Weatherford keeps her finger on the pulse of young peoples’ interests as a professor of English at Fayetteville State University. She puts an intentional spotlight on the arts, and incorporates her love of jazz and her passion for artists like Billie Holiday into her work. They also navigate ugly pieces of American history like slavery, the 1963 Birmingham bombing and police brutality against black communities. Her books often depict the stories of African American leaders, explorers and artists, many of whose stories are seldom told. Now the author of more than 50 books for children and young adults, Weatherford writes stories that fill in some of the many gaps she saw in the books from her childhood. Weatherford was in elementary school during the height of the civil rights movement, but she encountered very few black characters or people of color in the children’s books she read growing up. She continued writing poems, and her father used them for typewriting exercises in his classes. Her father, a high school printing teacher, printed the poem on an index card. She dictated it to her mother on the way home from elementary school in Baltimore. Carole Boston Weatherford wrote her first poem in first grade.
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