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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. February is Black History Month, and the official theme of Black History Month in the United States this year is African Americans and the arts. To that end, we are thrilled to welcome Kwame Alexander today in his role as editor of a new book called This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. We're going to ask him to read a few selections.

You may know the massively creative Kwame Alexander as a poet or an educator or a publisher or an Emmy-winning TV producer or the author of around 40 books, including for children and adults, some of them bestsellers. You may know his book released last year called Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances. His best-known book and TV series might be the middle school-targeted The Crossover.

Know that book? It came out in 2014. It's been awarded the American Library Association's Newbery Medal for Literature for Children and a Coretta Scott King Award, which is also for youth-oriented writing. Some of you parents out there probably know the TV series version of The Crossover which ran just last year on Disney+ and won the 2023 Emmy just recently for outstanding young teen series and was produced by Kwame Alexander with LeBron James' production company.

Yes, it's partly about kids involved with basketball, and yes, the book is written in verse, and so an appropriate person to turn to to edit the book called This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. Kwame, it's an honor. Welcome to WNYC.

Kwame Alexander: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can we talk about you a little first before we talk about the book? Hopefully, hear you read a few selections. Among the things in your memoir, you write about your complicated relationship with your own father and your relationship as a father with your daughters. Why did you title the book Why Fathers Cry at Night? Why center the idea of crying?

Kwame Alexander: My mother passed away in 2017, and I realized, three years later, and I still hadn't really cried, that I had been nurtured and raised in an environment where it was not okay or cool or appropriate for a man to cry. I remember traveling to Kenya, and I was talking to some of the men in one of the villages, the village called Wamunyu, and I asked, I said, "Do you all as men, do you cry?" and he was like, "No, we don't. We were taught from a very early age that that was wrong and if we cry, we were spanked." Like it was not a good thing.

I just began to wonder, why have I not really grieved about my mother who was the most important person in my life? That sent me down this path, this journey of wanting to get to that point where I cried not just at night or not in the darkness, but I was upfront and open, authentic and vulnerable as a man, as a human being, and showed my true colors under the sun, as it were, in the daylight.

Brian Lehrer: That story you just told with those men from Kenya, if we accept that it's probably a very different culture from a lot of what we have in the United States, it almost raises a question of whether, universally, or close to it, male culture has developed as that kind of stoic "we don't cry".

Kwame Alexander: I think the answer is in the question. Absolutely. I asked Stephanie, who I was married to for 24 years, who is my best friend, who I love dearly, I asked her, I said, "Do you ever talk to my mom?" You know, Brian, when our loved ones pass away, we often hear that we see them, or they come to us in our dreams, or if you're really connected, you have these conversations with these folks who were important to you.

I asked her, I said, "Steph, do you ever talk to my mom?" She said, "I talk to her all the time. I talk to her, I talk to Aunt Flora, I talked to Aunt Leila May." She started naming all these women in the family who have passed on, and I said, "Well, what about Uncle Philip? What about Uncle Richard?" She said, "I didn't talk to them when they were alive." [laughter] She said, "Maybe they would come and pat my head."

Brian, I made a conscious decision that I don't want to be that uncle, that father, that man who is not remembered, who is not talked to. Writing the memoir Why Fathers Cry At Night was a door, was me opening a door to that understanding. Of course, Brian, the real work of actually trying to become this better man, that started once the book was published. That was just the beginning.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Things are changing the last few generations, I think, but too slowly. You told Terry Gross on Fresh Air last year that your father loves through words, loves through books. How does that get expressed? How does someone express love to members of their family, to their children, through books?

Kwame Alexander: Thank you for mentioning the Terry Gross interview, which was one of the hardest and most rewarding interviews I've ever done. I thought that my father was going to really be in his feelings after listening to it. I remember when I sent him the memoir-- I did not send it to anyone in advance. I felt like it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. [chuckling] It proved not to be the best decision [chuckles] because I got a lot of blowback. Anybody out there writing a memoir, you might want to consider sending it to the folks in it. When I sent it to my father, his response was, "I read your little memoir."

