Kwame Mbalia

Profile Photo

Kwame is a husband, father, writer, a New York Times bestselling author, and a former pharmaceutical metrologist in that order. His debut middle-grade novel, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, was awarded a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, and it—along with the sequels Tristan Strong Destroys the World and Tristan Strong Keeps Punching, is published by Rick Riordan Presents/Disney-Hyperion. He is the co-author of Last Gate of the Emperor with Prince Joel Makonnen, from Scholastic Books, and the editor of the #1 New York Times bestselling anthology Black Boy Joy, published by Delacorte Press. A Howard University graduate and a Midwesterner now in North Carolina, he survives on Dad jokes and Cheezits.

Stories

Cover Photo: This illustration shows a young boy looking out of a plane window, where we see pink clouds and the starry sky beyond it. He holds up a paper airplane to the window, as if dreaming of an adventure.
To Write for Middle-Grade Readers is to Write About Elsewhere

We’re not writing for us as we are now, but us as we were, or could have been, or should have been.

Apr 21, 2022