Top: Author Angie Thomas and her mom, Julia Thomas, in Trenity Webber's creative writing classroom. Bottom: Thomas and Nia Jackson. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Before last Friday, high school junior Nia Jackson had hit a writer’s block on her musical, One For The Beginning, Two For The End. Then she listened to author Angie Thomas take the stage and tell her story—which didn’t feel so far away from New Haven at all—and something clicked back into place. She got ready to pick the script back up, and finish the show.
Jackson is a junior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School (Co-Op), where she is studying visual arts and writes in her free time. Thomas is an award-winning author, whose gift for truth-telling in her 2017 novel, The Hate U Give, has also made her one of the most frequently banned authors in recent history. Last Friday, their worlds collided joyfully at Co-Op, where Thomas delivered a master class in storytelling, sticktoitiveness, and the necessity of optimism when the world feels completely upside down.
She spoke again Saturday at Yale’s annual Black Solidarity Conference, alongside speakers and scholars including Ibram X. Kendi, Serena Page, and Michele Ghee. But it was her time at the College Street high school, and later in a smaller group session in Trenity Webber’s second-floor creative writing classroom, that may have left the most profound impact on New Haven.
The visit was made possible by Nelba Márquez-Greene, a community scholar within the Yale School of Public Health’s (YPH) Firearm Injury Prevention (FIP) project, and FIP team members who spoke briefly about their own research at the top of the assembly. In 2012, Márquez-Greene lost her daughter, six-year-old Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Her son, Isaiah Márquez-Greene, is a survivor of the same attack.
In the years since her daughter’s death, Márquez-Greene has kept Ana Grace’s vibrant legacy alive through deeply human storytelling and through the arts, of which she is a steadfast champion and outspoken advocate. So it makes sense, perhaps, that her world would include Thomas’ profound gift for narrative, in which the author names and explores the trauma of gun violence not just on a single victim, but on the survivors, including family, friends, and community members who are left with unimaginable grief and handfuls of questions.
“I’ve been all over the world because I took a chance and told a story,” Thomas said to students gathered in the school’s auditorium, many of them wide-eyed and beaming as she spoke. “The world, it does not make sense right now. And I still have hope.”
In many ways, it was Thomas’ story of how she summons and maintains that hope that pulled so many students, and left them still floating on the words long after she had left. Born and raised in Jackson, Miss., Thomas grew up in a part of the city called Georgetown, a historically Black neighborhood that is known “for all the wrong reasons,” she said.
In part, that came from the fact that gun violence was an all-too-frequent and unwelcome presence in the neighborhood. Thomas was used to hearing gunshots multiple times in a single evening, she told students. But it also taught her that people were not monoliths: the same drug dealers behind those gunshots might be outside the next day, buying ice cream for the community’s kids.
“I grew up knowing that a place like that is complicated,” she said. As she spoke, a few nods of recognition rippled through the room. “I grew up knowing that people are complicated.”
Initially, Thomas gravitated toward music, rather than books (although her mother Julia Thomas, a former school teacher who Friday sat in the front row, has made literature a part of Thomas’ life since before she could talk). As a young adult, she was moved by the music and poetry of Tupac Shakur, with a kind of soaring lyricism in which Thomas could see herself. While she also devoured popular YA books like Twilight and The Hunger Games, none of the characters looked like her.
At some point, “it started to send the message that this is not for me,” she said.
Instead, she used Tupac’s lyrics as a springboard to explore her own experiences (she can still jump into his verses extemporaneously, and did so to cheers, applause and a few yesssses from students last week). She could feel, as the music flowed through her, an interest in that same kind of writing, and flirted with the idea of becoming a rapper. She also started writing fanfiction based on the books that she was reading. It led her to Belhaven University, a small, liberal arts college in Jackson where she could study creative writing.
This, maybe, is one of the places where Thomas’ story feels like could take place in New Haven, which sometimes seems like a tale of two (or three, or four, or five) cities squeezed into 18.7 square miles. Home to a few thousand undergraduate students, Belhaven was just a 10-minute drive from Thomas’ home in Georgetown. For many people growing up there, however, it felt totally inaccessible.
“In those 10 minutes I felt like I had to be an entirely different person,” she remembered. More nods of recognition across the room, as she described code switching every time she walked onto campus. Even in a city steeped in Black history, Thomas was still the only Black student in her creative writing program, and later the first Black person to graduate from that major.
Somewhere in the audience, sophomore Jael Phillips remembered what it felt like to step into a predominately white middle school, and have to code switch in and outside of her classes. “It’s almost something that each Black girl has to go through,” she later said to Thomas. “I definitely liked how you made it real.”
Back at Belhaven, Thomas was acutely aware that she was existing between worlds, and sometimes struggled to reconcile the two. Her sophomore year, she could feel that contrast bubble to the surface when, not even a full day into 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers assaulted, handcuffed and then shot and killed 22-year-old Oscar Grant, an unarmed Black man who was headed home after ringing in the New Year with his friends.
