Director

Kwame Alexander

KWAME ALEXANDER is a poet, educator, producer and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 40 books, including Why Fathers Cry at Night, An American Story, The Door of No Return, Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, and The Undefeated, the National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picturebook illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 

Kwame is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, The Coretta Scott King Author Honor, Three NAACP Image Award Nominations, and the 2017 Inaugural Pat Conroy Legacy Award. In 2018, he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana, as a part of LEAP for Ghana, an international literacy program he co-founded. In January 2023, a Kennedy Center-commissioned national tour for young audiences began for Alexander’s musical Acoustic Rooster’s Barnyard Boogie: Starring Indigo Blume, which is based on two of his beloved children’s books, Acoustic Rooster and Indigo Blume. 

Kwame is also the Executive Producer, Showrunner, and Emmy-winning Writer of The Crossover TV series, based on his Newbery-Medal winning novel of the same name, which premiered on Disney+ in April 2023. The Crossover was produced in partnership with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company and Big Sea Entertainment, Kwame’s production company where he serves as CEO and Co-founder, dedicated to creating innovative, highly original children’s and family entertainment. 

Other current projects in development at Big Sea include America’s Next Great Author, the groundbreaking reality television series for writers, and an animated series based off of the book The World of ¡Vamos! by Raúl the Third, in partnership with Sony Pictures Television – Kids (formerly known as Silvergate Media). 

A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Kwame is the creator and host of the Why Fathers Cry podcast, premiering September 2023, featuring conversations about love and parenting and loss, with fathers and sons.  

Additionally, Kwame regularly serves as a keynote and guest speaker at hundreds of thousands of schools, libraries, organizations and conferences around the world. He has shared his passion for literacy, books and the craft of writing at events like the Chautauqua Lecture Series, the Edinburgh Book Festival, Aspen Ideas, Asheville Ideas Fest, and the Global Literacy Symposium in Ghana, where he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana. Most recently he was appointed the Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Writer-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution. 

His mission is to change the world, one word at a time.

2025 Schedule

Thursday, October 23

1–5:30 p.m. | Registration | McKinley Building, American University

2–2:30 p.m. | Opening Program | McKinley Building, American University 

2:30–4 p.m. | Origins Panel | McKinley Building, American University | Followed by book signing and light refreshments

4:30–5:30 p.m. | Industry Workshop: Everything You Ever Wanted to know about Book Publishing but didn’t Know Who to Ask with Kwame Alexander | McKinley Building, American University 

5:30–7 p.m. | Dinner on your own 

7 p.m. | Pitchapalooza | McKinley Building, American University 

Friday, October 24

7–9 a.m. | Registration | McKinley Building, American University

9–11:30 a.m. | Writers’ Labs Intensives

• Poetry Lab with Ruth Forman | McKinley Building, American University 
• Novel in Verse Lab with Kwame Alexander | McKinley Building, American University 
• Memoir Lab with Liza Achilles | McKinley Building, American University 
• Fiction Lab with Angie Kim | McKinley Building, American University 

11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. | Free Writing Time & Lunch on Your Own 

1:30–3 p.m. | Keynote Lecture by Clint Smith | American University | Followed by book signing 

3:30–5 p.m. | Panels

• How to Tell the Page-Turning Story: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, and Historical Fiction | McKinley Building, American University 
• Crafting the Multi-Generational Story: On and Beyond the Page of Children’s Literature | McKinley Building, American University 

5–7 p.m. | Free Writing Time and Dinner on Your Own 

7 p.m. |An Evening with Maggie Smith and Marie Arana | McKinley Building, American University | Followed by book signing

Saturday, October 25

8:30–11 a.m. | Writers’ Labs Intensives

• Middle Grade Fiction Lab with Katherine Marsh | McKinley Building, American University 
• Poetry Lab with Tim Siebles | McKinley Building, American University 
• Historical Fiction Lab with Victoria Christopher Murray | McKinley Building, American University
• Reflective Writing Lab with Mary Hall Surface | McKinley Building, American University 

