We stayed in Accra, the capital, and saw five-star hotels and restaurants, but we also went out to really rural areas, no running water, no electricity, and took bucket showers. And I had the chance to study abroad on a month-long program in Ghana.

There are so many stories embedded in that. My focus specifically was political violence about power, how people gain power, how they take it away, how they justify taking it away. I studied political science and African and African American studies. How did that academic experience set you up for what came after? And there’s a stigma around going to big state universities, but it ended up being great in the honors program. That does seem like a powerful gesture from an administrator.īetween the financial aid - no other school was really that competitive in that regard - and that, I decided to go there. And he was like, “Well, I tell you what, if you come to U of A, we will take care of you.” That really struck me and had a big impression on me. He said, “Have you made a decision?” And I said no. He was head of the multicultural affairs office at the time. I remember distinctly, April 2011, I didn’t know where I was gonna go to school. I felt a tremendous pressure - like, where I go to school is going to dictate the trajectory of my life. ’Cause I had nothing better to do.Īpparently because you’re a writer and you like writing applications and that’s just what you do.

Rest assured, she’s around.) Rather, the self-described introvert is hitting her stride only after years of rudderless solitude that forced her to write her way through, drawing from her experiences in Little Rock, Fayetteville and Ghana to spin undiscovered worlds. (You might also assume from her given Twitter location, Wakanda, that she isn’t in the 501.

To follow her on Instagram or on Tiktok, where Gray shows off an obvious knack for wit and timing, you’d assume she was born for the spotlight. In a very short order, the University of Arkansas grad went from studying historical power struggles in a tower of Old Main to becoming a power player herself. “A dazzling debut,” Kirkus called “Beasts of Ruin.” Netflix agreed and snagged it into development for a feature film. That fateful tweet got her an agent the agent got her a deal with Putnam. For Gray, who moved to Little Rock from Atlanta as a young teen, and who calls Little Rock home now, the rise from a total unknown - pitching her epic in 2019 via a Twitter hashtag - has been meteoric.

Beasts of ruin ayana gray