Kwame Alexander

Their background spans across film and curation and production and performance and language arts.

Their work is a series of evolving attempts to love, document pay homage to and preserve the black south and themselves in tandem asia may is a watering hole fellow we'll have to get into that what that means and has had their work featured at the gibbs museum spoleto the festival of words la and in this is honey an anthology of contemporary black poets curated by Kwame Alexander, among others.

They're currently serving, as I mentioned, as the second poet laureate of Charleston, South Carolina.

Asia Mae, welcome to the show.

And she just kept in touch with me.

And

when Kwame Alexander was putting together his book, she was like, we have the idea for it.

You have a particular poem I'm thinking about.

That's what Friends Are For was actually the March Today show pick.

Kwame Alexander picked it as his feel-good book of the month, which was lovely.

So it's had a really, it's been, had a wonderful run.

It was, you know, featured on People and Newsweek.

Yay, Brian! So that was great.

Kwame Alexander was the emcee.

He did a great job.

And yeah, it was just an overall wonderful experience.

oh excuse

me i just forgot the award that is given for children's books but the award winning um Anyway, so I'm also very excited to be developing a musical based on Kwame Alexander's award-winning book, The Crossover, which also won an Emmy for its adaptation of the TV show, and we're turning it into a musical with original music by Christopher Jackson, who just returned to Hamilton after 10 years as Washington, and Kandris Jones, who wrote the amazing play Flex that was recently at Lincoln Center.

So we'll be looking at, we're working towards the workshop in April of that.

So yeah, that's what I have cooking.

And I think The Black Flamingo was obviously the way in for me.

But that was after reading, you know, verse novels by Sarah Crossan and Elizabeth Acevedo and Kwame Alexander and Jason Reynolds, just a few of the verse novelists that kind of inspired me to enter this form because I think it's a really great form for telling stories.

It's really easy to read and follow.

It leaves a lot to the reader's imagination and it gets straight to the heart of the action and the emotion of the protagonist.