Author Kwame Alexander was bred to be a master of words. While his father was working towards a doctorate from Columbia university, he would make 11-year-old Alexander read his PHD dissertations. The topics—African-american religious and educational implications of the work of Adam Clayton Powell, Richard Allen, and Elijah Muhammad—was far from casual reading. Although he says his father’s work was palpable text, it was his mother that added the fun, introducing him to poetry and African folk tales.
“My father said I was an experiment,” says Alexander, who is indeed a literary cyborg. “He said your mother and I wanted to figure out how to create a critical thinking, intelligent, confident, creative writer who was kind and compassionate, and could walk around in this world, knowing his worth."
Alexander, who has authored 41 books, absolutely knows the value of his narratives. He’s created a roadmap for his work to find profitability post book cycle as the struggling writer narrative was never attractive to the Virginia Tech graduate. His books have been optioned for film and television, including The Crossover, a series with Lebron James’ Springhill studios. His book, Why Fathers Cry, was turned into a 6-episode NPR podcast.
Seated in his quarters, Kwame doesn’t have to think long about what his superpower is. He’s known it since his days of reading “Fox in Socks” by Dr. Suess. Since his days at Virginia Tech where Nikki Giovani gave him back-to-back-back Cs in her poetry classes.
With that said, Kwame, what’s your superpower?
KWAME ALEXANDER: I have this capacity to engage people with my words, to fire them up, to act, and at the same time, feel great about it, and feel like they can take on the world, all through words. I got that from my parents.
My father is a tremendous speaker, Baptist preacher, author, activist, and from the time I was a child, I can remember listening to him in the pulpit, giving a sermon, or at a conference speaking, and he got people riled up.
He knew how to string words together to make folks scream, "Hallelujah," or, "Preach." He made them feel what he was hoping to express, and he was very fiery. My mother, on the flip side, was soft-spoken, but everything she said came out with such powerful heart that it made you feel good.
LEVEL: Writers all have their origin stories on how they fell in love with words. What's yours?
When did I fall in love? It was three years old with Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. It was five years old, Spin a Soft Black Song, Nikki Giovanni, and reading that by myself. It was 10 years old, reading Manchild in the Promised Land. It was 11 years old. This is the moment where I could articulate that books are really cool. [In] 1978, Random House published a book called The Greatest: My Own Story, it was the autobiography of Muhammad Ali. It was 478 pages, Jermaine, and I couldn't put it down. This was in the midst of me hating reading, because I was reading my dad's dissertation, so thinking that this ain't cool no more. I discovered this book in our garage, and just fell in love with the rhythm, his language, his poeticness.
And when did you realize you wanted to write for a living?
That was when I started writing love poems in college to get dates.
There’s a story there, yes?
I was a biochemistry major, because I wanted to get as far away from literature as possible. A couple things happened. Junior year, I had gotten a C minus in organic chemistry and was like, "I ain't down for this anymore." Nikki Giovanni became a professor at Virginia Tech where I was studying, and I saw this woman the summer between sophomore and junior year. I was walking on campus and saw this woman, and had seen her at a party the previous year and thought she was fine, smart, and pretty amazing. I was too shy and uncool, and didn't know how to approach her. I'm walking on campus, and we're walking towards each other, and there's no one else. I can't avoid saying hello to her. I speak to her, and she speaks to me, and I invite her out to lunch, and she goes to lunch with me to a place called Pizza Inn, $4.99, all you can eat pizza, and I ain't have enough to pay for her.
Does the story have a happy ending?
We had lunch, and then I ended up writing her a poem and giving it to her. She asked me out on another date, and then I just proceeded to write her more poems. That was my way of courting her by just writing her love poems. One thing led to another, and she ended up coming over to my apartment, which was about as big as a closet. I cooked her dinner. I made turkey legs, rice, and homemade dinner rolls. A year and a half later, we got married.
The telling of that story was incredibly detailed. Tell me about your podcast, Why Father’s Cry.
It started as a book. I wrote the memoir as a way to talk to my daughters about how I've loved and how I've failed at it, and just giving them a glimpse into their father. Then the book came out in May, and I remember thinking, I would love to talk to other fathers, sons, husbands about what I've been thinking about, and dealing with, and going through and have real vulnerable, open conversations. The podcast seemed like the best way to approach that.
