We recently had the opportunity to talk with author Kwame Alexander about how poetry can draw a reluctant reader into a lifelong love of books and the creative process behind his book, “The Crossover,” awarded the 2015 Newbery Medal for Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children.
Author Kwame Alexander
Photo Credit: Pilar Vergara
The first thing we noticed about The Crossover: its rhythm. Why did you choose to have Josh’s voice rhythmic in that way?
When I decided the book was going to have a frame of basketball, I knew that I wanted the language to mirror the sport’s high energy and rhythm,
I thought that basketball was poetry in motion – so I created a story on the page that reflected the action on the court. I’ve been a poet most of my life, so it seemed like a good marriage.
How would you describe kids’ reaction to the book?
You want to impact young people. That’s the goal. That’s the only goal. You want to get them reading. The response initially came from librarians and teachers – they were loving it.
I thought, “Wow, how cool is that?”?
Then teachers started getting it to their students. My, my, my – the reaction from the students blew me away. There were quite a few boys who had never showed much interest in reading before. Their teachers and librarians contacted me and said, “They couldn’t put your book down.”
That’s pretty remarkable right there. That’s why I’m doing this.
Have you ever seen anyone perform a page from the book?
Yes! There was a school in Illinois – Granger Middle School – and the entire school read the book. They brought me in for the day to see some presentations, and the kids all 
memorized the poems. It was so awesome. Each kid – girl, boy, black, white – they all felt like they were the characters.
That’s all you really hope for from a book – that it’s going to resonate with young people and empower them in some way. I believe poetry can get kids reading.
Why is it so important to get kids reading?
Inside of a book, between the lines, is a world of possibility. The book opens it up.
Why is it important for kids to open books? Because they can see themselves and they can see what they can become… Open a book and find your possible.
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*Picture book for preschoolers through second graders
*7-year-old boy as main character
Rating: Bright illustrations match the cute text in this tennis tale that might just make you want to go to the court with your classroom or your child.
Short, short summary: Tennis, Anyone? tells the story of a 7-year-old boy who gets a tennis racket for his birthday, and he is wondering what to do with it. He doesn’t know anyone who plays tennis, and he thinks this present is kind of lame. Then he goes out to the courts with his dad, and he sees that tennis is pretty fun after all. Besides he can also use his racket for a guitar.
So, what do I do with this book?
1. Do a shared writing activity about the different uses of a tennis racket. In the end of the story, the main character says that his tennis racket could also be a guitar. What else could students use a tennis racket for? You should get some interesting answers. Write answers down on chart paper. For younger students, allow them to illustrate their answers. For older students, they should write a few sentences and illustrate.
2. Many social studies curriculums in younger elementary grades focus on family units and communities. In Tennis, Anyone? family and community members are included in the story. Use these characters to discuss students’ or your children’s family members. Then discuss what sports and/or hobbies they enjoy. Younger students can illustrate their ideas, and older students can write about them.
3. I love Tennis, Anyone? because it is promoting getting out and playing a game with family members instead of children playing alone with all their electronic toys. PE teachers and health teachers could use Tennis, Anyone? in their classrooms. Homeschoolers can use this book to start a discussion about health and exercise. Elementary teachers can tie Shane McG’s book to the health curriculum.
Have you read this book? Leave your comments below. Any more activities or lesson ideas? Please let us know. Or simply share your favorite sport or favorite sport book.
Liam Bergstrom has just been called up to his high school’s varsity basketball team from the JV squad because of an injury to another player. He knows he was selected only because the team needed someone to play defense and rebound, so he doesn’t want to make waves when, prior to the start of Liam’s first game on varsity, Coach Kloss leads the team in a prayer.
It’s not that Liam isn’t religious, because he is. But the team prayers and Coach Kloss’s unspoken demand that the entire team join the Horizon Athletic Fellowship (think Fellowship of Christian Athletes) makes him uncomfortable. When Liam tells his parents about the situation, his mother urges him to take action since the prayers are unconstitutional. But no one else on the team seems to have a problem with it. Some of the guys are truly religious and believe in the concept of team prayer; others just go along with it to make sure they get their playing time and to avoid getting on the coach’s bad side.
