Natoya Perkins

Natoya Perkins was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1981. She graduated from high school but was not successful in any

of her examinations. She was encouraged by her mother, Esther Perkins, to start looking for a job as she will not become a housewife under her roof. Natoya got up and did just that (look for jobs). Without any high school subjects, she got a job to teach as a kindergarten teacher at the age of eighteen. She taught kindergarten (basic school) for eleven years. During this time, she was going back to school part-time to get her high school matriculation and her college diploma. She acquired a teacher’s diploma in early childhood education at Saint Joseph’s Teachers’ College in Jamaica. Natoya then started working at an elementary (primary) school in 2010. In 2012, she started her studies to receive her bachelor’s degree in primary education at the International University of the Caribbean in Jamaica. Five years later, she went to live in Japan (Sapporo-shi) where she taught English at the junior high school level, and she spent only two and a half years there. In 2019, Natoya Perkins then set out to another adventure in the United States of America to teach elementary kids. Before she moved to the United States of America in 2019, she had always felt she had stories to tell about her life’s journey. So one day in 2017, while living in Japan, she wrote this book. Her first children’s picture book, Nina and Anna—A Friend to Call My Own. The book was not submitted to a publisher, however, until August 2021. This was possible because she met a fellow author online who showed her how to start the process of publishing her book. She is looking forward to writing more books in the future.