- Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

My first guest is an award-winning author, poet, producer, and educator, a real Renaissance man in the literal sense.

Kwame Alexander is the New York Times bestselling author of 44 books, including "The Crossover," "The Undefeated," "How Sweet the Sound," and "The Door of No Return."

His writings include poetry, stories for young people, and books about African American trailblazers.

I am really pleased to welcome Kwame Alexander to "American Black Journal."

It is great to have you here.

- It's great to be here.

- (chuckles) It's great to have you take time out from writing books (chuckles) to sit and talk about writing books, because, at the pace you're going, I mean, I just can't imagine you have time for anything else, and somehow you've managed to squeeze all these other things in too.

- Well, you know, what's interesting is I love talking.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

(chuckles) - I began my career as an actor.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- Like that's where I started and, at a place called Virginia Tech, and I auditioned for plays and didn't get cast, (Stephen chuckles) and I said, "Okay, well, I gotta figure this out."

And so I began writing plays to cast myself.

- Right.

(chuckles) - So the writing happened as a result of that.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, 44 books, I mean, that is an incredible number.

Prolific is the word that keeps coming to mind, but there are also, the range of things that you're writing about is really broad.

Talk about how you get inspiration for these books, and for each one, what's the thing you're trying to accomplish with it?

- I think, ultimately, as Langston Hughes said, "I'm trying to distill my human heart into a few words on the page."

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And sometimes, that heart is filled with longing and love, and so a love story or a love poem might come out.

Other times, it's my two-year-old who won't stop crying.

And so I play some jazz music, and she stops crying, and so I say, "Well, let me write a book about Duck Ellington and Mules Davis, and teach her about jazz."

So it really is about what I'm feeling, what I'm experiencing, what I'm thinking, when I'm dealing with sort of the woes and the wonders of life.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And it comes out in various ways.

- Yeah, let's talk about the difference between writing poetry and writing stories.

- Sure.

- I think of poetry as, you know, of course, more subject to rhythm and pacing and the kind of things that you see in music- - Sure.

- More often, and of course, stories can do that too.

- Right.

- But it's a very different process.

- Oh, absolutely, I mean, you think about it like this.

With prose, you have a lot of words at your disposal.

- Yes.

- You know?

- You can go on as long as you want.

- With poetry... - [Stephen] Yeah.

- You have to capture sort of the heavy things that are happening in just a few words, and so it requires more conciseness, and so if you look at a page of poetry versus prose, there's more white space on the poetry page.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And I believe that's so that the reader can take that spiritual journey.

It's not just about the words that are there, but it's about the words that aren't there, that sort of challenge us and make us pay attention to what's happening in our lives and the world.

- That's an interesting way to think about that.

I've always thought that the best music often is about the notes that aren't there.

- Right.

- Miles, in particular.

- Exactly.

- Right?

You don't have to play every note.

Some of them are understood.

I guess poetry is the same.

- I mean, look, you could tell, and I did, I told a woman that I loved her, you know, over and over, and she didn't really pay attention.

I wasn't very cool.

I didn't get cool till very recently.

- Then show her.

(chuckles) - And so I recited a poem to her.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- I have never been a slave, yet I know I am whipped.

I have never been to Canada, yet I hope to cross your border.

I have never traveled underground, yet the night knows my journey.

If I were a poet in love, I say that, with you, I have found that new place, where romance is just the beginning, and freedom is our end.

- [Stephen] Oh.

- And she married me.

- [Stephen] Oh, there you go.

(laughs) - So... - There you go.

It worked.

- The poetry works.

- Right, it worked.

So, I also am curious these days with everybody who's a writer or an artist, artistic person of any kind.

- Sure.

- What the world and the state of the world is saying to you about the work.

I mean, I think that as writers, of course, we're always influenced by everything from the outside.

- Yeah.

- What's the world telling you?

What's the world telling you to do?

What's the world telling you to be interested in right now?

- Well, I think, like most human beings, we are scared, we are confused, we find ourselves in the midst of chaos, not sure how we're going to survive, but when we think back to the history of, in particular, Black Americans and how we got over it.

- [Stephen] It's always been that way.

- It's always been that way.

And you gotta imagine that, you know, in a slave ship, and you've got, you know, people in the bottom of a ship, head-to-toe in the hold of a ship, packed together, from Sierra Leone, Mende from Ghana, Ashanti from Nigeria, Igbo and Yoruba, and so, how do they communicate when they have different languages?

And you gotta imagine, Stephen, that at some point, there was a hum.

- Yeah.

- (hums) And somebody began to sing a song, and it was these words and this music, and this harmony and this melody that got, that helped us get over, that helped us keep the faith.

- Yeah.

- And I posit that the words and the songs and the visual melody does that for us.

It allows us to be able to deal with the woes and the wonders of the world.

It allows us to be able to capture it, to question it, and, ultimately, I think, as Toni Morrison showed us, as James Baldwin showed us, as Nikki Giovanni showed us, it can help us resist, it can help us find the words to resist, and if you want it to become something, you gotta say it.

- Yeah, yeah, you know, fear is an interesting motivator.

I always feel like, sometimes, it inspires the best work, which is a dark way to think about it, but it does.

I mean, that sense of urgency, that sense of impending harm or doom, I think, pushes artists inward in a way that produces these unbelievable things.

For me, maybe that's a silver lining for right now, is that the art that'll come out of this period maybe will be inspiring to people in the future.

