Derrick Barnes

Derrick Barnes:
I am putting every single ounce of who I am into every single book that I write so y'all know what to expect. The blackest books you have ever read from yours truly.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick Barnes isn't just writing about black kids. He's writing directly to them as sincerely as he possibly can. But to be sincere means to be vulnerable, which is a skill he learned from some of his favorite writers of all time, Musicians.

Derrick Barnes:
Writers that we love the most are the ones that are able to be the most vulnerable and able to make us feel things. I think listening to a lot of R&B music early on when I was a kid allowed me to tap into that, my writing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Derrick is the award-winning author of beloved picture books, Crown, An Ode to The Fresh Cut and the King of Kindergarten. He's won the Ezra Jack Keats book Award, the Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award among so many others. More recently, he earned a national book award honor for the graphic novel Victory Stand, Raising My Fist for Justice. The man has earned some flowers and surely there are more to come.

In this episode, Derrick shares about how music inspired him to write, about how his idols taught him never to compromise his voice as a black man, and his theory about the quality of music and its connection to our classrooms. He also kind of wraps for us, which is fun.

My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is the Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and illustrators about the ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at the Reading Culture pod and subscribe to our newsletter at the reading culturepod.com/newsletter. All right, onto the show.

Let's start when you were younger, where you grew up and what your early life was like.

Derrick Barnes:
Well, my family is from the Delta of Mississippi and they were part of that great migration of black people moving north and moving west just to find jobs and escape the terror of racism and white supremacy. And my folks stopped in Kansas City, Missouri, so that's my place of birth. I always describe myself as a Midwest southern boy. I spent a lot of summers in Mississippi. I'm all Midwest boy, Kansas City, pickup trucks, jeans, boots, football, snowball fights.

I grew up in a single parent household. My mother, she just has a high school education. She was a CNA pretty much my whole childhood. She was a nurse, worked in nursing homes, raised me and my brother Anthony, who's my hero. I fell in love with words very young. I guess when I was in preschool I was reading on elementary school level, got me tested. I was in a gifted program pretty much my whole early education career all the way up until high school. I just fell in love with words and started my writing, my illustrious writing career in the fifth grade. That was a very pivotal year for me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What happened in fifth grade?

Derrick Barnes:
Well, two things happened. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, I didn't know that.

Derrick Barnes:
That was rough having to cut out all the sweets in my diet and-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
God, when you were in fifth grade.

Derrick Barnes:
Fifth grade having to take four insulin shots a day. Looking back, it has really taught me discipline and structure and I exercise daily. I married a vegan, so I eat pretty clean. It just keeps me sharp, I think.

The second thing that happened was I fell in love with hip hop music. My brother, even though we were in the Midwest, he had a lot of East coast buddies from New York and Philadelphia, so they would always give him mixed tapes. So I always heard stuff before everybody else did, like the new LL Cool J, new Eric B and Rakim, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and I just fell in love with hip hop music. And being from Kansas City, which is one of birth places of jazz music, my mother took us to a lot of live shows, R&B, jazz, blues.

I remember I used to copy lyrics from liner notes from albums. You can see the albums up on my wall back there. I used to copy a lot of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. I wanted to be like these modern day poets. My fifth grade teacher, Ms. Shelby, recognized how much I love hip hop music and how hip hop is just a child of poetry. So she introduced us to all the writers from the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larson and County Cullen and Langston Hughes, I fell in love with his work. He's one of my homeboys. He's from Missouri, from my home state. So in the fifth grade I studied everything that he wrote.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you listened to Stevie, you listened to Roberta Flack and then hip hop you were listening to-

Derrick Barnes:
I said Roberta Flack is the first woman I fell in love with. We would get up on Saturday mornings and clean and my mother would have her albums on and she just sounds like an angel to me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What's your jam for her? If you're going to play something, what are you going to?

Derrick Barnes:
So my favorite song of hers is That's No Way to Say Goodbye. When we get off you have to check that out. I love that song man, so much. There's no way to Say Goodbye, Killing Me Softly, obviously. All of her songs with Donnie Hathaway, but her first album was a classic too.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And I heard you were a big Prince fan.

