Kwame Alexander’s An American Story releases Jan. 3 and will help educators and parents start the conversation.
Book Title: An American Story Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Publication Date: January 3, 2022
NEW YORK /PRNewswire/ — On January 3, 2023, Kwame Alexander, the #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Crossover, The Door of No Return and The Undefeated, will kick off a national tour at Judy Blume’s in Key West, Florida for An American Story, a bold children’s picture book that explains American slavery through the voice of a teacher who is struggling to help her students understand its place in history.Kwame Alexander, New York Times bestselling author.An American Story book cover; release date January 3, 2023.
Told through lyrical writing and stunning illustrations, the powerful, multilayered narrative by Alexander and artist/sculpturist Dare Coulter will take educators, parents and young people from fireside tales in an African village, through the passage across the Atlantic and the backbreaking work in the fields of the South to eventual emancipation.
“I wrote this book after a rather difficult parent-teacher conference back in my daughter’s fourth grade school year,” said Alexander, whose book The Crossover is a forthcoming Disney+ television series. “AnAmerican Story is for all teachers and parents trying to find their voices, trying to share a lesson that we all find so difficult to discuss. It is a story for readers of all ages — a story of a people’s struggle, strength, horror and hope that needs to be told and understood by all of us.”
Coulter, a longtime sculpturist and illustrator, said: “I want there to be these big assemblies of beautiful, hopeful kids reading this book, to whom we can say, ‘Yes, this did happen, yes, it is terrible; but the way forward is acknowledgement and understanding.’ I want readers to walk away feeling resilient.”
Alexander’s national tour for the book launches with a live virtual conversation from Judy Blume’s Key West, Florida bookstore, Books and Books, on Tuesday, Jan. 3 at 12 p.m. EST on his Facebook page (Facebook.com/KwameAlexanderBooks). The virtual event will be followed by a nine-city book tour, which kicks off on Jan. 5 in Raleigh, North Carolina and includes stops in Jacksonville, Florida; Charleston and Charlotte. Learn more at kwamealexander.com.
About the Author
Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, publisher and New York Times bestselling author of 37 books, including the Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor-winning picture book The Undefeated, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, the Newbery medal-winning novel, The Crossover (a forthcoming TV series on Disney+), and Becoming Muhammad Ali, co-authored with James Patterson. He is also a regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition.
About the Artist
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Dare Coulter (she/her) is an award-winning artist, muralist, and sculptor whose primary artistic objective is to create positive imagery of Black people and families. She aims to install sculptures depicting Black joy around the world. Learn more at darecoulter.com.
TIME100 Next 2025: Celebrating the Emerging Leaders Redefining Tomorrow
TIME Magazine’s TIME100 Next 2025 list highlights 100 rising stars reshaping leadership across various fields. With covers featuring Tate McRae, Jonathan Bailey, and April Koh, the list showcases diverse talents driving significant global change, underscoring a new era of influence.
TIME Magazine has unveiled its highly anticipated 2025 TIME100 Next list, spotlighting 100 rising stars who are reshaping industries, challenging conventions, and defining what leadership looks like for the next generation. From groundbreaking entertainers to innovative tech pioneers, this year’s honorees represent a diverse tapestry of talent and vision that’s driving meaningful change across the globe.
Three Faces of the Future
The 2025 TIME100 Next issue features three striking worldwide covers, each showcasing a different dimension of emerging leadership. Singer-songwriter Tate McRae, actor Jonathan Bailey, and Spring Health co-founder and CEO April Koh each represent the breadth of influence this year’s list encompasses—spanning entertainment, business innovation, and mental health advocacy.The 2025 TIME100 Next covers featuring Tate McRae, Jonathan Bailey, and April Koh.
TIME100 Next 2025: Celebrating the Emerging Leaders Redefining Tomorrow
“The TIME100 Next spotlights changemakers from around the globe who are shaping the next generation of leadership and redefining what progress, influence, and impact mean in today’s world,” said TIME Chief Executive Officer Jessica Sibley.
