Episode 111: My Secret Joy with Rajani LaRocca

On this week Tricia speaks with award-winning author Rajani LaRocca about representation, STEM, creativity and much much more. Rajani LaRocca is a physician and award-winning author of books for young people. She was born in Bangalore, India, immigrated to the U.S. as a baby, and spent most of her childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, she trained in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she’s been working as a primary care internal medicine physician since 2001. She lives in eastern Massachusetts with her family and impossibly cute dog. Rajani has always been an omnivorous reader of novels, nonfiction, comic books, and cereal boxes. She is now an omnivorous writer of award-winning books for young readers: novels and picture books, fiction and nonfiction, in prose and poetry. Her middle grade novel in verse, Red, White, and Whole, won a 2022 Newbery Honor, the 2022 Walter Dean Myers Award, the 2022 Golden Kite Award, and the 2021 New England Book Award, as well as other honors. She is the author of numerous other acclaimed novels and picture books, including Midsummer’s Mayhem, Seven Golden Rings, and more. She also co-hosts the STEM Women in KidLit Podcast. The books Rajani read as a child helped shape who she is today in ways she’s still discovering. Books inspired her to pursue medicine, made her yearn to live in different worlds, and helped her consider what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. A lifelong book lover, she never saw herself in a book until she was an adult—and when she did, it was world-changing and mind-blowing. She believes that everyone deserves to see themselves in the pages of a book; that writing and reading diversely promotes empathy; and empathy makes the world a better place. Learn more about her at www.RajaniLaRocca.com and on Twitter and Instagram @rajanilarocca. Additional links discussed on the show this week: https://diversebooks.org/walter-winner-rajani-larocca-on-red-white-and-whole-and-being-caught-between-worlds/ https://stemwomenkidlit.buzzsprout.com/ https://www.rajanilarocca.com/novels/ Apply to be a leader of learning at Learning2 in 2023 https://learning2.org/ For a transcript of the episode: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gn3miiTNphDqnM9FFXjNs-3kGOy167Mshu07fr9RVtM/edit?usp=sharing