For Kwame Alexander, poetry and love and sports all fit together

As a teenager Kwame Alexander hated reading. He's now a poet, and a Newbery Medal-winning author of children's books. So what changed?

He'll tell his story, and read from the latest of what he calls his "novels in verse," in Minneapolis this weekend.

When he first learned to read, he loved it. He devoured books. Then he hit middle school, and things changed.

"My father started making me read the encyclopedia, and started giving me these books I wasn't interested in," he recalled. "And so I sort of fell out of love with reading, and spent my middle-school years and probably high school just with no interest whatsoever in literature."

It took two things to restore his love. First he came across Muhammad Ali's book, "The Greatest."

"And then I think the other thing, later in high school, was girls," he said. "And wanting to communicate with girls, and sort of share my feelings and my thoughts about how cool they were. And so I found that through poetry, being able to write love poems."

Alexander has described himself as a poet for the past quarter-century. He has written many books, mainly poetry. But in recent years he has turned to writing for a younger audience, and has set himself a challenge: to reach nonreaders.

Many youngsters stop reading for pleasure when they hit middle school, and a lot of them never restart. Having seen how a single book got him reading again, Alexander came to write a specific kind of book for young people.

"Novels in verse," he called them.

He began writing a story about a young basketball player entirely consisting of poems. To produce a novel in verse, he first has to work out what he wants to say, then develop his plot and start writing the poems. Then he has to rewrite them, again and again, to make sure they all work.

"Because I'm not just writing prose with line-breaks," he explained. "I am trying to write poems that have the ingredients that connect with us on a human level. That are concise, that have rhythm."

The basketball book, titled "Crossover," won a Newbery Medal in 2015. Alexander followed up with "Booked," a tale about a non-reading soccer player.

"This is probably the most autobiographical of all the books I have written," he said.

From "Booked":

Why couldn't your dad

be a musician
like Jimmy Leon's dad
or own an oil company
like Coby's?
Netter yet, why couldn't
he be a cool detective
driving
a sleek silver
convertible sports car
like Will Smith
in Bad Boys?
Instead, your dad's
a linguistics professor
with chronic verbomania"

The poem runs into the next page, and another poem, where the central character in the book complains that his dad makes him live in a prison of words.

He calls it the pursuit of excellence.
You call it Shawshank.
And even though your mother
forbids you to say it
the truth is
you
HATE
words.

The words look simple, but there is a lot going on here. Rereading the text reveals a deft layering of issues and ideas. These are poems about parental tension, bullying in school, crushes on classmates — and championship soccer.

"It's also 'I hate books,'" Alexander said with a laugh. "It's a lot going on. It's almost like a Spike Lee movie."

For all the layers, though, the text isn't intimidating.

"Poetry allows you to do all that, and for the reader to come away and say 'Oh, I can handle that.' There's a lot of white space on the page," he said.

Alexander spends a lot of his time in schools and libraries talking to young people. He'll appear at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Elmer L. Anderson Library on the University of Minnesota West Bank campus in Minneapolis. The event is free but registration is required. He'll talk to youngsters in the audience about basketball and soccer, love and poetry, and how they can all fit together.

"We really want them to become excited about words and books," he said. "They can change your life. And I know that, because they changed mine" — from that of a non-reader to the life of a poet. And without reading the encyclopedia.