A New Generation of Influence
TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs emphasized that influence doesn’t wait for seniority. “While we’ve made it our mission to cover people who have reached the pinnacle of their fields, the TIME100 Next is an opportunity to recognize those still on the rise,” Jacobs writes. “We’ve known that true influence knows no age and that it can arrive early in a career.”
This philosophy shines through in the list’s youngest honoree, 16-year-old Elliston Berry, proving that transformative leadership can emerge at any age.
Women Leading the Charge
Over 50 women grace this year’s list, including basketball phenom Paige Bueckers, advocate Sara Ziff, and community organizer Amanda Jones. Their presence underscores a powerful shift toward gender parity in leadership across every sector—from sports and science to activism and the arts.
Star-Studded Tributes
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The list features heartfelt tributes from established icons celebrating the next wave of talent. Ariana Grande writes about Jonathan Bailey, Selena Gomez honors Becky G, and Dakota Johnson celebrates Tate McRae. Other contributors include Pedro Pascal, Michael Keaton, Cate Blanchett, Miranda Lambert, and Diana Taurasi—each recognizing the unique spark in their respective honorees.
Entertainment’s Rising Stars
The entertainment category reads like a who’s who of tomorrow’s A-list: Jonathan Bailey, Tate McRae, Gracie Abrams, Damson Idris, GloRilla, Kaitlyn Dever, Lainey Wilson, and David Corenswet are just a handful of the performers redefining music, film, and television for a new era.
Beyond the Spotlight
The list extends far beyond entertainment, recognizing:
Athletes like soccer sensation Lamine Yamal and tennis player Taylor Fritz
Political leaders including Karoline Leavitt and Iceland’s Kristrun Frostadottir
Tech innovators such as Cristóbal Valenzuela and Phoebe Gates
Health and science pioneers like April Koh and Dr. David Fajgenbaum
Justice advocates including Emi Mahmoud and Efrén Olivares
Sustainability champions like Bob Mumgaard and Charles Hua
An Evening to Remember
On October 30th, TIME will host its fifth annual TIME100 Next event in New York City, bringing together this extraordinary group of changemakers. The evening will feature a special performance by Tate McRae, remarks from Jonathan Bailey and Nomzamo Mbatha, and the presentation of the TIME Earth Award to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
The event is presented by Rolex and premier partner Toyota, with support from General Catalyst, Project Management Institute, Meta, and The SPARK Collective.
The Future Is Now
What makes the TIME100 Next list so compelling isn’t just the individual achievements of its honorees—it’s the collective vision they represent. These are leaders who refuse to wait their turn, who see problems as opportunities, and who understand that the future doesn’t belong to those who simply inherit it, but to those bold enough to build it.
From Tate McRae’s chart-topping anthems to April Koh’s mental health revolution, from Jonathan Bailey’s captivating performances to the countless innovators working behind the scenes, the 2025 TIME100 Next class reminds us that tomorrow’s leaders are already here—and they’re just getting started.
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To explore the full 2025 TIME100 Next list, tributes, videos, and photos, visit TIME’s website.
What emerging leader on this year’s list inspires you most? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert. It might sound impossible, but it’s exactly what experts discussed at the second International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit hosted by Arizona State University in March 2025. Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely. Deserts, which cover about one-fifth of the Earth’s land area, are home to about 1 billion people. Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy. As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space. According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked. Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths. This accumulation of space debris is creating an increasing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft heading to orbit, and more stuff up there moving around that might hit them, space travel is becoming more like flying the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field every day. Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.Dodging obstacles in space is no picnic.
Dorothy Allison channeled her impoverished childhood into a richly crafted world that retained its gritty origins. Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images
Growing up poor in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison endured abuse of all kinds before becoming the first in her family to finish high school and college. As a lesbian, she faced additional challenges and hurdles. Before she achieved literary fame with her first novel, Allison ran a feminist bookstore and a women’s center. She was broke when she finally sold “Bastard Out of Carolina.”
To me, Allison is a shining exception in a long line of authors who have attempted to write about poverty but fail to accurately capture it.
