Out of Wonder: Poems celebrating Poets

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.

The 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Winner

"Newbery medalist Kwame Alexander has come up with a fresh and joyful way to interest children in poetry...Holmes takes collage work to a new level, with gloriously colored art that, the closer you look, tells further stories within stories. Each illustration captures not just the feeling of the poem, but wakes up readers to life’s excitements and small joys. Exemplary words and pictures make this a multicultural masterwork." Booklist (starred review)

"The celebrated poets here...represent a wide range of cultures and time periods. Holmes’s vibrant, arresting mixed-media collages, both full pages and double-page spreads, complement and extend the themes and rich imagery presented in the poems. Educators and librarians searching for books to introduce children to influential poets as well as model texts for writing poetry will welcome this stellar title." The Horn Book (starred review)