From Bethesda Magazine: A conversation with Chevy Chase, D.C., author Kwame Alexander
‘The Crossover’ writer discusses his career, engaging young readers and the virtues of poetry
By Mike Unger
May 19, 2026 3:00 p.m. | Updated: May 6, 2026 1:37 p.m.
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The soulful sounds of a horn, accompanied by a stand-up bass, drums, maybe a piano, start flowing into Kwame Alexander’s ears as he sits down at a card table off the living room in his Chevy Chase, D.C., home every morning at 6 a.m. Motivated by the music of jazz greats such as Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson, words travel from his brain through his fingers and onto the screen of his laptop for the next few hours. Writing is a daily ritual the 57-year-old author, publisher, producer and speaker can’t live without.
Alexander has become a noted commentator and advocate for child literacy, founding the nonprofit One Word at a Time, winning a 2025 NAACP Image Award and being named a 2026 Sine 250+ Fellow at American University. He achieved notoriety as an author of books for young adults. The Crossover, his 2014 breakthrough, is about twin 12-year-old boys who, like him, have a love of basketball and a complicated relationship with their father. It’s a free-flowing story written in verse; Alexander has always first and foremost considered himself a poet.
“The most important thing that I’ve come to know is that if you want to change the way people act, you got to change the way they think. You want to change the way they think, you got to change the way they feel,” he says. “What better way to get people to feel something immediately than through a poem, that language of love that cuts through all the fat and gets to the meat of the humanity of us.”
The power of the written word was instilled in Alexander by his parents. His mother was a folklorist and an educator, his father a Baptist preacher, writer, publisher and college professor. As a child growing up in New York City, North Carolina and ultimately Chesapeake, Virginia, reading was essential. Once Alexander took a poetry class as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, he began writing seriously. He knew it was his calling.
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Like many writers before him, Alexander says he struggled to be heard until he had a big hit. The Crossover was his. It won a Newbery Medal and a Coretta Scott King Award and became a Disney+ television show, winning Outstanding Young Teen Series at the Children’s and Family Emmy Awards. He’s now working with two Hamilton alums—director Thomas Kail and Christopher Jackson, who played George Washington—to adapt The Crossover into a musical.
Still, no matter what direction his career takes him, this father of two (and new grandfather) tries to start each day at his laptop. Writing, he knows, is his bedrock.
“It always comes back to that,” he says. “The thing about trying to write good books is that you have to have something worth saying. In order to have something worth saying, you have to live a life that matters.”
Bethesda Magazine spoke with Alexander at Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza in D.C.’s Friendship Heights neighborhood in February. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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You often talk about how your parents immersed you in books. How did their relationships with books impact you as a child?
They were both in graduate school when I was born. My mother was getting her master’s in business education, and my father was getting his master’s and his doctorate. So just for their schooling, they were reading quite a bit. In addition, my father also decided to start a publishing company. The first books he published were his dissertations from Columbia University. So I think they were as much a part of our lives as, let’s say, music was for the Marsalis family.
Their lives were very literary and very bookish. And so I come along, and of course now they’re going to indoctrinate me in that way of life. I think they believed that books were a way to instill a sense of identity and purpose and direction in me and my siblings.
Was reading something that you loved, or was it a chore?
My mother made it fun because of the books she surrounded us with. My mother was a folklorist, so she told stories. She traveled around the world. So she made literature and language fun. My father, it was a chore. It was functional. It was like, you need to learn about the world. And so here is this Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. You need to read that. I was 12 years old. When I look back on it, I’m like, ‘How cool was that?’ So I loved some of the things that I read, and loathed other stuff that I had to read. But certainly it all made an impact.
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Your father was a Baptist preacher. How were your personal views of religion impacted by him?
We grew up in a house where we believed in this religious idea of faith, the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things hopeful. There was a lot of belief. There was a lot of traditional religious practice, going to church every Sunday. Growing up in that house with a father who was not only a minister, but who was an activist and who used his ministry in a way that promoted social justice, one of the things that did for me was it made me feel confident and worthy. I had a place in this world, and I was going to stand tall and proud.
My first speech was given in church. I was a youth pastor. I remember that feeling of being on stage and delivering this message that resonated with me. And then to hear the response from the congregation, that empowered me. And so I think there was a certain level of inspiration and empowerment that came from being immersed in the Baptist church in general and being the son of a pastor in particular.
When did you start writing?
