I was working with a couple of middle school students about three years ago and they had done historical research and were going to write poems based on their research. I don’t know that I have any particular advice except to read other examples of people who have made that kind of stretch. What advice would you give to someone who wants to write about a group or person not of their same gender, race, or culture? Anderson’s Octavian Nothing and I don’t know if anybody attacked him for writing an African character, but what I’ve been steeling myself for is the possibility that I may be attacked for allowing this Italian-American kid to have a share in African-American history.
I have them having a little romance, but I didn’t want to write about it in too much detail because I frankly don’t know how to imagine it. I don’t know what 16-year-old kids are about. That was a long time ago, and so I kind of shied away from talking about sexuality, for example. Teenagers today, their lives are very different from the life of 16-year-old kids when I was a 16-year-old. I’m the age of Connor’s grandmother trying to imagine what his life might be like. That was a trial because I didn’t want to put a lot of social media and contemporary music and things like that into it because I don’t live in the world of 16-year-old boys. Were you worried at all about writing from the perspective of someone so different from yourself (i.e., a 16-year-old Italian-American boy)? Probably the biggest challenge for me was shoehorning all the info about the Tuskegee Airmen into one digestible piece so I could explain it clearly to someone who might not know anything about these men. In your author’s note to American Ace, you talk a lot about your reasons for writing this story the way you did. Nelson shared her thoughts on empathy, writing about historical figures, and what she sees as the deeper issue beyond just publishing more diverse books for children.
Inspired by her knowledge of the Tuskegee Airmen (her father was one of the last Airmen), Nelson relays information to young readers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s story through a teen’s thesis on the subject.
Nelson spoke with PW about her latest verse novel, American Ace, which chronicles one Italian-American man’s discovery, after his mother’s death, that his father was not really his father, and he was most likely the son of an African-American pilot in World War II. Celebrated author and poet Marilyn Nelson’s numerous books for young people include Newbery Honor-winning Carver: A Life in Poems, Coretta Scott King Award winner A Wreath for Emmett Till, her memoir How I Discovered Poetry, and most recently, My Seneca Village.
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