It turned out I was the second Black student they'd accepted in 20 years.

And in the third year of your degree, you got to go abroad for a whole year.

It turned out I was the second Black student they'd accepted in 20 years

There I was on this course and there were only 11 of us on it It was a really small course. And I don't know how I found this course but it literally changed my life in every conceivable way

I get on this course and we ' re studying music and photography and film

In that first year there were people on the economics courses dropping left, right and centre and, I'm like, we ’ re going to study the Blues today, I'm going to listen to WC Handy and Robert Johnson

The whole broad spectrum of the arts is what it was, and I was excited about the possibility of being able to go to the Caribbean. I wanted to go to University of the West Indies in Mona to learn about my culture and I found out we didn’t have links with them

So, I ended up getting sent to California. To the University of California, Santa Cruz I had never heard of it.

My friend at the time, who was on the course, she got sent to Berkeley

And so, I get there and I had been to Berkeley to help her get settled in, and then we went down the coast

All the time I'm thinking, “I’m a Black girl from Hackney.” How is this happening?

Driving down the 101 and we turn into this gate and all you see is this long, long brown field and at the top of the field is this little brown hut that they’re letting people in and that's where I was going to be for a year. I'm a little girl going into the middle of nowhere in California and the first day of school, I met my husband! was

But actually, talk about transformations because, it was the most incredible campus; beautiful little town up on the hill. You could see the sea on one side and then they have the giant Redwood forest in the middle which was unreal, and the first day of school, I met my husband!

Tell us a little bit about your role models growing up. Who were they and why?

I know it's really a bit of a cliche, but it has to be my Mum. She's now 98 years old and as strong and as feisty as ever

My mum was basically pregnant every year for 10 years. She came from Dominica in the Caribbean and my Dad was from Antigua.

And she was really smart. She was really academically gifted

So, my mum was growing up in the 1930s, 1940’s, 1950’s and she got this opportunity from a priest who came to our island. They were looking for the smartest kids on the island There was opportunity for them to go and study in America

And she was so being so bonded to her mother, who was seamstress and a bunch of other things in the in the community, she chose to stay with her mum and she learned to sew.

So she never went. But actually, by the time her life panned out, she met my Dad, they fell in love, they started to have kids.

It was the sewing that saved her because when she came here she became one of those ‘Singer Sewing Machine Women’.

A lot of them were Caribbean women as well and it would be sewing on the button holes or doing lapels or that little repetitious work and they would be bags and bags of stuff that she'd have to just sew and sew But that's how she kept us afloat.

So, she's my hero; he has to be. Remember there's eleven children

I'm going to the primary school and the dinner ladies were all White women saying things to me like, “Oh my God, how does your mum get your sock so white?”, “How's your hair so tidy?” They would always comment on our appearance and you take it for granted.

Mum was like, “You ain't leaving the house like that, OK?”

Tell us a little bit about the business; you run something called Jacaranda books. What was the genesis of that and how did that start? What were the influences? How did you get to the point of establishing this brand or this business and this is whatit'ssetouttodo?

EventhoughI'vedonethatdegreeand itwasamazingandIobviouslymetmy husband,sowhatIendedupdoingwas going back to America. He actually wenttoDCtostudyandthenwewere thereforayear.Andthenwemovedto San Diego and then I became a mum, sothenIwasjusthomehavingchildren andoutoftheworkforce

So, it was a slow, not really knowing what I'm doing, but getting a sense of needing to do something Eventually I come back to the UK, and I do this masters (postgraduate) course to get meconnectedtotheindustrybecause IhadnoconnectionsandIwastryingto getajoblikeeverybodyelse.

My kids were 9 and 11 and I was staying at home in my Mum's house at the time and so I was trying to get an Editorial Assistant’s job; what everyone wants when they come into publishing, and I was 48 years old and I was getting nowhere.

No one wanted to hire me in any internships Eventually one of one of the courses I did, the founder & CEO of Profile Books; Andrew Franklin came and we just hit it off, you know, and then a position came open at profile, but it was for Office Manager.

But like I said, I'm a mum with two kids. I cannot be picky so I took the job But I knew what I was doing. Everybody knows that Office Manager job; basically you make sure there's enough toilet paper, that the photocopy is working and everybody's got their coffee when they want it.

But I really love the books I wanted to be in the book world and also for me prior to that there was that time that Virago and The Women’s Press, in particular published all of these Black American

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