Kekla Magoon

Kekla Magoon’s young adult novel The Rock and the River, which won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award, was the first mainstream novel for young people to feature the Black Panther Party. She is the Margaret A. Edwards Award-winning author of more than a dozen books for young readers, including Fire in the Streets and How It Went Down. She is also the coauthor, with Ilyasah Shabazz, of X: A Novel, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and received an NAACP Image Award and a Coretta Scott King Honor. Her most recent nonfiction book, Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and has received accolades including the Printz Honor Award, the Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, and the Walter Dean Myers Honor Award. Magoon grew up in Indiana and now lives in Vermont, where she serves on the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.