He said, "You definitely told your truth," but the reality is that my father making me read the dictionary, making me read his dissertations in Columbia University, my father making me work for his publishing company, making me stand behind a table and sell books at the London International Book Fair, my father always with a book or always with a pen writing, my father, the Baptist minister who wrote and delivered the most powerful sermons, like I told Terry, and like I'll say to you, Brian, there's no way I would be here right now with 40 books.

There's no way I would be living this writerly life were it not for him being 100% all the time focused and centered around words and literature and books. As much as I want to complain about that as child, that's what I have experienced, I am the result of that. I love my life, I love my job, and I owe a lot to my parents.

Brian Lehrer: I'll steal one more moment from the Terry Gross interview, which is to say you talked about being forced to read books as an 11-year-old that no child of that age should be forced to read. Like your father's dissertation from the Columbia University Teachers College. It struck me that your acclaimed book, The Crossover, was written for exactly that age, like 11 years old. Do you think that either consciously or subconsciously you were trying to bring your childhood experience full circle by writing books that kids in middle school would actually enjoy?

Kwame Alexander: Oh, yes. I'll edit myself and say that it's not that no 11-year-old should have to read a doctoral dissertation, it's that no 11-year-old wants to read it. [chuckles] Who really wants to do that as a kid? You want to play video games, you want to play with your friends. My parents like to say that I was an experiment, that they set out to create a critical thinking, writerly, activist-minded, entrepreneurial Black man who could-

Brian Lehrer: Success.

Kwame Alexander: - wa-- Right. When I won the Newbery medal, when I won the Emmy Award, and I called my dad, his response was, "Yes, we did it," and they did. The Crossover is a nod to my 11-year-old self who wanted to have been able to read a book like that. That was my goal. What is the book I'm going to write that me and my friends would've wanted to have read, would've wanted our teachers to assign. Of course, we know that The Crossover deals a lot with the relationship between father and son and so that also plays a role in it as well.

Brian Lehrer: We haven't even gotten yet to the book that you're actually here to promote. [laughter] Listeners, any Kwame Alexander readers out there, any Why Fathers Cry at Night readers, any The Crossover readers, any of The Crossover watchers on Disney+ last year? 212-433-WNYC. Any other reaction you have to our conversation? 212-433-9692, call or text. The Crossover, as I said in the intro, was written in verse. If people tend to think of poetry as, maybe, relatively shorter works usually compared to novels, that's a lot of poetry to have to write.

Kwame Alexander: Oh, yes. The goal is you're telling a story, so that's first and foremost. You are telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. In so many ways, Brian, if you were to look at it quantitatively, most novels are going to be 40,000 or 50,000 words while a novel using poems and novel in verse is going to be half of that at most. You're not using as many words on the page, but the words that you use on the page have to be able to move the story along, have to be able to paint a picture, have to be able to give the reader enough that they are excited, entertained, engaged.

Like Langston Hughes said, and this is the biggest part of and why it takes so long to write a novel in verse and why it takes so much of you is because it-- Poetry is the distillation of the human heart. It's so much stuff in so few words.

Brian Lehrer: Turning The Crossover into a TV series for Disney+, is it as fun as I think it might be to see characters who you've created in print come to life with real-life actors on a screen?

Kwame Alexander: Oh, absolutely. When we sold The Crossover, I was told that as, an author, you sell the book and then you get out of the way.

Brian Lehrer: You didn't do that?

Kwame Alexander: I told you the kind of person I was raised to be and so I told him, I said, "Look, I need to be in the writer's room." The head writer is called showrunner as I'm sure you know, and I had never done that. I told him, "If you want to make this into a TV series, I need to be the showrunner." I got a lot of pushback and, eventually, they decided to pair me up with a established showrunner who ended up being pretty miraculous and magnificent named Damani Johnson.

