![]() I've wanted to ask him, did he love her, too? When my mother, fed up, finally moved out, was their marriage better? Did she date? Did he? Why didn't they ever divorce? As I stand on the ledge of the unraveling of my own coupling, I have so many questions for the man who made me, but I'm too afraid to ask. I've wanted to know more about the woman he had a child with - the woman who was not my mother, his wife. Now as an adult, I wonder, did he and my mother ever hold hands? How did he court her? Did he dance with her and then help her with the dishes? Did he make love to her in the kitchen? Did she rub his scalp after? How did they love is the question I've contemplated asking during those times when my own love life was discomforting or in peril. KWAME ALEXANDER: (Reading) Ever since I was a child and discovered his framed marriage counselor accreditation certificate tucked inside a sexual intimacy in marriage manual in our garage, I have wanted to speak to my father about marriage. I want you to start by reading the opening paragraph from very early in the book,, from a chapter titled "A Letter To My Daughters." And much of this book is written to your daughters. So your wonderful book started as a book of love poems but turned into a book that's also about the end of love, the end of marriage, a troubled relationship with your father and troubles with your daughters. Thanks to Tonya Mosley and Dave Davies for keeping things together on the air while I was out sick. When we spoke last Thursday, I had a cold or a virus or something that wasn't COVID, and my voice was really hoarse, but I didn't want to miss doing this interview. ![]() His Newbery Medal-winning book, "The Crossover," has been adapted into a Disney+ series on which he serves as an executive producer and writer. He's best-known for his children's books, which include "The Undefeated," for which he won a Caldecott Medal. Kwame Alexander's new memoir is called "Why Fathers Cry At Night," and it's told in the form of prose, poems, letters and recipes. ![]() His mother was an educator who became a principal. His father was a Baptist preacher of Black liberation theology who assigned books to Alexander and then quizzed him on them, which made Alexander hate books until he later found the books he loved. We also learn on the first page that by the time he was 2, he was dressed in a dashiki. Overnight, I was barefoot on Mount Everest," unquote. Within two years, our eldest would pack her belongings, clothes, books, heart and leave home and leave us. They would eventually become impassable canyons. Within a month, the cracks in my marriage emerged. On the opening page of Kwame Alexander's beautifully written new memoir, he writes, "my mother died on September 1, 2017.
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