Many of Alexander’s works are thematically centered around family, a love of knowledge, and friendship, like his 2013 novel He Said, She Said, which follows the unlikely romance between high-school football star Omar “T-Diddy” Smalls and socially conscious humanitarian Claudia Clarke. Since then, he’s released Booked, The Playbook, and Solo, which he wrote with Mary Rand Hess, along with children’s books Animal Ark and Surf’s Up. Thanks to his 2014 novel The Crossover, which earned Kwame a Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Award, the literary world has followed his career with a newfound vigor. Of course, his work in the creative writing field hasn’t gone unnoticed. Throughout the next decade, Alexander put out the occasional book, like 2005’s Dancing Naked on the Floor, and in 2006 created the Book-in-a-Day program, which is a day long workshop that acts as a crash course for kindergarten through 12th grade students in writing and publishing. He was a creative writing teacher, a poet, and an independent book publisher, before releasing his first book in 1999, a love poem collection titled Crush. Now, almost a decade and a half later, he’ll headline the second annual Black Ink Book Festival, using another platform to continue to instill a love of reading into his audience, no matter the age.īeginning his career in the ’90s, Alexander took a handful of jobs that embraced the written word. “My life as a writer and being inspired enough to want to write about what’s happening around me, to me, is linked directly to my interaction with young people, because I think they are my inspiration,” says Alexander. Really, it was just his way of giving back. “The children ended up writing poems and publishing a book,” says Alexander. Arriving at the MOJA Festival with a head full of poems, he delivered a presentation to a group of six- and seven-year-olds at the Dock Street Theatre and hosted a writing workshop for the kids.

The first time award-winning author and poet Kwame Alexander visited Charleston was in 2003.

He said she said by kwame alexander