Kwame Alexander

Author

• Born: August 21, 1968
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Kwame Alexander is a best-selling and critically acclaimed American author and literary advocate. He is best known for his poetry and fiction for children and young adults, including his breakthrough 2014 young-adult verse novel The Crossover, which won the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor.

Background

Kwame Alexander was born in the Manhattan Borough of New York City in 1968. He developed his love of reading and writing from his parents. His father was a publisher who wrote educational books, and his mother was an English teacher. Alexander and his two sisters and one brother grew up around numerous books. He read nearly everything he could get his hands on when he was a child. Some of his favorite authors were Eric Carle, Lucille Clifton, Eloise Greenfield, Shel Silverstein, Lee Bennett Hopkins, and Langston Hughes.

However, by fifth grade, Alexander started to dislike reading. He blamed his father and schools for forcing him to read books that he had no interest in, so he instead decided to focus on other hobbies. He began to play basketball and football. A short time later, Alexander read The Greatest: My Story, boxer Muhammad Ali's autobiography. He read the entire book in one night. Alexander credited the book for helping him regain his love of reading.

Alexander then became interested in poetry and wrote a poem for his mother when he was twelve. He began to read more poetry and soon fell in love with the form, especially the way poems could say so much with so little. However, Alexander did not imagine himself pursuing a writing career.

Alexander attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he studied medicine. He continued to write poetry as a hobby—he wrote mostly to girls to try to get dates. One of his professors, poet Nikki Giovanni, inspired him to consider a career as a writer. He mulled it over and spoke with his parents about it. His father was unsupportive at first, only because he wanted to know if his son was serious. His mother encouraged him to follow his dreams. Alexander decided to try to build a career writing poetry.

Life's Work

In the mid- to late 1990s, Alexander served as an editor for several works, including the poetry collection The Flow: New Black Poetry in Motion (1994), the book Tough Love: Cultural Criticism & Familial Observations on the Life and Death of Tupac Shakur (1996), and the collection 360°: A Revolution of Black Poets (1998). He also wrote his own poems. His first published collections were Just Us: Poems and Counterpoems 1986–1995 (1995) and Kupenda: Love Poems (2000). He also delved into nonfiction with the how-to manual Do the Write Thing: 7 Steps to Publishing Success (2002).

From the mid- to late 2000s, Alexander continued to develop his poetry. He released the collections Dancing Naked on the Floor (2005), Crush: Love Poems (2007), An American Poem (2008), and And Then You Know: New and Selected Poems (2008) and edited The Way I Walk: Short Stories and Poems for Young Adults (2006) and Family Pictures: Poems and Photographs Celebrating Our Loved Ones (2007).

Inspired by his daughter, to whom he read every night, he then decided to focus on writing for children and young adults. He published the children's picture books Indigo Blume and the Garden City (2010) and Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band (2011), both of which were nominated for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award. His next work was a fiction book for young adults called He Said, She Said (2013). The book details a romance between two high school students, told in parts by each character.

Alexander then had an idea for a different kind of young adult fiction book. He wanted to blur the line between fiction and poetry. He wanted to write poetry in a way that made it appealing to young readers. In 2014, he published The Crossover, which focuses on two brothers who love to play basketball. Alexander wrote the book in verse, using several different forms of poetry to make the pages of the book look like he wanted them to sound. One section uses a text message in haiku form to tell the story. Another uses a conversation in couplets (two-line stanzas) and tercets (three-line stanzas). He also used the words creatively, making use of diagonal text, font size, and bolding to get a particular picture across to readers. He also wanted to leave young readers with a message at the end, much like the advice that he received from his father while he was growing up. The Crossover was a hit with both readers and critics. Alexander received the prestigious Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor for the book.

