Greensboro, NC — La-Donia Alford-Jefferies, a North Carolina A&T graduate, has written a children’s book about the HBCU homecoming experience. She enjoyed her previous homecoming experiences so much that so she decided to share it with other children through the book entitled Homecoming.
The idea first came to La-Donia when she was pregnant with her first child. She was then living in Cincinnati, Ohio, too far to return to Greensboro, North Carolina for A&T’s homecoming. So she thought of another way to pass the memories and describe the uniqueness of a Black college homecoming to her own children and other children as well.
She tried looking for books and found a lot of children’s books about HBCUs, but none particularly about HBCU homecoming experience. That’s when she decided to write and self-publish her own book about the topic – a 26-page children’s book.
The book tells the story of two African-American parents who brought their three young children to their first homecoming where they visit the fraternity and sorority plots and the buildings where their parents took classes. In the story, the family also enjoy a football game, the drum major, and eat fried food at a tailgate party.
“This may be the teacher part of me, but I remember thinking I want young children to have a book with characters that look like them and characters that they can relate to in terms of what’s happening in their community,” Alford-Jefferies told Greensboro News & Record.
The book was largely inspired by North Carolina A&T, where she graduated college and attended preschool. Her mother was a college professor then and her father was also an A&T graduate. It is also where she met her husband.
Since the book’s launch, she has already sold 1,000 copies. She was overwhelmed by her first book’s success and said, “This has exploded. I just did not see this coming in this time frame.”
La-Donia, who is now a high school biology teacher and a mother of 2 kids, is currently conceptualizing her next book. She also hopes more parents will use her first book to help their children know what goes on in college.
“I just want kids to be excited about college,” she said. “If homecoming is what does it, fine by me.”