Derrick Barnes

Derrick Barnes (born August 9, 1975, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.) is an American author of award-winning books for children and young adults. His picture book Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut (2017) won the Kirkus Prize for young readers’ literature and was named a Newbery Honor Book and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book in 2018.

Early life

Barnes was reared in Kansas City, Missouri, by Catherine Barnes, a single mother. From an early age, he was smitten with reading. As as boy, he was also captivated by the poetry of hip-hop. Recognizing Barnes’s interest in language and stories, his fifth-grade teacher introduced him to the writing of Langston Hughes, who became a huge influence on Barnes’s work, along with young-adult author Walter Dean Meyers, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and poet and playwright Derek Walcott. Barnes attended Jackson State University in Mississippi, where he wrote and performed poetry en route to earning a bachelor’s degree in marketing in 1999. Following graduation, he returned to Kansas City, where he became the first Black American man to work as a copywriter at the Hallmark greeting card company. At Hallmark he met illustrator Gordon C. James, whose agent, Regina Brooks, offered Barnes a deal to write two early-reader children’s books.

Writing career

In 2004 Barnes published those books: Stop, Drop, and Chill, illustrated by Barbara Jean Phillips-Duke, and The Low-Down, Bad-Day Blues, illustrated by Aaron Boyd. He wrote them both with simple rhymes for beginning readers. The text of Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut is a poem that promotes self-worth in African American boys. It is accompanied by vivid pictures by James that are set in a barbershop. According to Barnes, he aims to create stories that help Black children (especially boys) see themselves as important, but he also seeks to dispel stereotypes of Black children for non-Black readers. In 2022 he told Publishers Weekly:

I try not to put anything regarding race into my books. They just so happen to be slice-of-life books that feature a beautiful Black child with a beautiful Black family. I just want to normalize how magnificent we are.

Barnes’s 2019 book, The King of Kindergarten, and its 2022 sequel, The Queen of Kindergarten, both illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, relay the excitement of the first day of kindergarten. I Am Every Good Thing (2020), illustrated by James, further celebrates and empowers Black boys. Like Crown, it won the Kirkus Prize for young readers’ literature. Barnes is also the author of the Ruby and the Booker Boys series, a collection of chapter books that follow eight-year-old Ruby and her three troublemaking elder brothers. Titles in the series include The Slumber Party Payback (2008) and Ruby Flips for Attention (2009), both of which were illustrated by Brantley-Newton.

Among the books that Barnes has written for older children is The Making of Dr. Truelove (2006), which features a boy who starts an online relationship-advice column in an effort to win back his girlfriend. Aimed at a middle-school audience, We Could Be Brothers (2010) follows two African American 13-year-olds as they become friends while serving school detention. It touches on the importance of positive male role models and self-respect.

Barnes has also written nonfiction. Who Got Game?: Baseball (2020) relays stories and statistics from the history of baseball. Moreover, Barnes produced Victory. Stand! (2022), a graphic memoir of former U.S. track-and-field athlete Tommie Smith that he wrote with Smith and that was illustrated by Dawud Anyabwile. Smith had won a gold medal at the Mexico City 1968 Olympic Games but had then been expelled from the Games after giving a Black Power salute during the awards ceremony.

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Personal life

At Jackson State, Barnes met Tinka Anne Wells, whom he married in 2001. He and his wife, who is a physician, have four sons. In 2005 the couple and their two eldest sons were living in New Orleans, where she was serving her residency, when they were displaced by Hurricane Katrina. A series in Ebony magazine in 2012 proclaimed the Barneses the fourth “coolest Black family in America.”