9/12/2023 0 Comments Forgot to cancel linkedin premium![]() Be kind to your future self and bookmark this link. The last 25% of the book is completely unhinged. On what readers can look forward to in the Blood Debts series, Benton-Walker says, “The world is bigger, there’s more characters. ![]() the End of the World, out from Labyrinth Road this fall, with book two of that series in the works The White Guy Dies First, an anthology of YA horror slated for summer 2024 and Blood Justice, the second in the Blood Debts trilogy, due in April 2024. ![]() His forthcoming projects include his middle grade debut, Alex Wise vs. These conditions felt incredibly close to the story he’d created, Benton-Walker says, noting how “the theme of justice started to creep into Blood Debts and it really helped me save the story.”īlood Debts was released in April, earning starred reviews from PW and Kirkus, and Benton-Walker has no plans of slowing down. “I’ve been really lucky in the sense that we’re very equally yoked when it comes to creativity.”īenton-Walker worked on Blood Debts over the course of 2020, while caring for his young son Aiden with his husband amid the pandemic and protests over the murder of George Floyd. “The first thing that she asked me was, ‘What did this story mean to you? And what do you want it to mean to your readers?’ ” he recalls. In 2020, Blood Debts sold in a three-book, mid-six-figure deal for North American rights to Ali Fisher at Tor Teen, whose editorial vision for the book aligned with what Benton-Walker imagined. “Patrice was one of the first people in a professional setting to actually hear me when I brought up a concern and take action with my best interest at heart,” he says, “and I will never forget it.” As a Black writer with a Black agent, Benton-Walker notes that his experience collaborating with Caldwell was a far cry from working in corporate management consulting for 15 years, where he faced racism and homophobia. I was close to giving up when I asked myself, ‘Well, if you give up on this, what else are you going to do?’ ”īenton-Walker signed with Caldwell in 2019, and the pair reworked many aspects of Blood Debts, including bringing in an original magic system and fleshing out the historical background. “There were so many times where I thought it was not going to happen. “I can’t lie, it was hard,” Benton-Walker says of his years in the query trenches. He went on to write several adult and children’s manuscripts over the course of eight years, before a cold query to Patrice Caldwell, who was at the time an editor at Disney and is now an agent with New Leaf Literary & Media, landed him the opportunity to move forward. Their only chance at staying out of harm’s way is to reunite their drama-filled family and investigate a 30-year-old murder that tarnished their reputation and forced them off the throne of the magical world.īenton-Walker’s road to publishing began in 2010, when he wrote his first full-length adult novel he began querying in 2011. In the book, Black 16-year-old twins Clement and Cristina must put aside their personal differences when they realize that their mother’s sickness is the result of a hex placed on them by someone in the magical community who wants to see their family exterminated. Benton-Walker brings young Black heroes to the forefront of his YA debut, Blood Debts (Tor Teen), which is flooded with Southern culture, an extensive cast of diabolical characters, and a magical system inspired by Afro and Afro-Latinx rituals and practices.
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