I was in the room, I was on the set, I was helping them make these decisions. I got to see a lot of this transformation, this adaptation, happen in real time. It was marvelous. There was this one moment, Brian, maybe episode five, where Phylicia Rashad who we all know, who played Claire Huxtable, she was playing the-- She plays the grandmother in our TV series, and she had a question about the way a line was supposed to be delivered, which was very poetic. Which, like most of the lines in the book and in the show, are quite poetic and lyrical.

The director called me over, and so I am directing Phylicia Rashad. It's so surreal that I am giving this legend, this icon, this brilliant actor, notes on how to deliver a line that I wrote in 2008 at Panera Bread in Herndon, Virginia, on Elden Street. I'm just a poet man, and I've been real blessed.

Brian Lehrer: Now we know where poetry is written. Sitting alone, I presume, in a Panera Bread.

Kwame Alexander: [laughs] Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: You want to talk to a fan? Here is Priya in Melbourne in Jersey. You're on WNYC with Kwame Alexander. Hi, Priya.

Priya: Hi, there. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Can hear you fine.

Priya: Great. I first saw Kwame Alexander speak at [words] and Bookstore-- [words] Bookstore in Maplewood, so just shout-out to my local independent bookstore. He was just absolutely amazing. I bought his book, I think it's called the playbook, for my son who was a middle schooler at the time. We had just moved to New Jersey. We're not from New Jersey. We moved to New Jersey from another country, and he was just going through it.

I just found his voice, Mr. Alexander's voice, to just be so incredibly powerful. Every time I think about the poem that he recited with somebody else on NPR, I think it was around the time of the 2016 election, I just get tears in my eyes, so thank you for doing what you do. Yes, so big, huge fan, obviously. [chuckles]

Kwame Alexander: That means a lot. I really appreciate you for sharing that, Priya. I think that's the beauty, Brian, of poetry. That's one of the really powerful things is that it has the ability, when it's done right, to connect with us. Even though we may not have experienced the thing that's being talked about, or we don't know the poet or know their experiences, we can connect with it. It brings us closer together as a community. We come together in unity.

Like I said, my mom passed away and one of the things that I had to end up turning to was writing about it, and that allowed me to get closer to grief. There's this piece in, This Is the Honey called, I Wish My Love Was Here. Everybody has some sort of connection to loss and longing, and this is a piece by Kurtis Lamkin.

"I wish my love was here. She would know what to do with such a day. She would wipe the sun and sea from her shoulders and rub them deep into my palms. When the salt and sand was gone, she would kiss my hands and say, 'There.' I wish she was here. I know she is in me even amid the crashing and foaming around me. Her tenderest sigh. I am not alone, but I miss her. I miss her so much, and I don't know what to do. She would know, my love, if she was here.

Brian Lehrer: Pretty straightforward poem about grief seems to me. I haven't heard that before. Not knowing what to do, with that zinger at the end, "She would know."

Kwame Alexander: Right. The thing is, the way you feel before you read a poem-- The way you feel after you read a poem should be a little bit different than the way you felt when you started it. It should take us somewhere. Poems, I believe, are a little like miniature lives. They're journeys of life, of these capsules, these highlights of our lives, and I think they got to take us somewhere, and that one certainly did for me.

Brian Lehrer: You did my work for me. You seamlessly segued from your [chuckling] other works that we were talking about to the new book that you're officially on for, and that is, for listeners just joining us, as the editor of This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, I'll say the famous names here include Rita Dove, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Clint Smith, Amanda Gorman who's just 25. Remember her? She became a national sensation for the work she read at President Biden's inauguration, Amanda Gorman. With so many poets to choose from in the world, Kwame, how did you choose works for this anthology as editor?

Kwame Alexander: It started off with me wanting to, A, have really renowned poets who had inspired me in my writerly life. B, have some of my peers, people I've known for 20 or 30 years, like Tony Medina, like Jessica Care Moore, like Ruth Foreman. C, when I was starting out writing, my first poems, I thought, were really good but a lot of journals and publishers didn't. They probably weren't that good, but nobody wanted to publish me, so I published myself.