- That is the hope.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- That is the dream, and you gotta think that, you know, before Nikki Giovanni passed away, we talked about the election and the results of it.

And her comment to me was, "Kwame, we've been here before."

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- "And this too shall pass."

- [Stephen] We can do it.

- And so, when we look back on our history, and we think of a poet like Langston Hughes, "I been scarred and battered.

My hopes the wind done shattered.

Snow has frizzed me, Sun has baked me, I think between 'em they done tried to make me stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'.

But I don't care!

I'm still here!"

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And so these words still inspire almost a hundred years later.

And so I posit, just like you just said, yeah, the idea is that these words, our words, our art, our music, you know, will continue to inspire future generations.

- Yeah.

- That's the goal.

- Yeah.

- Otherwise, the art is fruitless.

- Yeah, yeah, let's talk about your new work, your new book.

- (sighs) The new book, so my dad says, my dad's my biggest fan.

He'll be in the grocery store, "Have you read my son's new book?"

- [Stephen] "Have you seen this?"

- "Have you seen this?

You know he made the New York Times."

(Stephen laughing) (laughs) The latest book is called "How Sweet the Sound."

And it's a picture book that's for ages one to 99.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And it's about the history of Black music in America.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And how music from, you know, when we look at the blues... - Which is the history of American music.

- Right, absolutely.

- There isn't a way to separate those things.

- Absolutely.

- That's right.

- When we look at jazz, which is American music, when we look at reggae, at hip hop, and so I wanted to sort of document how we, you know, brought the rhythms and the sounds and the leaps and the bounds from West Africa.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- To the present, how we got here, and look at that sort of journey, and so I wrote that story.

- Who's that story for in your mind?

Who are you writing to in that book?

- You know, I like to think that I am always writing a love letter to Black people, and I am always writing sort of a reminder to all of us.

- To everybody else, yeah.

- To everybody.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- To recognize and acknowledge and appreciate the humanity of Black folks.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- You know, and so, that's my goal.

- Yeah, yeah, I also wanna ask you about one of the kind of fun projects that you have, "Acoustic Rooster."

- "Acoustic Rooster."

- (laughs) I love that, and "Jazzy Jams."

- Which started here in Michigan.

- [Stephen] Is that right?

- In 2010.

- Yeah.

- I had written 10 books of love poems, and I wasn't making a whole lot of money, I wasn't able to provide for my family, so I had jobs.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And I got a book deal for "Acoustic Rooster's Barnyard Band" from a company in, I wanna say, Grand Rapids.

- Okay, yeah.

- Okay?

- [Stephen] Other side of the state, yeah.

- Called Sleeping Bear Press.

- [Stephen] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And they published "Acoustic Rooster," which is about a rooster that started a jazz band with Thelonious Monkey and Ella Finchgerald and Duck Ellington.

(Stephen chuckling) And so that became my first children's book in 2011, and, of course, I've gone on to write many more, but that recently got turned into a cartoon, so it'll be a- - It's on television now.

- [Kwame] Animated special on PBS.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- [Kwame] So that's pretty exciting.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

♪ Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O ♪ - But this is the BeBop Barnyard.

We should sing a jazz song about our farm.

- I know a jazzy rooster who can sing all about our band!

- Yay!

- I mean, you know, the transference of a story like that from page to screen is one of the things that's kind of really fascinating to me.

- Yeah, well, it made sense, because we're writing about music.

- [Stephen] Right.

- Which is in, sort of an auditory experience.

And so how do we then, you know, take these words on the page and put them on the stage?

- Yeah.

- And make that, make them come alive and bring the music out.

I like to think that we're entertaining, but we're also informing.

The biggest metaphor that I can think about when it comes to jazz is that, "Jazz," as Wynton says, "is a metaphor for democracy."

And you've got all these different players, the sax, the drummer, the horn, you know?

You got their piano, you got the singer, and they all gotta exist on stage together to create this musical masterpiece, but at any given point, somebody's gonna solo.

- [Stephen] Right.

- Somebody's gotta shine.

- Someone's in the front.

- And the other people stand back and let them do their thing, because at some point, they know they're gonna have the respect to do their thing, and I think that's a beautiful thing.

- That's a great analogy.

- We're trying to teach kids a lot of these things, I think, through the show.

- Yeah, yeah, so you say your dad is your biggest fan, but I'm imagining that your daughter might be a bigger fan, especially because of things like "Acoustic Rooster."

- Right, right, well, I got two daughters.

- [Stephen] Yeah, yeah.

- I got a 34-year-old and a 16-year-old.

- [Stephen] Okay.

- So I figured I'd try it one more time, see if I can get it right.

- [Stephen] Yeah, right.

- And the 34-year-old just had her first, and her first child, and his name is Langston.

- [Stephen] Oh.

- So I'm old now, I'm a grandfather.

And so I think my daughters have always been primary inspiration for me.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- But now, Stephen, I got a whole new sort of lease on life.

- [Stephen] Ah, right.

- With Langston, who's eight months old.

- [Stephen] Oh my goodness.

- And so, like, I got all kinds of new ideas and inspiration, so when people ask me, "Where do you get inspired?"

It's definitely from the children.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- You know, the mind of an adult begins in the imagination of a child.

- Absolutely, yeah.

All right, Kwame Alexander, it was delightful to have you here in Detroit and on "American Black Journal."

Thanks for coming by.

- Thank you for hosting me.

- Yeah.