Alexander took a similar approach with his next project, Booked, also a sports book written in verse. Published in 2016, the novel focuses on a young soccer player who deals with bullying at school and divorce at home. Alexander also released the children's picture books Surf's Up (2016) and Ark: Celebrating our Wild World in Poetry and Pictures (2017), and the nonfiction work The Playbook: 52 Rules to Aim, Shoot, and Score in This Game Called Life (2017). For the poetry collection Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets (2017), he collaborated with fellow poets Marjory Wentworth and Chris Colderly as well as illustrator Ekua Holmes.

Over the following years, Alexander continued to publish many works and earn widespread recognition as an important author. Many critics especially noted his ability to tackle serious subjects in a way that makes them interesting and accessible to young people. His children's book The Undefeated (2019), which celebrates Black American culture, won a Newbery Honor (as well as multiple awards for illustrator Kadir Nelson). His poetry collection Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope (2020) was praised for its examination of landmark social events such as the election of President Barack Obama and racial justice protests. His young-adult historical novel The Door of No Return (2022) looks at the brutal reality of the slave trade.

In 2023, a television adaptation of The Crossover debuted on the streaming service Disney+. Alexander served as a writer as well as showrunner and executive producer for the show, which won an Emmy Award for outstanding young teen series. The following year, Alexander's picture book An American Story (2023) won a Coretta Scott King Award for its illustrations by Dare Coulter.

Alexander also published Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances in 2023. This collection emerged during times that were personally troubling to the author. His mother died in 2017. Within months, his second marriage was ending after twenty-three years, and by 2020, he was estranged from his elder daughter, who was then a young adult. He was working on his next poetry collection when his editor pointed out that the work he had created felt like a memoir. Realizing the truth in that statement, he re-examined what he had written and continued in that vein. He also launched a Why Fathers Cry at Night podcast, in which he spoke to other fathers, husbands, and sons.

Alexander also launched a production company, Big Sea Entertainment. He was developing a reality show, America's Next Great Author.

Impact

A prolific and accomplished writer of poetry, young adult fiction, children's literature, and more, Alexander emerged as an influential literary voice of the early twenty-first century. One of the key goals throughout his work is to make literature, and especially poetry, approachable for readers of all ages. In his young adult novels, he uses the visuals, movements, and rhythms of poetry to get a message across to readers. He uses distinct poetic forms to help move the story. Alexander also became known for his success in using accessible, engaging writing for children and young adults to introduce young readers to complex social topics.

In addition to his own writing, Alexander gained a reputation as a dedicated advocate of reading and writing. He cofounded the Literacy Empowerment Action Project (LEAP), an organization that built a library and provided literacy training to teachers in Ghana, and the Book-in-a-Day literacy initiative, which inspired Kwame Alexander's Page-to-Stage Writing Workshop, published by Scholastic. In 2023, he was appointed artistic director of literary arts at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit educational organization.

Personal Life

Alexander has been married and divorced. He has two daughters, Samayah and Nandi.

Bibliography

"About." Kwame Alexander, kwamealexander.com/about/kwame/intro/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Alexander, Kwame. "Poet Kwame Alexander Reflects on 'Why Fathers Cry at Night.'" Interview by Terry Gross. National Public Radio, 1 June 2023, www.npr.org/2023/06/01/1179421403/poet-kwame-alexander-reflects-on-why-fathers-cry-at-night. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Barron, Christina. "Kwame Alexander Aims to Win Readers Who Are at the Age He Hated Books." Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kwame-alexander-aims-to-win-readers-who-are-at-the-age-he-hated-books/2015/11/18/49481786-83c0-11e5-8ba6-cec48b74b2a7‗story.html?utm‗term=.a7e1bd4ce2b1. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

"How to Get Kids Hooked on Books? 'Use Poetry. It Is a Surefire Way.'" NPR, 3 Apr. 2016, www.npr.org/2016/04/03/472859082/how-to-hook-kids-on-books-try-poetry. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

"Kwame Alexander." African American Literature Book Club, aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author‗name=Kwame+Alexander. Accessed 21 June 2024.

"Kwame Alexander." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kwame-alexander. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

"Transcript from an Interview with Kwame Alexander." AdLit.org, www.adlit.org/transcript‗display/64542. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.