Christopher Paul Curtis

Christopher Paul Curits grew up in a middle-class Black family in Flint, Michigan. Although his father was a doctor, he gave up his medical practice and became a factory worker and union organizer when his patients were no longer able to pay him. Curtis’s mother stayed at home to raise her children—Curtis and his four siblings—when they were small. Later, she became a teacher in the Flint Public School system. Both of Curtis’s parents were active in the Civil Rights Movement and brought their children with them to marches and meetings. In junior high school, Curits became the first Black student elected to his integrated school’s student council. Although Curits initially planned to pursue a degree in political science at the University of Michigan-Flint, he dropped out after his first year and took a fulltime job at a General Motors automobile plant. However, he took college classes in the evening part-time and completed his degree in 2000. Although Curtis wrote on the side throughout his earlier working life, he took a full year off in the early 1990s to focus on it more deeply, during which he drafted what would become his first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, which was published in 1995. This book, which was nominated for Coretta Scott King Award, the Newberry Award, and the Jane Addams Peace Award Honor in 1996, launched Curtis’s professional writing career. To date, he has published nine novels for young adults, most of which focus on the Black experience in 19th- and 20th-century America and Canada. He has been married twice and has four adult children. He is the first person to have won both a Newberry and a Coretta Scott King Award.