11:30 a.m.–1 p.m. | Conversation with Glory Edim, Lauren Francis-Sharma and Kwame Alexander | McKinley Building, American University | Followed by book signing 

1:30–3:30 p.m. | Free Writing Time & Lunch on Your Own

3:30–4:30 p.m. | Industry Workshop: Writing the rhyming children’s picture book with Sue Fliess | McKinley Building, American University 

4:30–6 p.m. | Publishing Panel: Meet the Agents and Editors | McKinley Building, American University

7–8 p.m. | Special Crossover 10 Year Anniversary Event

Keynotes

Keynote Lecture: Clint Smith

Clint Smith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground as well as Counting Descent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic. 

Clint has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. He is a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review.

Previously, Clint taught high school English in Prince George’s County, Maryland where he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History.  

Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children. 

An Evening with Maggie Smith and Marie Arana

Maggie Smith is the author of seven books: Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life (Simon & Schuster, 2025); You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria Books, 2023); Goldenrod (Simon & Schuster, 2021), Keep Moving (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a national bestseller; Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Lamp of the Body won the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press. The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison won the 2012 Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn, and the 2016 Gold Medal in Poetry for the Independent Publishers Book Awards. The collection was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Montaigne Medal, and poems from this collection were awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry. Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, 2016); The List of Dangers (Kent State/Wick Poetry Series, 2010); and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). 

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison delves into the depths of fairy tales to transform the daily into encounters with the marvelous but dangerous. The Rumpus writes: “These poems are studded with images we recognize from fairytales, offering iconic color in the forest gloom: wolves, foxes, deer, skinned rabbits, apples, hearts, white bones. Through Smith’s imaginative leaps, a kind of sorcery occurs, the lines shape-shifting quickly and musically.” 

Good Bones is Maggie Smith’s most intimate and direct book yet. Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that have a sense of moral gravitas and personal urgency, poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility. Ada Limón writes, “Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark, the poems in Good Bones are lyrically charged love letters to a world in desperate need of her generous eye.” 

The title poem of Good Bones went viral internationally after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the murder of MP Jo Cox in England. To date the poem has touched more than a million readers and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Bengali, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. It was called the “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International, but the poem has continued to be shared widely around the world in these tumultuous times. In April 2017 “Good Bones” was featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary—in an episode also called “Good Bones”—and Meryl Streep read the poem at the 2017 Academy of American Poets gala at Lincoln Center. The Telegraph (London) wrote that the poem is “a beautiful elegy for an imperfect world marked by tragedy, exploring the difficulty of finding positivity in the face of suffering…. The poem is a call for us all to improve the world, even if it might just this moment seem beyond repair.” 

Smith is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Poems have been widely anthologized in volumes such as The Best American Poetry series, the Knopf anthology, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, Speigel & Grau’s How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times, and a number of textbooks. 

A freelance writer and editor, and a Consulting Editor for the Kenyon Review, Smith is also a passionate and enthusiastic teacher. She has taught creative writing at Gettysburg College, in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, and at various conferences and nonprofits around the country. She is the Visiting Poet at Ohio Wesleyan University for 2017–2018. She lives with her family in Ohio. 

Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is the author of the memoir American Chica, a finalist for the National Book Award; two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights; the prizewinning biography Bolivar; Silver, Sword, and Stone, a narrative history of Latin America; The Writing Life, a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post; and LatinoLand. She is the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress and lives in Washington, DC, and Lima, Peru. 

Conversation with Glory Edim, Lauren Francis-Sharma and Kwame Alexander 

Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants, has written about the Caribbean in both of her critically acclaimed novels, “’Til the Well Runs Dry” and “Book of the Little Axe.” 

Lauren holds a degree in English Literature with a minor in African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, and an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lauren, a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and a MacDowell Fellow, is also the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College. 

Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a podcast and digital literacy platform that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. She edited the Well-Read Black Girl anthology, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and named a best book of the year by Library Journal. Her latest book On Girlhood is a collection of groundbreaking short stories that explore the thin yet imperative line between Black girlhood and womanhood. The winner of the Innovator’s Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Edim worked as a cultural practitioner for over ten years and serves on the board of Baldwin for the Arts. She resides in Washington D.C. with her son, Zikomo. 

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, Emmy-winning producer and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 41 books, including the new release Black Star, the second installment of his Door of No Return trilogy, This Is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, Why Fathers Cry at Night, An American Story, The Door of No Return, Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, and The Undefeated, the National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 

Kwame is also the Emmy-winning Executive Producer, Showrunner, and Writer of The Crossover TV series, based on his Newbery-Medal winning novel of the same name, which premiered on Disney+ in April 2023. The series was produced in partnership with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company and Big Sea Entertainment, Kwame’s production company that is dedicated to creating innovative, highly original children’s and family entertainment. Other current projects in development at Big Sea include America’s Next Great Author, the groundbreaking reality television series for writers. 

A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Kwame is the creator and host of the Why Fathers Cry podcast, premiering September 2023, featuring conversations about love and parenting and loss, with fathers and sons. He regularly shares his passion for literacy, books and the craft of writing around the world at events like the Chautauqua Lecture Series, the Edinburgh Book Festival, Aspen Ideas, and the Global Literacy Symposium in Ghana, where he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana. Most recently he was appointed the Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Writer-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution. 

His mission is to change the world, one word at a time. 

Faculty

Fiction

Fiction Writers’ Lab Intensive with Angie Kim 

Angie Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a Good Morning America and Barnes & Noble book club pick, winner of the Virginia Literary Award, and Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023. Her debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award and was named one of the 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time by Time. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. 

Novel-in-Verse Writers’ Lab Intensive with Kwame Alexander 

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, Emmy-winning producer and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 41 books, including the new release Black Star, the second installment of his Door of No Return trilogy, This Is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, Why Fathers Cry at Night, An American Story, The Door of No Return, Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, and The Undefeated, the National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 

Kwame is also the Emmy-winning Executive Producer, Showrunner, and Writer of The Crossover TV series, based on his Newbery-Medal winning novel of the same name, which premiered on Disney+ in April 2023. The series was produced in partnership with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company and Big Sea Entertainment, Kwame’s production company that is dedicated to creating innovative, highly original children’s and family entertainment. Other current projects in development at Big Sea include America’s Next Great Author, the groundbreaking reality television series for writers. 

A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Kwame is the creator and host of the Why Fathers Cry podcast, premiering September 2023, featuring conversations about love and parenting and loss, with fathers and sons. He regularly shares his passion for literacy, books and the craft of writing around the world at events like the Chautauqua Lecture Series, the Edinburgh Book Festival, Aspen Ideas, and the Global Literacy Symposium in Ghana, where he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana. Most recently he was appointed the Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Writer-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution. 

His mission is to change the world, one word at a time. 

Middle Grade Fiction Writers’ Lab Intensive with Katherine Marsh 

Katherine Marsh is an award-winning author of novels for middle-grade readers including The Lost Year; Nowhere Boy; The Night Tourist; Medusa: The Myth of Monsters and a sequel The Gods’ Revenge. Among her honors are National Book Award finalist, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, winner of the New York Historical Society Book Award, winner of the Jane Addams Award for Children’s Chapter Book, winner of the SCBWI Golden Kite Award, and winner of the Middle East Book Award. Her books have also been Junior Library Guild Gold Selections, New York Times Notables, American Library Association Notables, Bank Street Best Books, on dozens of state lists, and have been translated into sixteen languages. A former magazine journalist, Katherine lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two children and an astonishing array of pets. 