I really wanted to like Box Out. I thoroughly enjoyed John Coy’s previous book, Crackback, and the topic of sports and religion intrigued me. Thing is, the team prayers just seemed like an excuse to have Liam quit the team to make some new friends and reconsider his appreciation of, and motivations for playing, basketball. While Liam’s religion was referenced in the first half of the book, with him going to church and praying at night, I can’t remember any of that happening in the second half of the book. I suppose I’m a bad person to judge, because I’m not religious and come from a non-religious family, but I would have thought Liam’s struggle with the team prayers would be more difficult, more meaningful. Instead, it was a pretty straightforward “it’s wrong and illegal and needs to stop.”
I think part of the problem can be traced to the third-person present tense narration. At least as it’s used in this book, it makes for exciting, action-packed basketball scenes, but didn’t work so well when Coy tried to explore Liam’s feelings. In the end, I liked Box Out a lot more than I should have, considering my criticisms of the book. But it’s still not as good as Crackback.
Also reviewed at Readingjunky and YA Books and More.
Manuel Ramos
SCENE FROM THE MOVIE GIANT
Tino Villanueva (Curbstone Press, 1993)
It's been several years since I watched the classic movie Giant, whose cast included James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Sal Mineo, and Rock Hudson. The first time I saw it, I was a young boy, probably eight or nine. It was the middle of the 1950s and I was in the Rialto Theater on Main Street, in a small Colorado town. The Rialto was one of those movie palaces that used to occupy places of respect in almost every American town -- a gaudy, blinking marquee, deep red carpeting, elaborate wall fixtures, and thick curtains that majestically opened when the lights dimmed and the newsreel flickered on the screen.
I remember Saturday afternoon matinees with my buddies and an occasional midweek night out with my parents and younger brother for some special screening. The Rialto was where I first encountered American icons of comedy such as the Three Stooges and the Little Rascals, and red-blooded heroes like John Wayne and Burt Lancaster. It's also the place where I practiced my recently acquired reading skill. Sitting on a worn cushion and scraping my shoes on the sticky floor, I read all the credits as they rolled up the screen; I learned that the director was always last and when his name appeared, the flick was about to start.
But my experience with Giant was different. Going in, I thought it was only a love story but it had some attraction for me because of James Dean. Back then, and maybe for years afterwards, I deluded myself that I was something of a rebel, even at that young age, and so I was drawn to teenage outlaw myths created by the movies and other facets of mass culture in the immediate post-War years. In another movie I thought Sal Mineo was perfect when he sauntered down a nameless New York street hunched over in a shiny red jacket, smoking a cigarette and flashing a switchblade. I saw the first four Elvis Presley movies and every rock and roll melodrama that passed through the Rialto.
And so I checked out Giant, mainly to see what James Dean had been up to after his surly bulldozing of the decaying middle American landscape in Rebel Without a Cause. Of course, I didn't think of it that way when I was a kid -- he was cool, man, and that was enough.
But what I got from Giant was this amazingly complicated story about Texas -- quick money from oil, cowboy aristocracy clashing with political tensions created by a vanishing Old West; rich and poor whites mixing it up in their own private class war; and, eventually, Mexicans: people who looked like my grandparents, who were scattered throughout the film as so many props.
I felt uncomfortable watching this movie. I didn't like the way the Mexicans were treated in the film but somehow I thought that maybe it was the Mexicans' fault. Why were they in a movie anyway? Movies were for slapstick comedy, outer space monsters, the glory and bluster of John Wayne on the shores of Iwo Jima, and juvenile delinquents.
Texas poet Tino Villanueva has focused his own reactions to this movie and created an epic poem entitled Scene From the Movie Giant. In his marvelously written book he capsulizes a lifetime of provocations inspired by the movie. In particular, he deals with one scene where a trio of quiet, almost submissive Mexicans are subjected to blatant and violent racism.
Villanueva agonizingly chronicles his own attitudes about the crucial scene, which portrays the apparent victory of brute force and hatred over the humble Mexicans. Sarge, owner of a diner, refuses to serve a Mexican family. When cattleman Rick Benedict (Rock Hudson) objects, Sarge savagely beats him up. Villanueva stretches his images over the years and miles to Boston where, as a graduate student, he still grapples with the real meaning of the scene from the movie. As Villanueva writes, he constantly must turn back to the time when his offended small world was disrupted, unresolved. As is made clear in Villanueva's pages, his own resolution comes through the words he has chosen to present to the reader, so many years after he watched a movie in fear and awe. He has presented the truth as only a poet can understand it.
