Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets

The 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Winner

A Newbery Medalist and a Caldecott Honoree’s New York Times best-selling ode to poets who have sparked a sense of wonder.

Out of gratitude for the poet’s art form, Newbery Award–winning author and poet Kwame Alexander, along with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, present original poems that pay homage to twenty famed poets who have made the authors’ hearts sing and their minds wonder. Stunning mixed-media images by Ekua Holmes, winner of a Caldecott Honor and a John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, complete the celebration and invite the reader to listen, wonder, and perhaps even pick up a pen.

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, and author of twenty-one books for children and educators, including Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band, Surf’s Up, Booked, and a middle-grade novel in verse, The Crossover, which was awarded the 2015 Newbery Medal. He is currently the poet laureate of LitWorld, a K-6 literacy organization dedicated to supporting the development of literacy in the world's most vulnerable communities. He lives in Virginia.

Ekua Holmes is a fine artist whose work explores themes of family, relationships, hope, and faith. The first children’s book she illustrated is Carole Boston Weatherford’s Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, which was a Caldecott Honor Book and a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book and for which she also won the John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award. Ekua Holmes lives in Boston.