1. Kekla Magoon's works include middle grade novels, short stories, and historical, socio-political, and economy-related non-fiction.
13 Facts About Kekla Magoon
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Kekla Magoon is the biracial daughter of a white American mother with Dutch and Scottish ancestry and a black Cameroonian father.
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Kekla Magoon graduated with a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University, where she majored in History, with a concentration on Africa and the Middle East.
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Kekla Magoon has a master of fine arts degree in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, which she was able to study via a low-residency program for children's writers.
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Kekla Magoon is a member of the NWP Writers Council.
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Kekla Magoon says that all her novels deal with how ordinary kids can make a difference in the world.
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Kekla Magoon says she spent time deliberately researching the non-violent civil rights movement, has always had an interest in history, and majored in History in college.
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Kekla Magoon initially had the idea to write the novel between her first semester at Northwestern University and revised the first draft during her second and third semester, before submitting The Rock and the River as her thesis.
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Kekla Magoon wrote her fourth young adult novel, How It Went Down, about the aftermath of the shooting of a black teenager, in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
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Kekla Magoon's sixth young adult novel X is a fictionalized account of civil rights activist Malcolm X's formative years and co-authored with his daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz.
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Kekla Magoon says that she loosely based the novel on a real event from her childhood, when an ice cream parlor clerk in North Carolina told them about how his father and uncle once tried to trade their baby sister.
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In July 2019 it was announced that Kekla Magoon would be publishing a non-fiction young adult novel about the legacy of the Black Panthers, called Until All Are Free: The Black Panther Party's Call for Revolution and slated for a tentative publication date with Candlewick in 2021.
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Kekla Magoon's novels have earned starred reviews from multiple literary magazines.