The first poem was probably seventh grade. It was a poem for my mother. Sporadically after that I’d write some stuff here and there. But when I began to sort of write in earnest was sophomore year at Virginia Tech. The Black students wanted to get Virginia Tech to divest [from] apartheid, to take their money out of companies that were in South Africa supporting of that form of slavery. We held rallies and protests, and at these I began to read poems. And then there was a woman I liked. I began to write her poems.
Why poetry? What can a poem convey that other styles of writing cannot?
You’re giving attention to a moment in time, to an experience, to a feeling, to an observation in a way that’s immediate. And so the reader, the listener, they get it.
Let’s jump back to the woman you wrote the poem for. Did it work?
It did. She married me. We got divorced, but that’s another [story].
When you’re writing poetry or a novel in verse, do you have to consciously think about what weight you’re giving to the meaning of the words as opposed to whether they rhyme or how they sound?
You’re paying attention to all of that. You do it so much that it becomes sort of a natural way of writing. It becomes a part of the process. But absolutely, you’re thinking about the way the words sound. You’re thinking, Is this metaphor? Am I still carrying the same metaphor? I was talking about stone, am I now talking about a baseball? Is there a connection? Am I making it work? You’re thinking about all those sort of things. The most important thing is, am I showing you something? Because I don’t want to tell you. Am I conveying something that’s meaningful and significant by showing you? You’re thinking about all that. I think it’s the right words in the right order.
You were once asked, ‘What would you say to a kid who thinks they don’t like to read?’ You said, ’Read a poem.’ Why is poetry a good gateway for that kind of kid?
Look at all the white space on the page. You’re saying a whole lot in a few words. It’s not intimidating. You get through a poem, you get through a three-line haiku, you’ve gotten through a beginning, middle and end. Oh, I finished. It builds confidence. It allows students to be able to say, ‘I’ve accomplished this, and now I can move on to the next one.’ I think it’s a bridge to kids being able to appreciate longer forms of literature.
When you sit down to write one of your books, do you have a specific audience in mind? Are you thinking, Is a 14-year-old boy going to like this? Is a 15-year-old girl going to like this?
I am thinking, 10 times out of 10, am I going to love this book? Kwame at 7, Kwame at 12, Kwame now. Every time. I just published a book called The Mighty Macy. It’s a chapter book, which means it’s for ages 6 to 10. I did not say when I sat down to write, ‘Is this going to work for a 7-year-old?’ I said, ‘Is this going to work for me?’ I’m writing about a 9-year-old girl, but I’m writing for me at all the ages, and I got to love it. I’m the audience.
I think the first novel I wrote was called He Said, She Said. I sat down and I said, ‘This is going to be a young adult novel. I’ve got to write this for the 15- and 16-year-olds.’ I thought about them the whole time I was writing it. It’s the worst novel I’ve ever written. It didn’t work.
You published several books before breaking through with The Crossover. Did you ever think that you weren’t going to be able to support yourself and your family through writing?
I thought every day this is not going to work. So I’d go get another job. Graphic design, publications coordinator, proposal coordinator. And then I’d try to do it again and it wouldn’t work. Twenty-three years going through that process. So every day I was like, ‘This is never going to work. But I’m going to keep trying.’
Why did you keep trying?
Well, it goes back to your question about religion. Faith. You got to believe in yourself. And I’ve never lacked that growing up the way I did. Reading all those books as a kid. One of the things that [stuck] with me is this quote that I remember reading [in] the Muhammad Ali book The Greatest. ‘I am the greatest, not because I’m better than anyone, because no one is better than me.’ I’ve always believed in myself. And so, yeah, I cried and I doubted myself. … When I woke up the next morning [I’m thinking], You can do this. I just had that belief. You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
When I read The Crossover, I was a little surprised to see a Horace Silver reference. I thought that a preteen might not get that reference to a 20th-century jazz pianist. You include a lot of references to music and musicians in your work. Why?
It probably goes back to when I was a freshman at Virginia Tech and I came home for spring break. I was up in our attic and I saw a crate of records. I was like, ‘Perfect. I got a record player and now I got some records.’ They were my dad’s. I took them back to college. It was Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra and Ornette Coleman and Freddie Hubbard and Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. And I just fell in love with it. I remember I had a girl over, the girl who eventually married me, and I played her jazz. Jazz became the language with which I was able to learn how to write, to be cool, you know, to sort of enjoy myself. The rhythm with which I write, I think, is musical. You can see it and feel it. And so it plays a role in everything I write.
What’s it like seeing an idea you translated from your head to the page become reborn as a TV show?