Historical Fiction Writers’ Lab Intensive with Victoria Christopher Murray 

Victoria Christopher Murray is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian, a Good Morning America book club pick, and The First Ladies, Target’s 2023 Book of the Year, both of which she coauthored with Marie Benedict. She is a NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

Poetry

Poetry Writers’ Lab Intensive with Ruth Forman 

Ruth Forman is an acclaimed poet, author, and friend of words. She is the award-winning author of best-selling children’s books Curls, Glow, Bloom, Ours, One, Like So, and Light, children’s book Young Cornrows Callin Out the Moon, and poetry collections We Are the Young Magicians, Renaissance, and Prayers Like Shoes. Ruth has received the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, The National Council of Teachers of English Notable Book Award, and recognition by The American Library Association. She is a former teacher of creative writing with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California as well as a longtime faculty member with the VONA writing program. Ruth is currently a professor at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. When not writing and teaching, she practices a passion for classical Yang family style tai chi chuan. You can learn more about her at ruthforman.com.  

Poetry Writers’ Lab Intensive with Tim Seibles 

Tim Seibles was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. His poems engage many aspects of life, from the romantic to the sociopolitical to the mystical. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow.  

His seven books include Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. One Turn Around the Sun, an extensive examination of his immediate family was released in 2017.   

In the last year, Tim has also written poems for two monuments. One in Norfolk, dedicated to the Norfolk 17 who began the fearful process of integrating Virginia public schools, the other for an installation in Dallas, Texas, that addresses the many race-based lynchings that took place there. 

His poems have appeared in several anthologies. Among them: In Search of Color Everywhere, Seriously Funny, Uncommon Core, This is The Honey, and Villanelles. Seibles’ works have also been featured in Best American Poetry 2010, 2013, 2023. His latest collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems was published by Etruscan Press in 2020.

Memoir and Reflective Writing

Memoir Writers’ Lab Intensive with Liza Achilles 

Liza Achilles’ Shakespearean sonnet sequence, Two Novembers: A Memoir of Love ’n’ Sex in Sonnets, was published by Beltway Editions on July 1, 2024. Poems from this collection have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Headlight Review, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Brief Wilderness, The Big Windows Review, Burrow, and Exacting Clam. Achilles’ nonfiction has appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books and the Silent Book Club blog, as well as independent blogs. Two Novembers was selected for DCTRENDING magazine’s Summer Booklist 2024. The Blog for the Discerning Reader has been active since 2018 and attracts thousands of readers each month. In 2016, she was a Semi-Finalist in the William Faulkner–Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for her unpublished historical novel The Water-Creatures. She is currently at work on an autobiographical novel on the intersection between philosophy and psychology. 

Achilles has English degrees from Northwestern University (B.A.) and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (M.Ed.). Her career as a high school English teacher turned into a career in writing and editing when she landed a job at a publishing house run by Pleasant Rowland, founder of American Girl. Since then, she has engaged in educational writing, proposal writing, business writing, policy writing, and technical writing, including a project for the Obama White House. She recently served as Policy Technical Writer as a contractor to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), focusing on IT policy, until she was laid off due to federal budget cuts in March 2025. She is now proud to be a full-time freelance author, editor, and blogger. She lives in the greater Washington, DC area. 

Reflective Writing Writers’ Lab with Mary Hall Surface 

Mary Hall Surface is an award-winning teaching artist, playwright, theatre director, and museum educator. She has presented her art-inspired writing workshops at the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Kennedy Center, Chautauqua Institution, Washington National Cathedral, Phoenix Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Harvard’s Project Zero Classroom. Her “Write into Art” series is among the Smithsonian Associates most popular programs.  Her innovative approach to the writing-visual art connection was featured in The Washington Post in 2017. Her plays have been produced worldwide including 17 productions at the Kennedy Center. She has been nominated for nine Helen Hayes Awards, including four Charles McArthur Awards for Outstanding New Play, and received the 2002 award for Outstanding Director of a Musical. Her work was recently commissioned for two films and a stage production by Washington’s Arena Stage. Mary Hall has published fifteen plays, an anthology of her scripts, two collections of scenes and monologues, and three original cast albums.   www.maryhallsurface.com. 

