Indies Introduce Q&A with DeAndra Davis

DeAndra Davis is the author of All the Noise at Once, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce young adult selection, and May/June 2025 Kids’ Next List pick. 

Kalli King of Rediscovered Books in Boise, Idaho, served on the panel that selected Davis’ book for Indies Introduce.

“All the Noise at Once is a captivating read about Aiden — a Black, autistic teen — and his love of football, his struggle with identity, and his fight against injustice after a jarring experience with the police,” said King. “I cheered Aiden on to the very end.”

Kalli King: Hello, everyone. My name is Kalli King, and I am from Rediscovered Books in Boise, Idaho. Today, I am going to be in conversation with DeAndra Davis.

DeAndra Davis is New York-born and Florida-bred. She’s a hopeless musical theater nerd (Wicked is definitely her favorite), a perpetual student and teacher, and always trailed by a kid or a dog because she has way too many of both. She has an opinion for everything, an argument ready, and a hug for everyone, and she thinks you should, too. All the Noise at Once is her debut novel, on sale April 15, 2025, and we are here to discuss the novel and learn a little bit more about DeAndra. So DeAndra, hello!

DeAndra Davis: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited!

KK: Of course, I’m so excited to get to talk to you. I really loved reading your novel, and it was very inspirational to me. So I was wondering, what was your inspiration for telling this story?

DD: I think inspirations came from a couple different places, it’s kind of an amalgamation of things. One of the primary things, obviously, is myself — I myself am autistic — but I also have autistic kids. One of my kids specifically, was front of mind when I was thinking about the character of Aiden, and why Aiden needed to be who he was.

Outside of that, people like to ask me, “Why football?” Football is a big part of our lives. My husband used to play football and he’s one of the reasons I know anything about football — way too much about football, as far as I’m concerned.

When I first started getting the ideas for this, it was at the height of incidents of police brutality, especially when it came to people who were Black. One that absolutely stood out to me was here in Florida. There was a man who I believe was in a group home situation, and he was autistic, and he had gotten out. He had something in his hand, and he was in the middle of the street, and cops had him surrounded, guns pointed.

His caretaker is out there like, “He does not have a weapon. He is not dangerous. He is autistic. Please do not shoot.” They shot anyway. They hit the caretaker.

The only thing that I could think was that if his caretaker had not been there, this autistic man would have just been shot for nothing, right? I was thinking about that. I was thinking about identities, and the ways in which our identities compound and intersect and create unique situations that maybe other people would not be in.

And so all of that inspired the shape that this story has taken.

KK: That was one of the most intense parts in [the book] — the incidents with not only people of color, and an autistic boy, but they’re also minors. They’re all just kids, and these adult men on the police force come and assume the situation.

DD: And that’s inspiration for me. Even the idea of them being minors comes from, unfortunately, personal experience. I asked my husband about his first experience with a police officer. He said, “I was like, 10. I was playing outside. They came through and they slammed us on the ground. They were like, ‘Get your fat ass in the house.’ Just screaming at everybody.”

And he can remember that. 10 years old.

Stories like that make me think. I remember at the time, I was like, “Oh no.” My son, who is autistic, is 11, and so I’m just on eggshells — when is something going to happen? — and that’s such a horrible feeling. Even that was something I had to think about: How does a minor behave in this situation they really shouldn’t have to be dealing with?

KK: I also liked the fact that they’re a well-off family. They’re doing pretty well in life, and they are still going to be included in police brutality. They can still be affected by that.

There’s this stereotype that the people who are being targeted by police brutality, are criminals, or they’re poor, or they’re lower class. But these people are definitely not lower class. No one can escape this.

DD: That’s the message I want to send too. We think that we can exempt ourselves, and unfortunately, oftentimes we can’t. I was born in New York, but my mom moved us to Florida. She was like, “I wanted to make you guys safer,” and she put us in a gated community. That was the reason why I wrote it in a gated community — one of those big planned suburban communities behind a gate that you think is supposed to protect you. And to an extent, when you’re behind the gate, everything’s fine, right? Because most of the time police don’t come through there. They can’t just come and police the area freely. But when you’re past that gate, everything looks exactly the same. That was one of the things that I really wanted to explore. There is still a certain level of safety that we have to have, that maybe you wouldn’t have to worry about if you looked a little bit differently.

KK: What was the most challenging part when you were writing this story? What was hardest to write?

DD: As much as I say, “I picked football because I love football,” I am bad at things like this. I’m terrible at understanding where things are in space, how close something is to another thing. So having to write this character who essentially was the opposite of me and has this heightened sense of spatial awareness…their spatial awareness is amazing, and they have a great idea of like distance, of how far something is from something else, and how many yards they have to go here. I had to draw a lot of maps.

Even for fight scenes and scenes of confrontation. The only way for me to get through scenes like that is to draw maps of where people are standing or where someone would have a vantage point of something else.