We did six episodes, sort of a limited series of the podcast, each one talking to a different man. Man, it was kind of cool to see that I'm not the only one going through the stuff I'm going through. it was like a barbershop, but real vulnerable, conversations men don't really ever have. It was going below the surface. I felt like that really helped me just begin to understand and be able to deal with and heal from things like divorce, things like forgiving your father, extending grace, how to listen better to your daughters, just all kinds of things, man. It just felt good, and I learned a lot.
Related: My Mother’s Words Still Make Me Cry
Out of the six episodes, is there one that stands out?
Well, I don't know if there's one that stands out. It's really not a fair question, and you wouldn't know that it's not a fair question, because we did a one year later episode with my daughter, my oldest daughter, who I had been estranged from for three years, Jermaine. We had our reconciliation, and there was healing. That episode that she asked to do was heartwarming, life changing, and pretty phenomenal. That stood out probably the most for me as a father.
Your book Why Fathers Cry at Night is being turned into a scripted series and another one of your novels was turned into The Crossover series on Disney Plus. What was it like working with LeBron James’ SpringHill production company on that?
On one level, it's just anything LeBron touches, it's gold. His hand in this show certainly opened a lot of doors for us. Then on a sort of a micro level, the executive from SpringHill who was in charge of working with us on the show, her name was Leslie, and Leslie just became like a little sister. She just got it. It is cool when you work with people who get it, you ain't got to explain, and they just know.
You’re creating in many mediums. What’s the most important trait you need to have to be a good writer?
Write good books. If you want to last, you’ve got to write meaningful, significant, entertaining books, because you want to keep people coming back. That's the biggest thing. There are quite a few things that I think go into the formula, and the formula varies with different people, but I think that is the foundation, that's bedrock. You have to be able to tell a good story. That requires work, and learning, and reading, a lot.
How do you know when you have a good story?
When I love it. There's one book, I've written 41, there's one of my books that I didn't love. I liked it, and I can't read it to this day. I remember my mother saying to me back in 2012 or something, she said, "Kwame, I read it, and I just don't get it." She said, "Actually, I just don't like it." That was the only book that I've ever written that she said that about, and I get it.
I gotta love it. Then you gotta ask the question, Jermaine, well, what is love? How do you define it? I don't know. It's something you feel. All the synapses are firing, and it just feels good. It feels right. I think there are some craft like is there a compelling beginning? Is there a satisfying ending? Is there a middle that keeps you engaged, that's page turning? In poetry, are you using metaphor? Are you showing and not telling? There are different craft things that can tell you whether the book is right, it's good, or as Nikki Giovanni likes to say, if the book behaves. They're different craftings, but I think for me, it's just, do I love it?
You’re essentially building an IP pipeline where book go from words on a page to films and series. Should writers have that long-term goal from get-go, or should you just be writing whatever is awesome to you?
What Jay-Z say? I'm not a businessman. I'm a business, man.
I've been raised in a way that I understood that in order to control my destiny, I need to control my art. The goal has always been to figure out ways to build a business, to build an institution around the words, around my work. Whether it be television, Broadway musical, eyewear with the quotes on the side, the Haiku Collection, whatever it is, I am about the business. I never wanted to be a starving artist.
It's extremely important for me to figure out a way to build generational wealth for my family through my literature. Ultimately, I am writing a book that I want you to buy that is a transaction. There is revenue that generates from that, and so why shouldn't I participate in that, in a significant way? The more books I sell, the more money I make, but more importantly, the more books that I sell, the more people who are reading.
What’s the best book of all-time that you didn’t write?
The book I keep turning to over and over again, I read it once every two years. It is the perfect combination of humor, drama, tragedy, social commentary, and I laugh so much. When you started this conversation, Jermaine, you asked me what my superpower is, and so I'm going to bring this full circle and say that part of giving a dynamic presentation, or speech, or writing a good book, and at the same time, teaching something, or making a statement about something that can be very heavy…
I got up this morning feeling good and black, thinking black thoughts. I did black things, like played all my black records, and minded my own black business. I put on my best black clothes, walked out my black door, and Lord have mercy, wiped snow.
Man.
Part of being able to talk about these very weighty and heavy things is bringing the humor, because when I bring the humor, then it puts your shoulders down, and it ingratiates yourself to me, and it makes you just feel a little bit more comfortable. Now, once I got you comfortable, then I can go in. I think there's a book that does that for me time and time again. It's a book by the author of Erasure, which got turned into the movie, American Fiction. It's a book by Percival Everett that not a lot of people know, but it's a novel called I Am Not Sidney Poitier. It is freaking brilliant, and that's probably my favorite book of all time.