Every other year, VHHS gets a special appearance from an author. In the past, writers such as Jason Reynolds,Samira Ahmed, and Neal Shusterman have visited VHHS. This year, VHHS selected Huda Fahmy, 2023 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature finalist. She is a Muslim-American graphic novelist and is the creator of many comics and graphic novels including “Yes I’m Hot in This”, “Huda F Are You”, and “That Can Be Arranged”.
VHHS librarian Monica Caldicott believes that having an author visit your school is something very exciting and special for students.
“It is a really amazing, cool thing to meet an author celebrity. When you read someone’s book, you think you know their characters and you think you know what happened in that book. But when you get to meet the author…you understand more than you could from the page,” Caldicott said.
Two years ago, Samira Ahmed, author of “Hollow Fires” and “This Book Won’t Burn”, visited VHHS. At this visit, Ahmed mentioned being hired for a Marvel graphic novel series known as “Ms. Marvel”. Caldicott said VHHS students were excited to learn that Ahmed was going to be writing a graphic novel.
“I thought to myself two years ago…‘That’s it. I’m having a graphic novelist next time,’” Caldicott said.
With help from fellow staff member Colleen Kennedy, Caldicott began to search for a graphic novelist to visit VHHS in 2024. This was when she came across the book “Huda F are You”, which was nominated for the Illinois Teen Choice Award at the time.
“You’re just rooting for Huda the whole time. She’s funny, she’s smart, she’s kind of snappy and witty. She loves her family, but then sometimes she hates her family. It just seems like she is the person that I really wanted to meet, and it was so fun to have Huda F’s creator with us,” Caldicott said.
According to Huda Fahmy, her favorite part about drawing graphic novels is making the facial expressions for each of the characters and inking out the drawings.
“I get to look in the mirror and make these funny faces, and then try to figure out how I can draw them out the way I want. That’s probably the most fun,” Fahmy said.
Fahmy said she received much of her inspiration from other authors and graphic novelists, including “American Born Chinese” and “Smile”.
One author that Fahmy mentioned was Svetlana Chmakova, the author of “Brave”. “[Svetlana Chmakova] had a Muslim character on the cover. It was so cool to see that. Reading those kinds of graphic novels to get myself in the headspace of writing my own graphic novel was really helpful, and they definitely inspired me,” Fahmy said.
Fahmy’s first book in her Huda F series is “Huda F Are You”, which narrates her character’s move to a new neighborhood with a higher Muslim population. Moving to Dearborn, Michigan was a big change for Fahmy as a young high schooler. At the time, she wasn’t too thrilled about the move.
“I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t be my own person…It felt like no matter where I went, I had people watching me and watching my every move, and it was criticized,” Fahmy said.
However, Fahmy now has a much more positive outlook on the move and is happy her family moved to Dearborn. She mentioned that if she didn’t move, she was worried that she would have forgotten her culture and she wouldn’t work as hard to remember where she came from.
Hijabi awareness is something that Fahmy feels strongly about, and it is one of the main reasons why she writes these stories. Although there has been a lot more awareness, Fahmy still feels that society has a long way to go before much of the hostility towards hijabs is gone.
“[Society] looked at us as if we were one thing…almost like a centralized monolith: ‘so, people who wear hijab must be like this’. [Society doesn’t] see us for the people that we are, the individuals that we are, living our own lives and having our own interests,” Fahmy said.