School Of Rock

Newbery medalist Kwame Alexander on music, race, and the power of poetry.

- Michael Mechanic

WHEN KWAME ALEXANDER talks, you can sense something just under the surface—laughter, maybe, or swagger— dying to burst forth. It’s the same vibe the 12-year-old protagonist of his Newbery Medal-winning 2014 novel- in-verse, The Crossover, exudes on the basketball court. (Alexander, 48, was a baller himself: “I was No. 1 on the tennis team,” he says. “I beat everybody.”) Raised in New York City and later Virginia by literary types—publisher dad, English teacher mom—Alexander has produced two dozen titles, from a collection of Tupac essays he edited to poetry volumes and children’s picture books. Solo, out August 1, is a young-adult novel co-written with the children’s author and editor Mary Rand Hess. Using poems as a vehicle, Alexander and Hess follow 17-year-old Blade Morrison, the scion of a profligate Los Angeles rock star, as he stumbles along a path of self-discovery leading to Ghana—to the same remote village, in fact, where Alexander co-founded a nonprofit that provides books, teacher training, and literacy programs for children.

MOTHER JONES: Many Americans think of poems as something to pull out for weddings and funerals. Were you surprised The Crossover was a slam dunk?

KWAME ALEXANDER: I wasn’t. I spent the last 20 to 30 years performing poetry in schools or at churches and universities. I got standing ovations or fourth- graders asking me to autograph their hands or people in church saying, “Amen. Hallelujah!” I courted my girlfriend back in 1998 by writing her a poem a day for a year—and she married me.

MJ: She’d better have!