Shetterley's father was a NASA engineer and her mom worked as an English professor at Hampton University in Virginia, so she grew up in the same neighborhood where many of these maverick women resided.

Then suddenly things at Langley became a bit more colorful, and of course, inspiring. These former school teachers and beautiful minds, who were relegated to math instruction in the segregated South, were called into service during the labor shortages of the war. The book starts with World War II and travels through the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the space race, providing a fly-on-the-wall style account of the women who helped create some of the greatest aeronautics accomplishments for the United States. 'I was like, 'Yeah, OK, whatever, right,' but everything she said every step along the way has really come to fruition,' Shetterly said. So much so that she didn't believe the movie's producer, Donna Gigliotti ('Silver Linings Playbook'), when she expressed interest in the story. Seeing such boldface names attached to a film adaptation of her book was quite the shock for Shetterly. Henson as Katherine Johnson, a physicist, space scientist, and mathematician Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, a mathematician Janelle Monae as Mary Jackson, also a mathematician and Kevin Costner as Al Harrison, the head of the space program. The movie, which is expected to be a blockbuste r success, will star Taraji P. Shetterly's book, which will be released Tuesday, will also be adapted into a 20th Century Fox film of the same name that will hit theaters in early 2017. 'The history that came together in these pages wasn't so much hidden, but unseen - fragments patiently biding their time in footnotes, family anecdotes and musty folders before returning to view.' 'The title of this book is something of a misnomer,' Shetterly noted.

In the 1940s, these female scientists and mathematicians were the human computers behind some of the biggest advancements in aeronautics. ' Hidden Figures,' Shetterly's first book, is the story of the nearly forgotten black women who worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's first field center, circa World War II. She may begin, before drifting into dreamland, to compute the distance her caregiver's love has to travel to reach the moon and then return to her.Īnd if author Margot Lee Shetterly has her way, when that little girl awakens from her slumber, she'll learn the names of the women who helped charter that journey.

Somewhere tonight, a little girl will be tucked in and told that she is 'loved to the moon and back.'

Shetterly margot lee