Winter Institute Speaker Kwame Alexander on Writing, Bookselling, and Empowering Young Minds

Newbery Award-winning author and literacy advocate Kwame Alexander will deliver the breakfast keynote “The Idea Business: A Life Spent Writing and Selling Books” on Tuesday, January 26, the final day of Winter Institute 2016 in Denver, Colorado.

“I really want to share a little bit about my experience, my background in bookselling and publishing, and how that has shaped and molded my writerly life,” Alexander said in a recent conversation with Bookselling This Week.

While on the path to becoming a writer, Alexander held several jobs in the book business, including working with his parents, who owned a bookselling company that sold books at trade shows and conventions. “I didn’t really have a choice,” said Alexander. “I would work those conferences and events and shows and stand behind a table, because you could not sit down — my father would not let us sit because customers wanted to see you standing.”

Eventually, Alexander’s parents started a book publishing company, where he and his sisters worked from a very early age. “I licked stamps for catalogs to be mailed out. I worked trade shows. I learned how to sell books,” said Alexander. And he did get paid — his first commission check was for $13.60, a lot of money for a 10-year-old at the time, he noted.

After high school, Alexander enrolled in college at Virginia Tech, where he studied medicine. “I wanted to get as far away from literature and publishing as possible. It was all I knew. We were immersed in books,” he said. “When you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily want to be proofreading a catalog. You want to be watching TV and playing outside.”

It was poet and professor Nikki Giovanni’s teachings on Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes that inspired Alexander to switch his major to English. “That was the beginning of my falling in love with books again,” said Alexander, “because there was a time when I was in love with it.”

Alexander has written and published poetry and prose for many years, but winning the Newbery Medal for the Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children earlier this year for The Crossover (HMH Books for Young Readers) was a career-changing event.

As his 18th book, The Crossover took five years to write, “and there was never a day that I ever questioned that this was the best thing I had ever written,” he said. “I knew that I put everything I had into it. I didn’t feel like I had left anything on the table. I feel that it embodied everything I had to bring.”

The energy and passion he brought to the pages of The Crossover has connected with young readers. Alexander has heard from many of them that the novel, which tells through rapid free-verse poetry the story of basketball-playing twins Josh and Jordan as they grow up on and off the court, has become a catalyst to get them reading again.

“All the attention, all the work, all the inspiration, all of my experience in poetry and working with young people — all that made its way into the book, and it worked,” he said. “I don’t know if I set out to do that, but I know that I’ve always been about trying to inform and inspire young people, and that was reflected in this book in the most profound way that I have ever done.”

But even with that kind of confidence in what he had written, Alexander never expected to get the call in February informing him he had won a Newbery Award.

“For 23 years, my writing career has been a jet plane on a runway. As each year goes by, as each book is published, my plane travels a little bit faster on the ground, picking up speed along the way,” he explained. “When you get that kind of call, that’s when the plane takes off. You rise. I’ve been soaring 30,000 feet above the ground since February 2.”

Alexander will add to his18 books already published with three new titles released in 2016: the picture book Surf’s Up, illustrated by Daniel Miyares, due out in February from NorthSouth Books; a multimedia toolkit for teachers called Kwame Alexander’s Page-to-Stage Writing Workshop, to be published in March from Scholastic; and Booked, a middle-grade follow-up to The Crossover, coming out in April from HMH Books for Young Readers.

Beyond his career as a writer, Alexander uses his writing and book publishing experience to engage in two initiatives to bring reading to young people across the globe: the Book-in-a-Day program and the Literacy Empowerment Action Project.

“I was raised to understand that being an artist and being a writer is much more than doing the literary work of writing and creating art. You have to love this kind of life, where you have something real and authentic to write about, and that your writing, ultimately, is done to empower. And in my case, it’s done to empower young people,” he said.

Through the Book-in-a-Day program, Alexander visits schools throughout the country to teach the fundamentals of creative writing and book publishing. The events are a combination of readings, poetry performances, creative writing, and workshopping, at the end of which students produce a book of their creative pieces. Since its inception, the program has created more than 3,000 student authors, who have produced 55 anthologies of poetry and fiction.

Upon his return from a trip to Ghana in 2012, Alexander launched the Literacy Empowerment Action Project, corralling a team of five writers and professionals to bring literacy, school improvement, and youth development to the village of Konko. The organization continues today to work toward improving literacy standards in developing countries.

“You can’t empower unless you’re empowered. And so how do you empower yourself? How do you create the best self you can?” said Alexander. “That comes from being an active participant in making the world a better place. There’s nothing more empowering than making the world better. For me, that’s teaching kids — wherever you are — the joy and power of language and literature and how it can empower them.”

“I get why kids think that reading books isn’t cool, because I was that kid. But I figured out what would’ve worked for me, and I try to be that force,” said Alexander, who gives his parents credit for much of the inspiring work he is doing today. “I may not have enjoyed their methodology, but it worked. I’m building on what they started.”

Kwame Alexander will deliver the Winter Institute breakfast keynote “The Idea Business: A Life Spent Writing and Selling Books” on Tuesday, January 26, 2016, in the Plaza Ballroom at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, Colorado.