"In Memory to Award winning Author Walter Dean Myers"
 |
Aug. 12, 1937 - July 1, 2014
|
Myers was a
three-time National Bok Award nominee,
received the Coretta Scott King Book Award for African-American fiction five
times and from 2012 to 2013 served as national ambassador for young people’s
literature, a position created in part by the Library of Congress.
"I didn't know I was going to be a
writer," Myers said in an interview with Scholastic Books after his book Scorpions was published in 1988.
"In fact, I didn't know that there was such a
job as an author,” Myers said. “No one really encouraged me to write, it was
just something I loved to do."
Myers, who wrote
more than 100 books, credited his foster father for instilling him a work ethic
within him.
"What I really
have is the discipline to work all the time," he said in an interview with
the Sacramento Bee. "I finish one project, and I'm ready to immediately
start the next."
Late in his career, he took up writing about
America's wars, in books such as "Sunrise over Fallujah" After watching
his father, brother and son fight in WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq, respectively,
Myers stated that he wanted to reach “young people who would be fighting this war, and who
would, in the future, be making the hard decisions about our country engaging
in wars, to be conscious of what war is really about”.
As he got older and the world around him was
changing, especially after the election of the first African American
president, Barack Obama, it bothered him how scarcely characters of color were
depicted in literature for children and teens. In 2013, according to one study,
only 93 of the 3,200 children's books published in the U.S. were about black
people. Myers believed that the invisibility of people of color in literature
discouraged kids from reading.
"When do you plan to stop writing
books?" his young readers once asked. “I plan to retire," Myers
answered, "seven minutes before I die." Myers was said to write 7 –
10 pages at least 5 days a week for the last thirty years. This clearly
explains how he has over 100 books to his credited.
Although he has
passed on, Myers’ legacy will live forever. He’s someone who transcended
literature and became important to a culture, and he is a shining example of
what writers should strive to be.
"I think it's difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They're embarrassed to have people see them doing it."
Walter Dean Myers
Walter Dean Myer’s complete bibliography
