Zakiya N. Jamal: You Can’t Fix a Blank Page
In this interview, author Zakiya N. Jamal discusses challenging the female virgin trope in her new romance, Sparks Fly.
Zakiya N. Jamal was born in Queens, raised in Long Island, and currently resides in Brooklyn. In other words, she’s a New Yorker through and through. She holds a BA in English from Georgetown University and a MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Writing for Children and Young Adults from The New School. Her debut novel If We Were a Movie will be published in 2025 by HarperTeen. Follow her on X (Twitter), Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Zakiya discusses challenging the female virgin trope in her new romance, Sparks Fly, how she incorporated the subject of AI into the story, and more.
Name: Zakiya N. Jamal
Literary agent: Thao Le
Book title: Sparks Fly
Publisher: Berkley
Release date: December 2, 2025
Genre/category: Romance
Previous titles: If We Were a Movie
Elevator pitch: A late bloomer goes to a sex club in the hopes of finally losing her V-card only to stumble into love instead.
What prompted you to write this book?
As a lover of romance, I wanted to play with the female virgin trope. Often in straight, or straight presenting, romance novels, the virgin female main character (FMC) is portrayed as innocent or “pure.” Someone who’s unfamiliar with sex or her own sexuality. Typically, they’ve never had an orgasm before. As a late bloomer myself, while that may be true for some, it certainly isn’t true for all so, I wanted to explore a different kind of experience where the FMC knows what she wants and is in touch with her sexuality she just hasn’t found the right person to explore that with yet.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I think I first start drafting what would eventually become Sparks Fly in 2022. Originally, I was calling it I Want You to Want Me (I love song titles as book titles) and Stella worked at a magazine called Entertainment Monthly (a rip on Entertainment Weekly) and Max was the CEO of the entire magazine publisher that was supposed to be a fictionalized version of Time, Inc., which no longer exists. However, my agent noted that female leads in romcoms are always journalists, so she suggested I go a different route with Stella’s career. She suggested publishing, but I currently work in publishing, so that felt a little too close to home for me. So, I placed Stella at Yellow Sparks, which is a fictionalized version of BuzzFeed, where I did work briefly 10 years ago. Some would argue Stella’s still a journalist, but it was fun tapping into the digital media space that doesn’t really exist anymore as it did when I worked in it. The premise of Stella meeting Max at the sex club never changed.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Not really. I’ve worked in publishing for almost 10 years now, so I knew a lot about the process going into it—that’s definitely helped me go through this whole journey.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I think the biggest surprise for me has been the AI plot and how much it resonates with people now. When I decided to make AI a big plot point of the book it, definitely wasn’t as hot a topic as it is now, and it’s what many people find interesting about the book, which I think is a great stroke of luck on my part. I mainly pulled in the AI plot because I had been doing research on BuzzFeed since it’d been so long since I worked there. One of the things that popped up was BuzzFeed getting called out for having AI-written articles. I thought that was interesting and then at the same time at my day job AI was also becoming a topic of conversation, so it felt like a good thread to tie into the story. I also wanted Max to have a smidge of distance from Stella’s job, so I changed him from being the CEO of the company she worked for to the brother of the CEO. And he needed a new job, so the AI company fit in perfectly.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope late bloomers and Black queer people feel seen. I really wrote this book for them.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Authors always say this but truly my biggest piece of advice is to keep writing. Unfortunately, the only way the book will get done is by writing it, so even when it feels hard and you think everything you write is terrible, keep going. You can’t fix a blank page!