It was tremendous. I think it would have been probably a not-so-pleasant experience if I weren’t involved. But being the co-showrunner and being the executive producer and being on the set every day, it was remarkable to see this vision that you had in a Panera Bread on Elden Street in Herndon, Virginia, where I wrote the first page, to see that now blossom into 200 people trying to make this into a TV show. It was the most beautiful thing.
Would it have been hard if you didn’t have that control?
Yeah. I remember it was suggested to me that one of the boys in the story should be on drugs. And I fought that, pushed back on that, and it didn’t happen. What if I were not in the room?
You said in an interview around the time your memoir, Why Fathers Cry at Night, came out in 2023 that you’ve always been a person who hasn’t opened up. So why did you decide to write a memoir?
Well, I wasn’t happy. I’d won all the awards, had a lot of success in publishing. Had a TV show with Disney. On the outside, it looked like everything was just going wonderful. And I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t figure it out. Like, what is going on? You got all this success. Why can’t you just be happy?
So I began to write some poems, love poems, that began to reveal some of the cracks and some of the problems that I had not admitted to myself. And so writing those poems led me to sort of expand into writing a full-on memoir. It was really a way for me to look at how I love, how I’m loved, and how I want my daughters to know they were loved. This was going to be a love letter to them. And it ended up being a love letter to myself. I learned a great deal, and it did what it was supposed to do.
Did you ever have an instance where you were reading your work and having to admit to yourself that, hey, I wasn’t being 100% honest there? Or I need to be more honest about why I was feeling this way.
Oh yeah. And not only that, but I also realized, oh s—, I can’t publish this book. I’ve been too real. I can’t put this out in the world. And I tried to get the book pulled.
Really?
I called my editor and said, ‘This can’t happen.’ And she said, ‘Well, I hear you and the book is at the printer.’ But yeah, I felt that. But I really had to go all in because I wanted to feel better and be better, especially for my kids.
During your interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, it sounded like you were on the road to strengthening your relationship with your father. You had improved relationships with your siblings, and you seemed to be on the way to doing that with your older daughter, with whom you had not spoken in a while. So three years later, where are you with those relationships now?
My father and I have a much more open and authentic relationship. Whereas we didn’t before. So we’ll talk about things that matter. It’s not just, ‘Hey, how’s your day?’ With my oldest daughter, I’m a grandfather. Dude, I’m a grandfather. How cool is that?
Very. Congratulations.
For the most part, I hadn’t shared [Why Fathers Cry at Night] with them [before publication]. I figured it would be better to ask for forgiveness. It was not better. It was challenging, but we came out on the other side of it in a much better [place].
You mentioned your divorce earlier. How have you come through that process?
I prefer not to use the word divorce. We’re partners. We’re co-parents. Here’s something funny I’ll tell you. My daughter is going to college in August. And so when we were looking at colleges last spring, she was talking to a counselor. And she was letting her know, ‘I’m going out of town. My parents and I are going to look at colleges.’ And she said her counselor was like, ‘Really? They’re not together though.’ And my daughter looked at her and said, ‘Yeah, but we’re still a family.’ That was our goal. And I feel like we’ve achieved that and we’re still on that journey together.
You’ve been to Ghana—where you opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic—11 times. What is it about that country that has so profoundly moved you?
You mean besides the snapper and the jollof rice and the plantains? And the people and the children and the culture? And to be in a country, to be in a community where you don’t feel like you are other or where people are trying to not make you feel like you are other? To be close to a culture that birthed your ancestors, it’s a homecoming. And it just feels great. It’s very inspirational. I’ve just come to love the people there.
What do you like about living in this area?
It reminds me of the food and how much I loved it in London. And it’s near my [youngest daughter’s] school. And I’ve got a lot of friends here. But I tell you what: as soon as this child goes to college, I’m back in St. John’s Wood in London, England [where I lived from 2019 to 2022].
Do you ever sit back and think, How did I get here?
Every morning—to go back to that religious household I grew up in—I thank the universe for conspiring to give me what I wanted. Every morning I thank the creator of the heavens and the earth for all of the opportunities, for all the wonders and all the wounds and all the challenges and all the lessons. I try to remain so grateful because I know it didn’t have to happen and I know it doesn’t have to continue. I think I’ve worked really hard, and I’m grateful for all the fruits of this labor.
Kwame Alexander
From: New York, North Carolina and Chesapeake, Virginia
Lives in: Chevy Chase, D.C.
Age: 57
College: Virginia Tech
Occupation: Author
Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.
This appears in the May/June 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine