Michelle Grace knew how to write a hit before she knew how to write a bedtime story. The New York City native was placing No. 1 Billboard dance songs at twenty, building a career in music while, by her own account, slowly drifting away from herself. “I feel like I had been blinded before her,” she says of that period. “And now I’m so alive.”
The “her” is her daughter, Mira, whose name means “my reflection,” and whose arrival rerouted Grace’s creative life entirely. Her debut children’s book, I’m Right Here, arrives this month. It is a love letter to Mira built on a single image: two stars that always manage to find each other across a vast galaxy, the way a mother’s love travels whatever distance it must to reach her child and tell her she is safe.
Grace did not come to that image easily. She chose surrogacy to become a mother, a decision she describes as challenging in ways she did not expect. She compares the experience to adoption: the instinctive connection she assumed would arrive on its own did not, and at times she felt that both she and her daughter had been robbed of something. Her response was to study. She immersed herself in early childhood development and found, in play, the bridge she had been missing.
Storytelling became the ritual that closed the distance. Making up tales for Mira, Grace watched how a child’s imagination does real work, sorting the world, solving problems, learning other people. The household rule followed naturally. “Everything we do is a story,” she says. “Everywhere we go, I try to make it play.”
The book came out of that same unguarded place. “I wrote the book when I was completely in my feelings,” she says. “It was an outlet for me to just be creative and express how I’m feeling and freeze a moment in time.” She intends it as a tool as much as a story, a reminder to parents that what gets poured into the early years compounds, and that creativity is not a childhood phase to be outgrown but something that stays inside adults, waiting to be used again. Child development experts Dr. Vanessa Lapointe and Dr. Erica Komisar, along with award-winning author Gillian Sze, have endorsed the book.
Even the illustrations carry a small story of their own. Draft after draft from illustrators missed what Grace was picturing, until she realized the right artist was already in her life: the painter whose work hangs in her own office was the one who finally captured the book’s world.
I’m Right Here is an opening chapter rather than a one-off. A second book, My Wild Imagination, is scheduled for spring, following a girl named Anna whose companion, a red furry creature called her Wild Imagination, leads her through puddles as wide as the sea, down rainbows and into magical gardens, pausing along the way to learn butterfly. A third title, Welcome Home, Little Fairy, is also planned for spring. Grace deliberately chose a different illustrator for each book, wanting every world to be honored on its own terms.
Her days now run on the same fuel as her pages. When she is not writing or reviewing artwork, she is inventing characters and voices on the floor with Mira. “You sit on the floor with your kid, and you play with them, and you say nothing is more important than this right now,” she says. “My daughter reminds me every day to be a kid and follow my heart. To have a voice, be expressive, and not hold back.”
Grace hopes families take the permission as much as the stories: to play, to connect, to imagine together. More about the books is at michellegraceofficial.com.
