Margot Lee Shetterly

Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother's sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents' college alumni associations.

For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.

A lot of times, we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work... and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don't often capture that or write about it.

The success of 'Hidden Figures' proves that people are interested in, hungry for, stories about transcendent human experiences.

There is so much talent among our young people; I hope the women in 'Hidden Figures' inspire them.

I guess it's inevitable that I would become somebody who would write about scientists.

As a callow 18-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be.

My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist.

Five of my father's seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists, and some of his best buddies - David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton - carved out successful engineering careers at Langley.

The Russians had got a real head-start into space; America was playing catch-up.

My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.

I remember 'The Norfolk Journal and Guide,' which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.

I started to think of 'Hidden Figures' as the first part of a mid-century African-American trilogy.

Growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.

It has been very rare to see a black woman as a protagonist. And also as three-dimensional people - mathematicians, mothers, wives, complicated people, not perfect.

I'm not a scientist or a mathematician.

How do we fill the need for technology workers, people who have computer skills and math and science skills? How do we get a more diverse science workforce? These are all issues - I would look at these documents that were from the '50s and '60s and '70s, and you'd swear they were written two weeks ago because the issues are the same.

I was surprised how little I knew about the significant contributions to aviation that had happened right there in Hampton, Virginia.

As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.

I want to keep telling stories of ordinary people.

History happens as soon as I pick up my coffee cup - it happened 30 seconds ago. It's history.

We want the big stories, of course, of the great men, but there's as much drama and interest and lessons to be learned in actions that people like us take on a daily basis.

My dad worked at NASA his whole career; he's a research scientist.

I knew a lot of black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and female mathematicians and engineers, women of all backgrounds. So this idea that anyone could be an engineer, a mathematician, or whatever, was something that I had grown up with and thought was really normal.

I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.