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.
My family listened to music in the morning as we prepared for the day, and at night as we cleaned the dinner dishes. I grew up on a steady diet of the R&B and soul music of the Jackson 5, Bobby Womack, and James Brown. Of Soul Train Saturday mornings and church service choir stands on Sundays. I sampled disco and devoured rap. But my roots were jazz and blues and the musical greatness of Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson, Bobby “Blue” Bland and John Lee Hooker. Music is the heart and soul of me.
When a manuscript comes across my art table there’s always a little bit of terror attached to it. What’s the author trying to relate? How should I approach it? How would a parent, a librarian, and, most important, a child look at my paintings? If, as an artist, I can’t quell some of these questions, they’ll derail the creative process.
Blistery red rashes and hallucinations, lethal germs in food, flea bites that kill— these are all subjects that have captured my attention, and I hope will grab readers’ attention, too. Intriguing medical stories speak to my background in zoology, an interest in history, and experience teaching middle school science. As an author, I get to be a sleuth—searching for hidden details and fascinating images to illustrate my books; I never know what remarkable material I’ll uncover next.
For years, I heard bizarre, thrilling stories about Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony; how it was written by the Soviet composer in the besieged city of Leningrad as the Nazis bombed the city; how it was performed there by a starving orchestra while the Red Army shelled the Germans to protect the concert hall; and how it was put onto microfilm and slipped out of the USSR, flown to Tehran, driven across the desert to Cairo, and finally brought to America to interest the United States in the Soviet cause.