BUILDING WORLDS WHERE BLACK WOMEN ARE MAGIC
With more than 20 books, vampires, ancient gods, supernatural huntresses and mythology spanning centuries, Delizhia Jenkins isn’t waiting for fantasy to make room for Black women. She’s creating the worlds herself.
BLACK WOMEN LIKE VAMPIRES TOO
Long before Delizhia Jenkins became an author, she was the girl fascinated by the stories other people sometimes thought were strange.
Vampires. Demons. Horror. Mythology. The supernatural. She loved all of it.
Growing up as a Black girl drawn to fantasy wasn’t always something other people understood.
Jenkins remembers being judged and occasionally treated like a “weirdo” because of the stories that captured her imagination.
Her response? She kept reading them. Then she started writing them.
“Black women love fairies too,” Jenkins says. “We like vampires too.
That simple truth became part of the foundation for a literary career that began professionally in 2013 and has now grown to approximately 22 books spanning urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, paranormal romance, horror and other supernatural worlds.
More importantly, Jenkins began creating the characters she wanted to see.
Black women weren’t going to stand outside the fantasy world looking in.
In her books, they would own it.
WHEN CHARACTERS START TALKING
Ask Jenkins where these worlds come from and the answer gets appropriately mystical. Sometimes, she says, the ideas feel like “downloads.” A character appears. An image takes shape. Then the research begins.
One idea led to Kalima, a Saturnian goddess imprisoned within Saturn itself. Jenkins began digging into the planet’s history and occult associations, and what started as an idea became a rabbit hole that ultimately took roughly five years to develop.
That blending of imagination, spirituality, research, history and mythology has become a signature of her storytelling.
Jenkins’ personal spiritual journey has also deeply influenced her work. After deconstructing from Christianity, she began studying texts, traditions and belief systems outside the religious framework she had previously known, eventually exploring African traditional religions, Egyptian spirituality and ancient mythology.
The deeper she went, the richer her fictional worlds became.
“Sometimes you have to hide gems in fiction,” she says.
BLOOD, GODDESSES & ANCIENT EGYPT
Her latest work, Blood of Sekhmet, dives directly into Egyptian mythology.
Sekhmet—the powerful lioness goddess associated with the Egyptian pantheon—becomes fertile ground for Jenkins’ fascination with power, destruction, balance and transformation.
Rather than borrowing mythology merely as decoration, Jenkins builds it into the DNA of her worlds.
Ancient gods and goddesses have histories.
Vampires have origins.
Characters carry mythology that existed long before the reader arrived.
And everything can connect.
Jenkins plans to weave elements of Blood of Sekhmet into another developing series, Fanged, creating the kind of interconnected storytelling universe that invites readers to keep going deeper.
MEET CAIN
Then there is Cain.
One of Jenkins’ personal favorites, Caine emerged from her Vampire Hunters Academy universe. After several books in the series, readers became so intrigued by the character that Jenkins decided he deserved his own story. Rather than presenting him simply as a villain, she went backward.
Who was he before? What happened to him? What turns a person into the monster everyone else eventually encounters? Inspired partly by the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Jenkins reimagined the mythology through a more human lens, examining whether someone seemingly destined to become a villain may have been set on that path long before he understood the consequences. The result became an origin story not only for Kane, but for the vampires inhabiting that world. His journey continues through Jenkins’ Vampire Hunters Academy Patreon as she develops the larger series.
FROM THE PAGE TO THE SCREEN
But Jenkins no longer sees these characters existing exclusively inside books.
She wants audiences to see them.
Understanding that social media has transformed the way audiences discover stories, Jenkins has begun creating visual content and even original theme music connected to her fictional worlds.
It allows potential readers to experience a glimpse of the atmosphere before opening the first page.
Technology has become another creative tool. Jenkins uses AI-generated visual experimentation to help imagine and promote aspects of her worlds while emphasizing that the writing itself remains hers. Her published covers, meanwhile, are developed with graphic designers.
But those visuals have awakened an even bigger ambition. “One of my dreams is to bring my books to film,” she says. Film. Television. Expanded visual storytelling.
For an author already thinking in characters, mythology, sound and imagery, the transition feels almost inevitable
THE NEXT UNIVERSE IS ALREADY COMING
Jenkins isn’t slowing down.
Among her upcoming projects is Sundown, a vampire horror story set in a sundown town with a chilling reversal: its white vampires prey specifically upon Black people. She is also developing the second installment of The Book of Obsidian, continuing Kalima’s story, as well as Mama, centered on an older vampire huntress embarking on what may be her final mission after her daughter is turned.
The latter is planned as a Mother’s Day release. There are more titles behind those. More characters. More worlds.
Jenkins took a year away to rethink her strategy, rebuild and determine where she wanted everything to go.
Now she describes herself as building “brick by brick.”
SOMEBODY IS GOING TO SEE IT
There is a noticeable certainty when Jenkins talks about what comes next.
Not if the books make it to the screen.
When.
“Somebody gonna see me,” she says. “Somebody gonna put this on film. These books are going on film.”
But underneath the ambition sits something much bigger than an adaptation deal.
Visibility. Jenkins understands what it meant to be the Black girl searching for herself inside genres she loved.
Now she can create what she once searched for.
The vampire huntress can be Black.
The goddess can be Black.
The woman wielding supernatural power can look like her.
And when Jenkins eventually writes the final sentence of her final book, she already knows what she wants the body of work to say.
That she was here.
That her imagination mattered.
And that Black women never needed permission to belong in fantasy.
“I want everyone to know, one, that I was here,” Jenkins says, “and number two, that Black women and Black voices matter.”
Twenty-plus books later, she’s making sure no one misses the message.
NAME: Delizhia Jenkins
CREATIVE WORLD: Urban Fantasy • Horror • Paranormal Romance • Contemporary Fantasy
PUBLISHING SINCE: 2013
BOOKS: Approximately 22 and counting
SIGNATURE OBSESSIONS: Vampires • Huntresses • Mythology • Ancient History • Gods & Goddesses • The Occult
LATEST WORLD: Blood of Sekhmet
FAN FAVORITE: Kane from the Vampire Hunters Academy universe
COMING NEXT: Sundown • The Book of Obsidian: Book Two • Mama + additional titles
BIG DREAM: Adapt her literary universes for film and television
CREATIVE MISSION: Put Black women and Black voices at the center of fantasy
PHILOSOPHY: Build it brick by brick until the world has no choice but to see it.