I am filled with gratitude because I know that none of this had to be: not the eighty-plus books, not the nineteen American Library Association Youth Media Awards, not the NAACP Image Awards, not the nomination as Young People’s Poet Laureate, not the opportunities to travel across the country and around the world sharing my books, and certainly not the joy of collaborating with my son, Jeffery.

I began this journey as a young mother. Now, I am a grandmother. My preacher/grandfather used to say, “Your children are your treasures.” Mine also comprise my legacy. My granddaughter Jordin, a gifted artist and poet, appears on the cover of Kin: Rooted in Hope. My granddaughter Cara, Olivia-in-the-flesh, inspired my upcoming book about jellyfish. Cara will be surprised to see her face on the opening spread. My son is awaiting the arrival of his firstborn in a few weeks.

Family means everything to me. All that I am is because of my late parents, both of whom were educators. When I was in first grade at an all-Black elementary school, I told my mother I had made up a poem. After I recited it on the short ride home from school, my mother parked the car, asked me to say it again. She wrote it down because I could not yet spell all the words. A couple of years later, she asked my father, a high school printing teacher, to print some of my early poems on the letterpress in his classroom. I grew up in that print shop, smelling ink and watching my father set metal type backwards. I watched as he applied ink to the roller and cranked the press to print the text on paper. At home, I had my own little toy press, aptly named “The Big Press.” My parents encouraged every creative interest of mine, from art, music, and darkroom photography to fashion design. They made me believe that I could do anything I set my mind and my heart to.

At the same time, there was almost always a grandmother in our house, passing down stories, proverbs, and recipes. My parents also passed down their memories of the Great Depression and the Jim Crow era. As a result, I was steeped in oral traditions.

As the civil rights movement opened doors, my parents prepared me to enter spaces that were as new to them as they would be to me. Together, my mother and I sat at newly integrated downtown lunch counters and experienced the symphony and ballet for the first time.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, few children’s books centered Black histories. But teachers at my all-Black elementary school infused our lessons with Black pride. In fourth grade, my teacher had the class memorize Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too.” The words were liberating to me.

By middle school, I was at an exclusive private school — one of four students of color at my grade level. The summer before I enrolled, the school required me to complete a grammar workbook as if English were not my native tongue. In eighth grade, we read Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident,” about a racist encounter between a Black boy and a white boy in my hometown of Baltimore. The poem led me to choose Cullen as the subject of my research paper on the Harlem Renaissance. When the teacher returned my paper, he had given me a grade of B and offered only one comment: “Did you write this?” I later realized that my teacher could not conceive of a Black student from public school writing an A paper, so he graded me based on his expectations rather than on my performance.

As a teen, I worked at a downtown department store. I spent lunch breaks at Sherman’s newsstand and bookstore, where I first purchased poetry books: a haiku collection, Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses, and Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets, featuring established writers and new voices from the Black Arts Movement. I inherited the legacies of Langston Hughes, ­Robert Hayden, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez.

After college, I began attending poetry readings and taking the mic myself. My father and I saw Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Her so-called choreopoem showed me that poetry belongs not only on the page but also onstage.

Photo courtesy of Carole Boston Weatherford.

I stand on the shoulders of generations who came before me. But I am a children’s book author because I am Caresse and Jeffery’s mother. Before they arrived, I envisioned a career writing poetry for adults. Then I took my preschoolers to library storytimes. There I was exposed to a new crop of children’s literature, notably John Steptoe’s Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters and Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach. More diverse than anything I had access to as a child, these books changed my trajectory. From then on, I would spend storytimes selecting mentor texts and reference books about the business and craft of children’s books.

Even before I articulated my mission, I was centering African American resistance, resilience, remarkability, rejoicing, and remembrance. I do not believe that children are too tender for tough topics. I never condescend to young readers. They deserve and will demand the truth. Children have a more absolute sense of justice than adults. Children recognize injustice and know how to interrogate it. When I share stories from the enslavement and segregation eras, children ask, “Who made that stupid rule?” or “Why did white people treat Black people unfairly?” These responses could not be more spot-on if I had scripted them.

I hail from healers, teachers, and preachers. I know that truth is a prerequisite to reconciliation and healing. Black history is a balm akin to church. I carry both sorrow and celebration to the altar of remembrance. I pen praise songs, litanies, lamentations, and elegies for ancestors whose voices were marginalized, muted, or muzzled and whose narratives were lost long ago. My books bear witness to African American traditions, trials, trauma, and triumphs.

I have found that my books do ­double duty, educating children and adults alike. After all, most adults never learned about bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, voting rights activist ­Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin, or the Tulsa Race ­Massacre. Sadly, subjects like these are under siege. In recent DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) purges, the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie ­Robinson, and Harriet Tubman — all of whom appear in my books — were whitewashed or deleted from federal websites.

Know this: Black history is too epic to erase. Regardless of how the wind blows, I am committed to staying the course — for our children, for our future. Librarians, teachers, authors: we are in this boat together. The sea may be wide, but to paraphrase Langston Hughes, our souls have “grown deep like the rivers.” And the most powerful force is not air, water, or earth, but freedom.

Carole Boston Weatherford is the winner of the 2025 Children's Literature Legacy Award. Her acceptance speech was delivered at the annual conference of the American Library Association in Philadelphia on June 29, 2025. From the July/August 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles, click the tag ALA 2025.

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