JEFFERY BOSTON WEATHERFORD is an award-winning children’s book illustrator and performance poet. His latest release, Kin: Rooted in Hope is a Coretta Scott King Honor book, You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, was named a best book of the year by the Association for Library Service to Children and National Council for the Social Studies, Cooperative Children’s Book Center, New York Public Library and Kirkus Reviews. He made his picture book debut with the award-winning title, Call Me Miss Hamilton. Formerly a teaching artist for the National Book Foundation, Jeffery holds a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Howard University where he was a Romare Bearden Scholar.

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KIN: ROOTED IN HOPE

The verse novel, Kin: Rooted in Hope is a mother-son collaboration tracing the pair’s lineage from 1770 to the early 20^th century. Multi-voiced first-person poems and dramatic scratchboard illustrations done by Jeffery Boston Weatherford reclaim lost narratives of the enslaved community and of the Freemen who co-founded nearby all-Black Reconstruction-era villages. The Weatherfords’ family story is intimate yet all too universal among African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved.