Authors Similar like John Steptoe

Julius Lester

Julius Lester was an American writer of books for children and adults. He was an academic who taught for 32 years (1971–2003) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was also a photographer, as well as a musician who recorded two albums of folk music and original songs.

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Anne Marie Pace

Anne Marie Pace is a picture book author. She is the author of the VAMPIRINA BALLERINA series, illustrated by LeUyen Pham, published by Disney-Hyperion starting in 2012, which is in production as a Disney Junior animated series to debut in 2017; and PIGLOO (Henry Holt, illustrated by Lorna Hussey, October, 2016). Her upcoming books include GROUNDHUG DAY (Disney-Hyperion, illustrated by Christopher Denise, December, 2017), and BIG-EYED BUG (Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster, illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon, 2018), as well as the new VAMPIRINA AT THE BEACH, coming in April 2017. Past books include NEVER EVER TALK TO STRANGERS and A TEACHER FOR BEAR, both published by Scholastic Book Clubs. She lives with her family in Virginia.

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Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership

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Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times , the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.

Ellison died of Pancreatic Cancer on April 16, 1994. He was eighty-one years old.

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Nella Larsen

Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.

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Richard Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerned racial themes. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

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James Baldwin

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.

James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.

He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France

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Malcolm X

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an American Black Muslim minister and a spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

After leaving the Nation of Islam in 1964, he made the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca and became a Sunni Muslim. He also founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Less than a year later, he was assassinated in Washington Heights on the first day of National Brotherhood Week.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley wrote, "Malcolm X has been called many things: Pan-Africanist, father of Black Power, religious fanatic, closet conservative, incipient socialist, and a menace to society. The meaning of his public life — his politics and ideology — is contested in part because

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James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.

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Carter G. Woodson

Convinced that the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of African Americans. Along with William D. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on September 9, 1915, in Chicago. That was the year Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. His other books followed: A Century of Negro Migration (1918) and The History of the Negro Church (1927). His work The Negro in Our History has been reprinted in numerous editions and was revised by Charles H. Wesley after Woodson's dea

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Philip Dray

Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.

Lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Sam Quinones

Sam Quinones is a long-time journalist and author of 3 books of narrative nonfiction.

He worked for the LA Times for 10 years. He spent 10 years before that as a freelance journalist in Mexico.

His first book is True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx, published in 2001, a collection of nonfiction stories about drag queens, popsicle-makers, Oaxacan basketball players, telenovela stars, gunmen, migrants, and slain narco-balladeer, Chalino Sanchez.

In 2007, he published Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. In this volume he tells stories of the Henry Ford of velvet painting, opera singers in Tijuana, the Tomato King of Jerez, Zacatecas, the stories of a young constru

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Wanda Gág

Wanda Hazel Gág (pronounced GOG) was an American author and illustrator. She was born on March 11, 1893, in New Ulm, Minnesota. Her mother, Elisabeth Biebl, and father, Anton, were of Bohemian descent. Both parents were artists who had met in Germany. They had seven children, who all acquired some level of artistic talent. Gág grew up the eldest of these, and despite their economic hardships, the family was surrounded by music, art, light, and love, making it for the most part a joyous existence.

When Gág was 15, her father died of tuberculosis; his final words to her were: "Was der Papa nicht thun konnt', muss die Wanda halt fertig machen." ("What Papa couldn't do, Wanda will have to finish.") Following Anton's death the family was on welfa

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Wes Moore

Westley Watende Omari Moore (born October 15, 1978) is an American politician, investment banker, author, television producer, and nonprofit executive serving as the 63rd governor of Maryland since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the first Black governor of the state, the third Black person elected as governor of any U.S. state, and as of 2023, the only incumbent black governor of any U.S. state.

