Award-winning YA author Walter Dean Myers grew up in Harlem, New York City. His family structure sounds pretty complicated to me...

Amusingly, during the year my folks lived in NYC (while Dad was getting his MBA from Columbia), Mom taught at P.S. 125, on 123rd across from Morningside Park - one of the schools Walter attended.

Here's a bit I liked:

I wasn't born with a hyphen linking me to Africa, any more than I was born with a desire to dribble a basketball or to write. These were interests that I worked on developing. These were activities I chose. Being Afro-American, or black, was being imposed on me by people who had their own ideas of what those terms meant.

Reserved for ghir.

Received today. Thank you for sharing.

Straightforward narrative of author's childhood, and the answer to the question he must hear often, "how did you become a writer?" Part of Walter Myers's success was likely the lucky event that he was informally adopted by his father's former wife and her second husband, the Deans. Despite economic difficulties, they worked hard and tried hard to give him opportunities he may not have had if he had lived with his biological father. Although he acknowledges he largely squandered the advantage of the accelerated class he was placed in for high school, his own passion for reading and writing pushed him to learn what many of his peers missed.

This book is registered at BookCrossing.com to track its journey through this world. You can make a journal entry (anonymously, if you like) to say you found it, then read it and/or pass it on for someone else to enjoy. Thank you!

By USGS gauging shack.