Kwame Alexander is an award-winning author of literature for children and young adults. Born in Manhattan, New York, in 1968, Alexander grew up in a family that valued literature—his father was a book publisher and scholar, and his mother was an educator—which shaped his commitment to writing accessible literature for reluctant readers. He attended 13 different schools over the course of his childhood and wrote his first poem at 13 (for his mother on Mother’s Day). Many of his novels contain characters around this age, exploring the challenges and joys of being a child and young adult. He later went to Virginia Tech, where he took a writing class from author Nikki Giovanni and decided to become a writer and poet.

Kwame Alexander has published 36 books. One of his most famous is The Crossover series, which includes The Crossover (2015), Booked (2016), and Rebound (2018); though published last, Rebound serves as a prequel to the other two installments. He has also written titles such as Solo (2017), Swing (2018, coauthored with Mary Rand Hess), Why Fathers Cry at Night (2023), and many more. Many of his novels are written in poetic verse; for the Crossover series, he stated that poetry was a medium that could “mirror the energy, the movement, the pulse of a

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