This third layer of the book This Is the Honey was me wanting to give an opportunity to younger writers, to emerging writers, who don't have as much access that some of the more established have. It was sort of a bringing together of all three of those groups. Then once I decided that, that ended up being about 60 or 70 poems. Then from there it was I'd get emails, Kwame, my friend writes also, and you should look at her stuff.

I'd get poem a day from the National Poetry Foundation. I'd get their emails and discover a gem. I think about someone from my past who, "Oh," I'd wake up in the middle of the night, "how did I not have a poem by him?" All of those things converged and we ended up with 154 poems.

Brian Lehrer: Want to pick any one of those 154 poems to read?

Kwame Alexander: You mentioned Alice Walker who, probably, my two favorite books that I've ever read in terms of fiction were Erasure by Percival Everett and The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker. A lot of people don't know Alice Walker is a poet. They know her from The Color Purple, but I've always loved her poems as well, and so I thought, "I got to have Alice Walker in this book." That'll be a major, major coup.

She wrote, "I could eat collard greens indefinitely. Every morning I drink this as I place a few flat homegrown leaves in my pan." Let me start over on that. See, I'm getting all flushed Brian, because I'm reading a poem by Alice Walker in my book[chuckling] This Is the Honey, so let me just start over.

Brian Lehrer: You get a second take. You [unintelligible 00:21:22]

Kwame Alexander: [laughs] "I could eat collard greens indefinitely. Every morning I think this as I place a few flat homegrown leaves in my pan. Pan, not pot, for we have graduated to speed, to wrapped anticipation, to a stirring sensuousness that satisfies my sense of passion, and I want them inside me, like the lover of my body that they are. Their green goodness beckoning me to rise."

Brian Lehrer: Health food poetry [chuckles] as well as culturally yummy poetry. Right?

Kwame Alexander: That's right, and love poems, there you go, and devotions. That's it.

Brian Lehrer: One more fan. Spenta in Tappan in Rockland County. You're on WNYC. Hi, Spenta.

Spenta: Hi, Brian. Long time, second time, so love both your show, and I love Kwame Alexander. I think, Kwame, you may not remember this because it was a very long time ago, but you autographed a-- Personalized for my daughter The Crossover. I contacted you and-- As a Christmas gift. That was before it went bestseller and all that other stuff. I've given that book to others who either don't like to read and/or love basketball as a way to get more adolescents to read.

I absolutely love your work. I think what you're doing with free verse and poetry is phenomenal both for adults and especially for young children. I've read almost everything you've written. I haven't read your new one. I started the trilogy. I've read The Door of No Return which was amazing, and so I just want to say I'm a huge fan. I know you promote books all the time and are very supportive of library, libraries and librarians, and you're very good friends with somebody I know from the NIAC Library who's a children's librarian, and she and I both adore you. Morgan Strand. Just wanted to give a shout-out to everything you do and how much I admire your work. It's just incredible.

Kwame Alexander: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Spenta. Can we end with one more selection from the anthology?

Kwame Alexander: Sure. The goal of the anthology was to really bring a lot of joy to people when they read this. I wanted them to feel good. I wanted them to leave feeling some hope amidst these troubled times that we find ourselves in. I often think, "What better way to bring joy, to bring hope than through love?" We all love or we all want to be loved or we were all in love last week and we not now. It's just love is the thing.

The book is divided into six sections. The first section is joy, the language of joy, and of course, the second section is love. This is the piece right here that I think it made me feel good to be able to read it and to be able to publish it. Hopefully, it will offer something to you all. It's by Willie Perdomo. It's called That's My Heart Right There. "We used to say, 'That's my heart right there,' as if to say, 'Don't mess with her right there.' As if don't even play. That's a part of me right there. In other words okay, okay, that's the start of me right there. As if, come that day, that's the end of me right there. As if push come to shove, I would fend for her right there. As if come what may, I would lie for her right there. As if come love to pay, I would die for her right there."

Brian Lehrer: Kwame Alexander is the editor now of This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. Thank you so much. This was special.

Kwame Alexander: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, Brian. Keep up the amazing work and inspiring us.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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