Born in Maryland and raised largely in New York, Moore graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master's degree from Wolfson College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After several years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, Moore became an investment banker in New York. Between 2010 and 2015, Moore published five books, includin

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James Allen

James Allen is an American antique collector, known in particular for his collection of 145 photographs of lynchings in America, published in 2000 with Jon Lewis as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The collection includes images of the lynching in 1911 of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and of Leo Frank in 1915 near Marietta, Georgia.

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Issa Rae

With her own unique flare and infectious sense of humor, Issa Rae’s content has garnered over 20 million views and close to 160,000 subscribers on YouTube. In addition to making the Forbes 30 Under 30 list twice and winning the 2012 Shorty Award for Best Web Show for her hit series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” Issa Rae has worked on web content for Pharrell Williams, Tracey Edmonds and numerous others. She developed a TV series with Shonda Rhimes for ABC and is currently developing a half-hour comedy for HBO with Larry Wilmore. Rae is also slated to release a book of essays with Simon & Schuster in 2015.

Issa Rae is signed with UTA and 3 Arts Entertainment.

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Yaa Gyasi

YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a Dean's Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.

YAA GYASI is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit prhspeakers.com.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the Unit

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Zakiya Dalila Harris

Zakiya Dalila Harris spent nearly three years in editorial at Knopf/Doubleday before leaving to write her debut novel The Other Black Girl. Prior to working in publishing, Zakiya received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Cosmopolitan, Guernica, and The Rumpus. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Emmanuel Acho

Emmanuel Chinedum Acho is a Nigerian-American former linebacker who played in the National Football League and is currently working as an analyst for Fox Sports 1. He played college football at Texas before being drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the sixth round of the 2012 NFL Draft.

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Coleman Hughes

"My name is Coleman Hughes. I’m a writer, podcast host, and musician.

I’ve written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, the Spectator, and the City Journal. Currently, I’m a contributing writer at the Free Press."

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Shirley Climo

Shirley Climo was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1928. She attended DePauw University until her mother died unexpectedly in 1949. She dropped out of college and took up her mother's work writing scripts for the weekly WGAR-Radio children's program Fairytale Theatre. During her lifetime, she wrote 24 books including The Korean Cinderella; Magic and Mischief: Tales from Cornwall; A Treasury of Princesses: Princess Tales from Around the World; A Treasury of Mermaids: Mermaid Tales from Around the World; and Someone Saw a Spider: Spider Facts and Folktales. She died on August 25, 2012 at the age of 83.

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Paul O. Zelinsky

Born 1953

Paul O. Zelinsky grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, the son of a mathematics professor and a medical illustrator. He drew compulsively from an early age, but did not know until college that this would be his career. As a Sophomore in Yale College he enrolled in a course on the history and practice of the picture book, co-taught by an English professor and Maurice Sendak. This experience inspired Paul to point himself in the direction of children's books. His first book appeared in 1978, since which time he has become recognized as one of the most inventive and critically successful artists in the field.

He now lives with his wife in Brooklyn, New York. They have two grown daughters.

Among many other awards and prizes, he received the 199

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Ed Young

Ed Young is the illustrator of more than eighty books for children, seventeen of which he has also written. Among his books is the Caldecott Medal winner Lon Po Po, which he both wrote and illustrated. He says that his work is inspired by the philosophy of Chinese painting. He lives in Westchester County, New York.

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Maria Eugenia Manrique

María Eugenia Manrique was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and currently lives in Barcelona, Spain. She studied fine art in Mexico City, specializing in xylography and engraving; Eastern painting at Nankín University, China; and sumi-e and calligraphy at the Nihon Shuji Kyoiku Zaidan Foundation in Japan. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Venezuela, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, the United States, Puerto Rico, China, Italy, Argentina, and Japan. In 2014 she won the Grand Prize in Eastern Painting at the International Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Exposition at the Anshan Museum in China. She has published four books on Eastern painting. The Caiman is her first children’s book.