Special Events

Pitchapalooza with Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, aka: The Book Doctors

Pitchapalooza is American Idol for books (only kinder and gentler). Twenty writers will be selected at random to pitch their book. Each writer gets one minute—and only one minute! Dozens of writers have gone from talented amateurs to professionally-published authors as a result of participating in Pitchapalooza, including Raul the Third, Ylonda Gault, Stacy McAnulty, Judith Fertig, Gloria Chao, Nura Maznavi and Ayesha Mattu. 

Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry are co-founders of The Book Doctors, a company that is the go-to resource for everything you need to write, sell and market your book successfully. Their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, is in its third edition and has sold over 100,000 copies. David and Arielle are the authors of over 25 books combined and have appeared in, among others, NPR’s Morning Edition, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and People Magazine. They have taught workshops at Stanford University, the Miami Book Festival and hundreds of other institutions, conferences and festivals. They are also the co-creators, with Kwame Alexander, of America’s Next Great Author. 

Arielle is the author of ten books including The Secret Language of Color. She is an agent-at-large at the Levine Greenberg Rostan 
Literary Agency, where for almost 30 years, she has been helping hundreds of talented writers become published authors. Arielle also co-founded the iconic company, LittleMissMatched, and grew it from a tiny operation into a leading national brand, with stores from coast to coast, everywhere from Disney World to Fifth Avenue in New York City. 

David is the bestselling author of 16 books on a wide variety of subjects, from memoir to middle grade fiction, sports to reference. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages, optioned by Hollywood, and appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, among numerous other publications. Before writing professionally, David was a comic and an actor. His one man show, based on his memoir, Chicken, was named the number one show in the United Kingdom for its entire run at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, Fringe by The Independent. 

Industry Workshops

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Book Publishing but Didn’t Know Who to Ask with Kwame Alexander 

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, Emmy-winning producer and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 41 books, including the new release Black Star, the second installment of his Door of No Return trilogy, This Is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, Why Fathers Cry at Night, An American Story, The Door of No Return, Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, and The Undefeated, the National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 

Kwame is also the Emmy-winning Executive Producer, Showrunner, and Writer of The Crossover TV series, based on his Newbery-Medal winning novel of the same name, which premiered on Disney+ in April 2023. The series was produced in partnership with LeBron James’ SpringHill Company and Big Sea Entertainment, Kwame’s production company that is dedicated to creating innovative, highly original children’s and family entertainment. Other current projects in development at Big Sea include America’s Next Great Author, the groundbreaking reality television series for writers. 

A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Kwame is the creator and host of the Why Fathers Cry podcast, premiering September 2023, featuring conversations about love and parenting and loss, with fathers and sons. He regularly shares his passion for literacy, books and the craft of writing around the world at events like the Chautauqua Lecture Series, the Edinburgh Book Festival, Aspen Ideas, and the Global Literacy Symposium in Ghana, where he opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana. Most recently he was appointed the Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts and Writer-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution. 

His mission is to change the world, one word at a time. 

Writing the Rhyming Children’s Picture Book with Sue Fliess 

Sue Fliess is the award-winning author of over fifty children’s books including Cicada Symphony, Octopus Acrobatics, Ninja Camp, Sadie Sprocket Builds a Rocket, Beauty and the Beaker, the Beatrice Bly’s Rules for Spies series, Magical Creatures and Crafts series, Kid Scientist series, many Little Golden Books, and more. Her books have received Blueberry Honors and starred reviews, been named to ALA Notable lists, selected to the Junior Library Guild, included in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, featured on Reading Rainbow Live, and translated into multiple languages. She’s written essays for O the Oprah Magazine and Huffington Post, as well as stories for Walt Disney. She has been teaching aspiring and established writers for over a decade and provides a picture book manuscript critique service. When she’s not wrangling words, she’s likely traveling. Sue lives in Northern Virginia with her family and goofy dog Truman.