Author L.L. McKinney has long been an advocate for equality and inclusion within the publishing industry, often using Twitter to start conversations. Earlier this year, she co-created the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe with fellow author Tochi Onyebuchi to help reveal the economic disparities between Black and non-Black authors by focusing on the advances paid by book publishers.

Years earlier, she launched a different hashtag -- #WhatWoCWritersHear -- that gave room for women of color writers to document all the damaging assumptions they've heard about their work, audience or themselves. McKinney spoke with the PBS NewsHour about why she started that particular hashtag, how she hadn't see herself represented within the world of science fiction and fantasy, and why we need more books that go beyond the "one Black girl book for the year."

"I was a kid who loved science fiction and fantasy, but science fiction and fantasy did not love me back," she told the NewsHour. "If I was on the page, I was the sassy best friend or I was the enemy or I was the help or I was the gangbanger ... or whatever." McKinney said, as a child, she didn't necessarily have the vocabulary to articulate what I was seeing and feeling, but now that she does, that's part of what she wants to change for readers today and in the future.

"I wanted [the genres] to be less hostile towards them than it was towards me," she said.

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