A customer in Charlotte, North Carolina recently let us know that award-winning author Kekla Magoon would be visiting with their middle school students this fall. To support this author visit, we created an original Meet-the-Author Book Reading with Kekla and co-author Ilyasah Shabazz talking about their book, X: A Novel (Candlewick 2016). In this recording, they explain why they wanted to write a novelization about Malcolm X's experiences as a teenager.Original Author Resources Enrich Student Experiences
A customer in Charlotte, North Carolina recently let us know that award-winning author Kekla Magoon would be visiting with their middle school students this fall. To support this author visit, we created an original Meet-the-Author Book Reading with Kekla and co-author Ilyasah Shabazz talking about their book, X: A Novel (Candlewick 2016). In this recording, they explain why they wanted to write a novelization about Malcolm X's experiences as a teenager.
Writing books is a very mysterious thing. At least it is for me. I’ve always enjoyed writing, maybe just as much as I’ve enjoyed drawing, but drawings are easier to gauge. When you create a drawing you like, you can look at it and immediately see the reasons why, and you can show it to other people and they can point to things that they like about it, too.
After creating three nonfiction books—Diego Rivera (2011), Separate Is Never Equal (2014), and Funny Bones (2015, all Abrams)—my editor and I both thought a fiction project might be interesting. We brainstormed and a suggestion that bubbled up was to take a well-known story, such as a fairy tale, and give it a twist.