(this review first aired on Denver radio KUVO in 1995)
A BIT OF NEWS
How Else Am I Supposed to Know I'm Still Alive?
If you can't read the image, it's an announcement of a presentation of How Else Am I Supposed to Know I'm Still Alive, written by Evelina Fernández and starring the very talented and always entertaining Debra Gallegos and Yolanda Ortega on January 19 at 7:30 PM at the Troutman Theater at Aurora Central High School, 11700 E. 11th Avenue, Aurora, CO. $35 for adults, $10 for students and seniors. The performance benefits the Nuñez Foundation College Scholarship Program. We love these women and their enthusiastic performance art, and I know I'll see many of you at the play.
Nation of Immigrants
The Art Students League of Denver sent the following announcement about their upcoming exhibit, Nation of Immigrants, curated by Tony Ortega and Susan Sagara Bolton: "This exhibit brings together a wide range of media, styles, concerns, and sensibilities from artists whose inspiration is the immigration experience. Walking through the exhibit, you will experience the history each artist brings to their art and how culture and heritage resonate through their work." Participating artists include Polly Chang, Manuel Cordero, Carlos Frésquez, Ken Iwamasa, Clara Martínez, Emanuel Martínez, Sylvia Montero, Adriana Restrepo, George Rivera, Danny and Maruca Salazar, Carlos Santistevan, and several others. Exhibit opens January 4, 5:30 - 8:00 PM and runs through February 27. The Art Students League is at 200 Grant Street, Denver, 303-778-6990.
Dolores Huerta 
Dolores Huerta will be the keynote speaker at the Latina/o Advocacy Day event to be held February 24-25 at the Adams Mark Hotel in downtown Denver. Sponsored by the Latina Initiative and the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights, the event provides advocacy and lobby training on policy issues of concern to Latinas and Latinos in Colorado. For those who might not know, Dolores Huerta is a long-time human rights activist and a co-founder with César Chávez in starting the United Farm Workers in the 1960s. Info., send an email to: [email protected]. Image courtesy of favianna.com.
Sacramento Poetry Center
I'm passing on the following piece:
Another great night of poetry is coming up this Monday, January 7 at the Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street, at 7:30 pm.
Starting off the new year will be Barbara Jane Reyes and Oscar Bermeo. It will be an exciting night of powerful poetry hosted by Arturo Mantecon. Don't miss it!
Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the SF Bay Area. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005) which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her other honors include an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, among others. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.
Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award winning poet, educator & literary events coordinator. Oscar now makes his home in Oakland, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party magazine and lives with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th Street
Sacramento, CA
916.451.5569 - www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org
Later.
‘Allo, YA YA YAs, I’ve nominated y’all for an award! Thanks for making a great blog that I always look forward to reading!
I recently heard of a real-life scenario which is much like this — I’m a little horrified that the FCA, which was just a benign small thing on the West Coast when I was growing up, sounds so completely out of control. I’m disappointed that this novel doesn’t sound quite like it lived up to its premise, but I’m happy to hear about it anyway.
Abby - Wow, thanks for the compliment!
TadMack - It’s interesting because the publisher’s description doesn’t mention the prayer issue at all. (The LC summary on the verso does, however.) So I’m not sure if it was supposed to be as important as I wanted it to be or if Scholastic was playing it safe by downplaying the religious factor. But the resolution just seemed too simplistic.
I actually put this one down a few chapters in. It didn’t grab me. I was also disappointed like you, because I had really enjoyed Crackback.
The issue of prayer in public school is a key part of this novel, but other factors influence Liam Bergstrom’s decisions and school life. Though his faith life may not be mentioned in the book’s second half, his challenge of Coach Kloss’s use of pre-game prayer remains, as well as his attempt to understand the hypocritical behavior of teammates who play the prayer game simply to keep a spot on varsity.
There are so many issues in this book that I felt would engage young adult readers: the unconditional acceptance of authority and how challenging that can be for a young person concerned about moral behavior, the racist attitudes and behavior on the part of a coach, the untrustworthy acts on the part of some adults to wrongly reassure children, and the ultimately redeeming qualities of acceptance and team work demonstrated by other adults. John Coy’s dialogue and plot development show his obvious work with young adults as he wrote a compelling, realistic story.