Most readers are probably familiar with the standard tropes in these works: violence, sexual abuse, addiction, filth and degradation. Allison was decidedly not in that camp.
She broke that mold by finding beauty in her impoverished surroundings and focusing on love, humor and family bonds.
Beauty in a hopeless place
Even though “Bastard out of Carolina” ultimately deals with physical and sexual abuse – which, of course, is not confined to poor people – this merely constitutes one element of a broader emotional and physical landscape.
Allison’s hometown of Greenville is also the setting of the novel – and it’s a place that the novel’s young narrator, Bone, describes as “the most beautiful place in the world.” She adds:
“Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making rents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover.”
Extreme hunger, however, is unique to poverty, and something that poor writers often recall with a kind of vividness that can escape middle-class or wealthy writers.
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“Hunger makes you restless,” Allison writes. “You dream about food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream.”
In “Bastard out of Carolina,” Allison doesn’t celebrate hunger. But she is able to find humor in it and show how laughter can be used as a coping mechanism.
In the novel, when Bone complains about being hungry, her mother recounts her own childhood: Back then, there was “real hunger, hunger of days with no expectation that there would ever be biscuits again.” And during those times she and her siblings would concoct fantastical stories of strange dishes: “Your aunt Ruth always talked about frogs’ tongues with dew berries. … But Raylene won the prize with her recipe for sugar-glazed turtle meat with poison greens and hot piss dressing.”
Humor isn’t used to gloss over the seriousness of poverty. Yet Allison is keen to point out that both can exist: They are all wrapped up in a life lived.Greenville, S.C., where Dorothy Allison spent the first 11 years of her life, was the setting for ‘Bastard out of Carolina.’ Library of Congress
American delusion
I can’t help but compare Allison’s work with that of an author like JD Vance. In his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance revels in his grandmother’s anger and violence as a sign of her vibrant hillbilly-ness.
On the other hand, in “Bastard out of Carolina,” Bone recalls her mother saying flatly, “Nothing to be proud of in shooting at people for looking at you wrong.”
So many other writers about poverty have characters who pine for the material comforts promised by the American Dream, whether it’s Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” or George and Lennie in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”Dorothy Allison worked on ‘Bastard out of Carolina’ for nearly a decade before finding a publisher. Amazon
Allison’s characters, on the other hand, learn to see through this false promise. In one scene, Bone and her cousin break into the local Woolworth’s.
Previously, she had longingly eyed a brimming glass case of nuts. But once she shatters the display case, she realizes “that the case was a sham. There hadn’t been more than two inches of nuts pressed against the glass front, propped up with cardboard.” Her reaction: “Cheap sons of bitches.”
In a display of class consciousness, Bone eventually detects the false allure of cheap commodities. “I looked … at all the things on display. Junk everywhere: shoes that went to pieces in the rain, clothes that separated at the seams, stale candy, makeup that made your skin break out.”
In contrast, she thinks of the value of the home-canned goods made by her aunt. “That was worth something. All this stuff seemed tawdry and useless.”
‘Jealous of you for what you got’
At one point, Bone articulates the concept of poornography without using that term. She talks about “the mythology” that plagues poor people:
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“People from families like mine – southern working poor with high rates of illegitimacy and all too many relatives who have spent time in jail – we are the people who are seen as the class that does not care for their children, for whom rape and abuse and violence are the norm. That such assumptions are false, that the rich are just as likely to abuse their children as the poor, and that southerners do not have a monopoly on either violence or illegitimacy are realities that are difficult to get people to recognize.”
In “Bastard out of Carolina,” Bone resents the rich rather than admiring them. In a conversation with one of her aunts, she says she “hates” them. Interestingly, her aunt provides the poor person’s counterpoint to hate.
“Could be they’re looking at you sitting up here eating blackberries … could be they’re jealous of you for what you got, afraid of what you would do if they stepped in the yard.”
Allison shows readers how class resentment can go both ways, and how for all of the contempt directed at poor people from the rich and powerful, there may also be an element of envy and fear at play.
Daniel B. Oerther, Professor of Environmental Health Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology and William Schonberg, Professor of Civil Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
