Irenosen Okojie has never been able to escape stories.

Not when she was a child in Nigeria, learning about the ancestral kingdoms of the Benin dynasty at her father’s feet, his tales planting seeds in her subconscious about what it meant to be forever alive through literature. Not when she arrived at her coquettishly upper-class boarding school in England, spending hours escaping to the local library. Not in law school where she dragged herself through her studies in a bid to replicate the ever-fabulous lifestyle of her pop culture crush Blaire Underwood. 

“I was surrounded by stories growing up. They were the only constant throughline in my life. It didn’t matter where I was or what else I was supposed to be doing, they always found a way to me. I could never resist them.”