Kadir Nelson

Kadir Nelson (born May 15, 1974, Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S.) is an American artist, illustrator, and author whose paintings have been featured in museum exhibits worldwide as well as on multiple covers of The New Yorker magazine. Nelson won the Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for The Undefeated (2019), a poem composed by American writer Kwame Alexander.

Early life and education

Nelson was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, though his birth certificate lists Washington, D.C. He grew up in New Jersey and California. He began drawing at age 3 and began studying with his artist uncle when he was 11 years old. Nelson won a scholarship to study art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After graduating with honours in 1996, he created many portraits and paintings of historical subjects, often telling a story with his art and emphasizing the heroic. He also made art for major corporations, movie studios, and publications, including The New Yorker. He created cover art for several albums, including for the Juno Award-winning album Nothing Was the Same (2013) by Canadian rap musician Drake, and illustrated commemorative U.S. postage stamps, including stamps featuring American author Richard Wright and athletes Wilt Chamberlain and Joe DiMaggio.

Author and illustrator

Nelson began illustrating books in the late 1990s. Some of his first works were paintings of scenes from Negro league baseball, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1999. His illustrations were recognized with many awards. In 2007 he won his first Caldecott Honor for his work on Carole Boston Weatherford’s Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom (2006). In 2008 he won a second Caldecott Honor for Ellen Levine’s Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad (2007), which tells the story of Henry Box Brown, an enslaved man who mailed himself to freedom. Nelson won the Caldecott Medal in 2020 for The Undefeated, Alexander’s 2019 poem celebrating the spirit of Black life in America.

Nelson also won the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award three times: in 2005 for Ntozake Shange’s Ellington Was Not a Street (2004), in 2007 for Moses, and in 2020 for The Undefeated. Nelson illustrated Nikki Grimes’s Under the Christmas Tree (2002) and Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Please, Baby, Please (2002) and Please, Puppy, Please (2005). Other books that Nelson illustrated include Doreen Rappaport’s Abe’s Honest Words (2008), Matt de la Peña’s A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis (2011), and Sarvinder Naberhaus’s Blue Sky White Stars (2017).

Nelson’s debut as a writer was We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball (2008), which chronicles Negro league baseball from its beginnings in the 1920s to its decline in the late 1940s; Nelson also illustrated the work. In 2009 he received the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal and a Coretta Scott King Author Award for We Are the Ship, which also was selected as a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book. He won the Coretta Scott King Author Award again for Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans (2011), which is narrated by a 100-year-old woman who tells the history of African Americans from their arrival on slave ships to the election of the first African American U.S. president. Other books that Nelson both wrote and illustrated are Baby Bear (2014) and If You Plant a Seed (2015).