I think that was the hardest thing, just figuring out where everything was in space. I drew a lot of maps because I’m bad at that.

 KK: I would never have known if you hadn’t said anything. Especially with the maps, it totally made sense to me that Aiden would imagine it in this way. Even outside of the football field, that mentality and picturing everything is set in that football idea.

So, you are going to be published soon. That’s so exciting! What has been your favorite part so far of getting published?

DD: This is a little bit of a cop out, but one of my favorite parts: I went to Winter Institute.

That was so fun. I’d never had an experience like that. I think that maybe the answer is the community that comes with this. I never expected such amazing community.

I think because, when you’re a writer, you feel like you’re just this little gremlin in a hole somewhere. You’re just tapping away at your computer in your little hidey-hole, just making words, and don’t expect it to bring you this amazing community. And it was great. It was invigorating. I had such an amazing time being around everyone. Everyone’s so encouraging. Booksellers are the nicest people in the world. It was just such an amazing experience, and I valued it so much. I still think about it. I still have my little name tag.

Truly, my favorite part of all of this has been gaining community, meeting people, being around people who are just as passionate about this sort of thing as I am — almost like a little collection of nerds, we just get together and have a good time.

KK: That’s basically all of Winter Institute. It’s just book nerds. That was so special getting to meet you in person there.

This is your first book. Do you have anything that’s on the docket? What’s your next project?

DD:  My next book, I’m really, really excited about. I think fans of this book are going to love it, but it’s also going to be a good one to bring in some new readers. It follows a female protagonist in sort of a bisexual awakening book. Outside of that, I think it’s a really beautiful book about dealing with parental abandonment, and dealing with hyphenated culture. My main character is Jamaican American. What does it feel like to not feel like you’re American enough in certain spaces, and also not feel like you’re Jamaican enough in certain spaces? How do you navigate that? How do you deal with that? It follows her through a summer of her trying to find her mother who abandoned her when she was a baby.

I promise, it’s so much more fun. In the same way that if I give someone the tagline for my debut, they go, “Oh, that sounds sad,” but then you read it, and you’re like, “Wait, there’s some fun in here too!”

There are games of Never Have I Ever, there’s breaking and entering, there’s Truth or Dare. There’s a lot of fun and a lot of self-discovery. I can’t lie, this one’s a little bit close to my heart, so I’m really excited about it.

KK: That sounds really good. I can’t wait to take a look at that. That’s exciting. I’m glad you have something else going on.

That’s the one thing that I really liked about the end of your novel. There’s a lot of hope, even though it’s a really difficult story, and there’s a lot of real life stories that don’t end well. This one gave me a lot of hope that people can make the right choices sometimes. It takes a community, but we can do it. We can do it together.

DD: I feel like you can’t write kidlit without hope. Genuinely, how can you do that to the kids? If you write kid lit, even if it’s in a difficult place, we have to show kids where it ends up: all of the hope. Everything that’s centered around that has to do with the kids. It’s not always what the adults are doing, it’s about what the kids are doing and the choices that they’re making. I want kids to know that you’re gonna screw something up. It might be big, it might be small, but you’re gonna screw something up. But even if you do, don’t think that you can’t come back from it.

The biggest lie that we tell is that we are defined by our worst mistakes, and I think that by setting those things in our head, we make it so that we can’t grow past anything. The most important things to tell kids is that you can continue to grow. You don’t have to be locked into anything. It is never too late to change something.

KK: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite things to say, especially to people coming into work. You’re gonna make mistakes, but just own up to them and keep learning from them. It’s okay to make mistakes, and when those mistakes are big and you feel ashamed, it can be really difficult. But you can build off of them and become a better person.

This is my last question. I love to ask authors this question, whenever I see them: what is on your nightstand? What are you reading?

DD: I am so basic. I am reading what the rest of the world is reading. I’m reading Oathbound with the rest of the world. Okay. I was reading Oathbound like the rest of the world, I just finished. But I am currently — again, like the rest of the world — reading Sunrise on the Reaping. Tracy Deonn and Suzanne Collins, they’re keeping me going right now while I do some drafting.

KK: I’m also reading Sunrise on the Reaping. You’re right. The whole world is reading that book right now. At our local library, there’s like 50 holds per copy of the book.

DD:  And it’s good, it’s good, that’s the thing. You know what? Suzanne, if you want to stay in hibernation and just give me new characters every so often, I’m good with that. Go back to everybody’s Hunger Games. I will pull up for every single one of those books.

KK: It was so great talking to you today. I’m so glad that we were able to meet and do this. I hope that your next project goes well, and again, the book All the Noise at Once comes out April 15. It will hit the shelves, and hopefully people will pick it up. I know I will be giving it to as many people as I can.

DD: Thank you so much.

KK: Yeah, thank you.

Find out more about the author at DeAndraDavis.com.

ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.