Most people know Kwame Alexander as the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Crossover, the bestselling children’s book about two young brothers hooked on basketball. Long before he was an award-winning author, however, Alexander spent his time writing love poems, in an attempt to impress women and find his voice as a poet and a young man. 

But three decades and two marriages later, Alexander is a 54-year-old father of two now reconsidering those relationships from his past, and what exactly he knows - and doesn’t know - about love. And in order to do that, he’s thinking more about the marriage his parents modeled for him as a child, as well as what he learned about love and relationships from his father, a hard-nosed Baptist minister who rarely showed affection. Alexander’s book, Why Fathers Cry at Night, is available wherever you buy books, as is his latest collection of poems, This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.

Episode Timestamps:

00:00 - 07:25 - Intro

07:25 - 09:50 - on learning to love from watching our parents’ relationship

09:50 - 19:47 - discussing Kwame Alexander’s father’s version of tough love

19:47 - 24:26 - digging into his father’s jazz collection

26:31 - 32:40 - on the vulnerability required to write about broken relationships

32:40 - 35:36 - on talking to our parents and children about love

Read The Transcript For This Episode