First and foremost, I would of course like to thank the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards Committee for this honor, the entire creative team at Simon & Schuster, and our agent, Rubin Pfeffer, for catalyzing this project in the first place. Rubin, you have been a light in this journey, always pushing me to put my best foot forward, no matter what, and for that I am forever grateful. Without your suggestion, Kin would never have come to be. This is your award as much as it is ours.

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2024 BGHB Nonfiction and Poetry winners.]

For as long as I can remember, I have watched my mother work on books and visit various schools and libraries. I even sent out mailing lists for her with my sister, Caresse, to help generate more exposure. But I never thought that children’s books would become such an intrinsic part of my life. If you had asked me while I was growing up, I would have told you that I wanted to be a scuba diver. That dream was short-lived and drowned out when I first saw the movie Jaws. Next, I wanted to become a video game designer, and I even went to school on a full academic scholarship to do so. But fate, as it seemed, had bigger plans for me.

When my mother and I got our first joint contract, for You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, I had no idea that honoring Black history and the ancestors would take us all over the United States, to several countries in Africa, and to the Middle East to ride on a camel’s back in the Arabian Desert. I didn’t know that I would be speaking in front of crowds of hundreds and eventually thousands, carrying on the legacy of the heroes and sheroes who paved the path before us.

It is one thing to write and create art about the historical legacy of the figures that are well known; it is an entirely different energy when the people you are writing about are the very people that are the reason you exist in the first place. And we got that opportunity when Kin: Rooted in Hope was conceptualized.

This project taught me just as much about my family as it taught others. Just as this was the world’s introduction to the Coppers…this was also my first introduction to the majority of my ancestors.

From Isaac Copper, to Chicken Sue, to learning that Frederick Douglass was on the same plantation as my family, every step of the journey to the completion of the project was the equivalent of taking another step into a cave of wonders where the treasure is my family history. Although this book is an ode to our family tree, we want it to be a call to action to dig deeper into your own history and reclaim the forgotten past, because knowing your history is generational wealth.

From the January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2024 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB24. Read more from The Horn Book by and about Jeffery Boston Weatherford.