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Rafe Martin

Rafe Martin is an award-winning author and storyteller, as well as a lay Zen teacher in the Harada-Yasutani koan line. He is founding teacher of Endless Path Zendo, Rochester, NY.

He is the recipient of the prestigious Empire State Award for the body of his work, as well as multiple American Library Association Notable Book Awards and Parent's Choice Gold Awards. He has been featured at such storytelling events as the Joseph Campbell Festival of Myth and Story, The Sierra Storytelling Festival, and the National Storytelling Festival. He is the father of two grown children and lives with his wife, Rose, in Rochester, NY.

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Jeff Brumbeau

It was Jeff’s exposure to independent, self-sufficient women, Jeff believes, that later inspired him to write children’s stories that featured strong women, as in his first two books, The Man-In-The-Moon In Love and The Quiltmaker’s Gift.

Growing up, Jeff was interested in tales with a strong moral base, especially those found in eighteenth and nineteenth century children’s literature. In his stories, he wanted to create the same vibrancy and ethical values that are found in the classic tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers. For The Quiltmaker’s Gift, he selected the quilt as a symbol for the theme of giving and sharing, because a quilt represents the ultimate gift. It offers both practical warmth and artistic beauty.

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Robert D. San Souci

Robert Daniel San Souci (October 10, 1946 – December 19, 2014) was a multiple award-winning children's book author, who resided in San Francisco, California. He often worked with his brother, Daniel San Souci, a children's book illustrator. He was a consultant to Disney Studios and was instrumental in the production of the film Mulan, for which he wrote the story. He studied folklore in graduate school. He died after suffering a head injury while falling from a high height in San Francisco in December 2014. He was only 68 years old.

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Ai-Ling Louie

Ai-Ling Louie is the author of the children’s classic, Yeh-Shen; A Cinderella Story from China (Philomel/Putnam). Her children’s biography series, "Amazing Asian Americans" currently contains three books: "Vera Wang, Queen of Fashion", "Yo-Yo and Yeou-Cheng Ma, Finding Their Way", and her book, the first children's biography published in the US about a South Asian American, "Astronaut Kalpana Chawla, Reaching for the Stars." In December 2018, "Patsy Mink, Mother of Title 9" will be published. All her books are for the elementary school child. The reading level is 4th grade

Ms. Louie was born in New York and became an elementary school teacher and children's librarian. Her pets are her aquarium fish.

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Helen Craig

Helen Craig is a British children's book illustrator and author, best known for creating the Angelina Ballerina series of children's books with writer Katharine Holabird.

Craig began illustrating children's books in 1970. The first book which she had both written and illustrated was The Mouse House ABC, published in 1977. With author Sarah Hayes, she also created Bear, a popular children's character who appears in This Is The Bear (1986), This Is The Bear and the Picnic Lunch (1988), and This Is The Bear and the Scary Night (1992).

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Patrick O'Brien

Patrick O'Brien has been a full-time illustrator and artist since 1985. His clients have included National Geographic, The Discovery Channel, and the Smithsonian. His art has appeared in magazines and newspapers, on posters and greeting cards, and even on billboards.

Patrick is the author and illustrator of twelve picture books for children. These are mostly non-fiction books about things like knights, pirates, ships, and dinosaurs, although he has done a couple of science-ficition books about dinosaurs in space.

In 2003 Patrick began creating oil paintings of maritime scenes. In 2010 the U.S. Naval Academy Museum mounted an exhibition featuring twenty-eight of his maritime paintings. In 2012, The National Maritime Historical Society awarded

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Mylo Freeman

Mylo Freeman grew up in The Hague and lives in Amsterdam. She attended the art-academy in Amsterdam and majored in illustration and painting. She has been a full-time writer-illustrator since 1993 and has published over 50 picture books. Her debut book Potty! was awarded the Kiek Book Prize and has been translated into many languages. The Princess Arabella series is one of her most well-known books and has been published in Holland, Nigeria and the UK.

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John Steptoe

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