Kwame Alexander

Kwame Alexander was born on August 21, 1968, in New York City, and grew up in a household that vibrated with language, literature, and a deep reverence for the written word — his father, who was a publisher, instilled in him from an early age the belief that books and stories are transformative tools for building community and changing lives. Alexander attended Virginia Tech, where he earned a degree in English, and spent years working as a poet, educator, and literacy advocate before his fiction career launched him to the forefront of American children’s literature. He is the founder of Book-in-a-Day, a literacy program, and has championed reading and poetry in schools and communities across the United States and internationally.

Alexander’s breakthrough novel, The Crossover (2014), is a verse novel about twin brothers and basketball stars Josh and Jordan Bell, and the family tensions and personal crises that threaten to divide them during a crucial season. Written in tight, athletic verse that mirrors the rhythm and pace of the game it celebrates, the novel won the Newbery Medal, the Coretta Scott King Honor, and numerous other awards, establishing Alexander as one of the most important new voices in middle grade fiction. The novel demonstrated that verse fiction could carry the full emotional weight of a literary novel while being genuinely accessible to readers who might otherwise resist poetry.

Alexander has followed The Crossover with a succession of celebrated verse novels, including Booked (2016), about soccer and a young boy navigating his parents’ divorce, Solo (2017), a verse novel written in collaboration with Mary Rand Hess, and Rebound (2018), a prequel to The Crossover about Josh and Jordan’s father as a teenager. His picture book The Undefeated (2019), illustrated by Kadir Nelson, won the Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, making Alexander one of the very few authors to have won both the Newbery and the Caldecott in their career.

Alexander’s writing is celebrated for the musicality and energy of its verse, for its celebration of Black joy and family alongside its unflinching engagement with loss and hardship, and for the way it makes poetry feel natural and necessary rather than difficult or intimidating. He writes with a performer’s instinct for timing and rhythm and a teacher’s understanding of how to reach reluctant readers. Kwame Alexander is one of the most decorated and beloved figures in contemporary children’s literature, and his work continues to open the door to reading for countless young people who find in his poetry the permission to love language.