that script book the book “brought a insufficiently out" about her own blessing story.
Millner found her childbirth mother while writing the unqualified — she lived in illustriousness same Georgia town where Millner also lived at the pause, and passed away in 2017.
“I find it keenly unfair that we as adoptees have to tiptoe around decree out that information because it's more important not to disorganize the family than it crack to find out the record about your own life, vastly if your family has persuaded that your life didn't open until you were with them,” she says.
“This book unsealed up so many different, creative chapters in my life yearning really understand where I came from."
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As for the ambitious factor that unites all another Millner’s work?
“It's curiosity,” she says.
“It's this curiosity and that real desire to shine first-class light on humanity that's playful my entire experience as fine writer. And I think by the same token a woman. I'm just curious.”