We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Myisha Haynes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Myisha below.

Myisha, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I had always created stories in my free time as a kid. I wrote and illustrated adventures and traded them with friends, making new worlds to explore and characters to fill them. But it wasn’t until after I finished grad school that I began working as a full-time artist. I took a class on creating art for mobile games, and had so much fun coming up with characters and environments that I looked for internships in the mobile game industry (which was experiencing a boom in 2014 in the Bay Area). I worked in the industry for almost ten years.

Myisha, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Creating stories that explore interesting worlds and dynamic characters has been something I’ve been passionate about since I could read a book. I love to explore dynamics in character interactions, especially giving Black and queer characters stories in genres where they had been underrepresented like fantasy and sci-fi. After being a game artist for nearly a decade, I worked as a freelance artist, creating multiple short comics in award-winning comic anthologies, illustrating graphic novels like Anne of West Philly, and working on upcoming graphic novels. I also teach 3rd-12th-grade writers and artists, leading workshops and classes that help them to produce published work.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

As a kid, I loved creative writing and illustration, but after elementary school, I largely did this on my own. Now, as an adult, I work for 916 Ink, a creative writing program aimed at making students published authors, facilitating weekly writing workshops and summer writing programs I would have loved to participate in as a kid.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

After ten years of working in the mobile game industry, I was laid off and had to figure out what it was I wanted to do. Go back? Find a different field to pursue? But the industry was becoming increasingly hard to find work in, and I had been working on my webcomic, The Substitutes, and illustrated Anne of West Philly before then. I decided to pivot to freelancing fulltime, working on selling my art at conventions local and otherwise, and continue working on my first solo graphic novel, while also beginning brainstorming my next one. I also realized I enjoyed teaching youth about the process of being a professional creative, and worked to find ways to pursue that in working at 916 Ink.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://myishahaynes.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/palaceofposey/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myisha-haynes-330b9b19/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSV6OFYClXlJHgOU8v3GYWw
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@palaceofposey

Image Credits

TJ Alexander