Derrick Barnes:
I love Prince so much, man. When I mentioned the musicians that I like, I almost never mentioned Prince because I guess I'm being interviewed about children's books and Prince really, at nine to 11 really made me feel naughty in a lot of ways.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
He does still so that.

Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, but also it was a lot of freedom in his music. Here is a black man who is a prodigy, really. Taught himself how to play all these instruments and he was very open about his sexuality. There was no other artist like him that was effeminate in a lot of ways, but he was very open about the way he felt about love and women, just very free.

And for a young black artist, seeing somebody put themselves out in the world that way makes you feel like I can be myself too. I can write about what I want to write about. I can sing about what I want to sing about. So Prince provided me with a lot of freedom.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Do you teach that to your kids now?

Derrick Barnes:
Yeah, in a subliminal way. And I think it's important that we listen to their music too. I think we get into this ageism type world with our children and talking about how horrible their music is, but you have to understand why they are into... A lot of it is a group thing too. They maybe listen to certain artists because everybody else listens to them.

I do try to listen to their music and when they're in my car, it's just my music. I do give them a chance to play their music. But ever since they were babies, we exposed them to a lot of music, jazz, world music. My wife listens to a lot of Afrobeat, a lot of African music. She's a West African dancer, so they pretty much heard everything.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, so music from today with an open mind. I got that. What about the hip hop of today, given the impact that the genre had on you as a kid?

Derrick Barnes:
The level of hip hop music has changed and there's a direct correlation to the emphasis that our current education system puts on language arts, and a real sincere effort to really focus on language and the richness of language and the huge array of talented writers. We don't have that anymore.

Like I said, I was in elementary school and high school in the eighties and the nineties and I had a lot of great teachers. It was the tail end of the civil rights era. When I heard of Rakim, I was able to appreciate he was one of the first MCs to use in a rhyme instead of that AB pattern. So instead of saying, "I went to the store and got me a drink, sat on the curb so that I could think that's a AB pattern, but Rakim was able to put rhymes in between those spaces. I take seven MCs, putting them in the line as seven more brothers who think they can rhyme. It'll take seven more before I go for mine. Now that's 21 MCs eight up. At the same time.

I was able to recognize that because of the literature that we were reading and the different structure of the poetry stances. You really put value into that. So even people marvel at the Wu-Tang Clan, but you can tell they had great English teachers because the language is so complex. Their rhyming patterns are so complex and when you hear today's MCs, it is something beneath the simple AB pattern. They don't even have a vocabulary. They don't have a extensive vocabulary to use. It's just a-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, it is a really interesting take on it but let's get back to your early writing. You mentioned that your career began in fifth grade. So what was the story that you wrote about?

Derrick Barnes:
I had just finished watching Lady and the Tramp. So I wrote a story about these dogs traveling across the country looking for a magic bone that was going to save the world. I discovered my superpower that day that I can use the English language in my imagination to captivate people. I discovered a skill that my peers didn't have that I was able to make things appear where nothing was there, just out of thin air be able to tell stories and craft and create character. So I started writing everything after that, more poems, more short stories, more raps, love letters, everything. Anything I can give my hands on.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Were you a romancer with your-?

Derrick Barnes:
I was. I was. I learned how to talk to girls early, especially in middle school, in high school. And really, a lot of it is listening to a lot of R&B music and studying those lyrics. And really the writers that we love the most, I think this is the case for all of us, the writers that we love the most are ones that are able to be the most vulnerable and able to make us feel things. I think listening to a lot of R&B music early on when I was a kid allowed me to tap into that in my writing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you knew early on, you knew you wanted to write?

Derrick Barnes:
I think a lot of it was I didn't see anybody. I mean obviously I knew about Walter Dean Myers and writers at a distant, but there were no black male writers that were tangible that were accessible to me so that wasn't even a possibility. The only thing, I just love writing and I kept a lot of spiral notebooks and just wrote and created characters.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Always poetry, always inverse or more prose?

Derrick Barnes:
I always wrote a lot of free verse. To be honest with you, I didn't write a lot of verse until I started working at Hallmark Cards. August of 1999, I was hired as the first black man in the history of Hallmark Cards to be a creative copywriter.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.