Walter Dean Myers
Walter Dean Myers
Walter Dean Myerswas an American writer of children's books best known for young adult literature. He wrote more than one hundred books including picture books and nonfiction. He won the Coretta Scott King Award for African-American authors five times. His 1988 novel Fallen Angels is one of the books most frequently challenged in the U.S. because of its adult language and its realistic depiction of the Vietnam War...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 August 1937
CountryUnited States of America
I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?
I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?
When we think of war, the tendency is to picture young soldiers only in their military roles. To a large extent this dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier for society to commit them to combat.
We all think we're different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.
I think that if we can't go back, then we should try even harder to go forward. And I do want to go forward, to a place where loving someone because they have a gentle smile and a friendly hello is as easy as it once was.
Think about all the tomorrows of your life.
Each time I think there is no place lower to go, I find that there is at least one place that will mess you up worse than you were.
I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.
My dad was a janitor for U.S. Radium Corporation, and he stayed there for 37 years. So he didn't read.
I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.
People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.
My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
So many organizations have a mentoring arm, but they don't really do it. Their idea of mentoring a kid is giving them general advice. But what they need to do is read with children.
I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.