Poet
Walter Dean Myers
American poet · 1937–2014
Walter Dean Myers was raised by foster parents in Harlem, dropped out of high school, and joined the army at seventeen — then wrote more than a hundred books, becoming the most important chronicler of Black urban boyhood in American children's and young-adult literature. He served as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature from 2012 to 2013.
His poetry brought Harlem to the page in collaboration with his son, the artist Christopher Myers, and in collections pairing verses with antique photographs of Black children he collected for decades. Months before his death he asked, in a famous New York Times essay, "Where are the people of color in children's books?" — a question that helped launch a movement.
His work remains in copyright, so we describe it here with minimal quotation.
Walter Dean Myers's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Harlem: A Poem1997
A praise-song for the neighborhood that raised him, tracing the journeys — from Waycross, Georgia, and the islands — that poured into Harlem's streets, churches, and stoops. His son Christopher Myers's collage illustrations earned the book a Caldecott Honor. Read aloud, it moves like the gospel and jazz it celebrates.
Love That Boy
Love that boy,like a rabbit loves to run
A father's plainspoken delight in his son, built on down-home similes and the repeated, morning-calling refrain 'Hey there, son.' Sharon Creech loved it so much she built her verse novel Love That Dog around a boy discovering it, with Myers appearing in the story as himself. Few poems model fatherly tenderness so simply.
Brown Angels1993
Myers collected thousands of vintage photographs of African American children, and in Brown Angels he set the best of them beside verses celebrating their dignity, mischief, and beauty. The book is an act of restoration — children history had filed away, returned to the center of the page. It launched a series of photo-poetry albums he continued for years.
Here in Harlem2004
Subtitled 'Poems in Many Voices,' this collection works like a Harlem version of the Spoon River Anthology: deacons, hairdressers, jazz musicians, mail carriers, and veterans each step forward to testify in verse. Myers based the speakers on people he knew growing up. Together they make a documentary chorus of a neighborhood's soul.
Jazz2006
A picture-book suite of poems that performs the history and feel of jazz — ragtime, swing, bebop, a New Orleans funeral march — with onomatopoeic riffs that beg to be read aloud. Christopher Myers's electric paintings share the stage equally. It doubles as a child's first jazz history and a poet's love letter to the music behind all his work.