Back in Mississippi, Thomas heard two different stories of Grant’s death. At home, he could have been a neighbor or friend, relatable for a past punctuated by the carceral system and a life that he was working to get back on track, including a fiancée and a sweet, six-year-old daughter named Tatiana.
At Belhaven, Thomas’ peers and professors pointed to his time in prison and the fact that he was on parole, as if it somehow justified his execution on a subway platform in the middle of the afternoon. At some point, Thomas sat down at her keyboard, and pounded out a short story about a young girl named Starr, and the police shooting of her best friend, an unarmed Black man who was just headed home.
Junior Kelis Smith, sophomore Jael Phillips and freshman Sumia Faizi.
At the time, “I foolishly hoped that after Oscar Grant, things would change,” Thomas remembered. More nods and hums of recognition in the auditorium, this time from stage left, where history teacher Zania Collier sat on an aisle. Then, just a year after Thomas graduated, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed on his way home from a convenience store, by a neighbor who saw a Black kid in a hoodie as a threat. He was 17 and still baby-faced, with soft eyes like a doe’s.
Then there was Michael Brown. Then Sandra Bland. The grief of the moment, and the clarity with which Thomas could see the racism that propelled it, felt unbearable.
Around her, the Black Lives Matter movement was just coming into focus. “And I thought to myself, what do I have the power to do?” she remembered aloud.
That short story, which by her senior year had become a longer story, became a book. In 2015, Thomas tweeted a literary agent during an “Ask Me Anything,” wondering if books with controversial subjects weren’t publishable. He invited her to submit her work, and later signed her on as a client (Thomas has since changed literary agents, which is also a story of self-advocacy). The Hate U Give—the title is a nod to Tupac’s collective Thug Life—came out in 2017.
“My gift made room” for the entirety of the story, she said. The Hate U Give, in turn, spoke to something deep within tens of thousands of its readers, and it skyrocketed to number one on the New York Times’ bestseller list (it has since sold millions of copies). It paved the way for Thomas’ next novels, On the Come Up, Concrete Rose, and most recently the first two installments in her Nik Blake trilogy, a middle grade fantasy series with roots in Black history and centuries of storytelling.
Phillips, who was part of a smaller session with Thomas after the assembly, spoke about how much the author's comments on code switching resonated with her.
Before speaking to students Friday, she said, she wanted to create an acronym especially for them, just as the music of Tupac had done for her so many years before. She found one in H-O-P-E, the letters to which she pulled up on the screen with an old photo of herself. The meaning—Have Optimism, Perspective and Endurance—is one that gets her through on the hardest days, she said.
“At a time like this, it may seem impossible to have some optimism,” she said. And yet, Thomas often thinks of activists and culture-bearers who have since passed on, including the late Nelson Mandela and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who held onto optimism despite years of horrific state violence and systems of power that did not (and arguably do not) want to see their visions come to be.
“They had the audacity to have optimism,” she said as student panelists Kelis Smith, Jael Phillips, and Sumia Faizi, as well as emcee Mikayla Holley, watched from the wings. “I need you to have the audacity to have optimism. To believe that yes, it can be better … I have the audacity to believe that you all have the power to change the world.”
She added that alongside optimism, she believes that hope requires both perspective and endurance, including a rejection of instant gratification. Meaningful change, she reminded students, takes a kind of sustained, long work that isn’t always quick or comfortable. But it can always, and often does, start with the voices that have been too easily discounted.
Co-Op already knows that history: in 2019, students organized a sit-in at the school to protest the proposed transfer of 53 educators out of the district, just months after students also rallied to keep the creative writing department as the school tried to quietly phase it out. Last year, students spoke out fiercely when the Board of Education transferred their arts director to another school overnight. In between, they have used their art forms and their voices to take on everything from online bullying and harassment to gun violence in New Haven.
“I’m gonna tell y’all a little secret that maybe your principal and teachers don’t want y’all to know,” Thomas said, as Principal Paul Camarco looked on expectantly from one side of the room. “Y’all are the most powerful people in this building. I mean that. If all of you decided to speak up and speak out about something, change would happen.”
“Y’all Are Writers Already”
That kind of fire and moxie remained palpable as student panelists took the stage, jumping from Shakur’s poetry to censorship and book bans to whether Thomas is more of an Edward or Jacob girl in the Twilight universe (“Team Bella! She could have done better!” she said to laughter and applause, rejecting both male options as inherently creepy).
In one moment, Thomas imagined a one-on-one with Maverick Carter, the 17-year-old boy at the center of her novel Concrete Rose (also inspired by Shakur’s poetry). In another, she stressed the importance of defying stereotypes, and continuing to surprise both her readers and herself, as she does in her Nik Blake and the Remarkables series. At another still, she credited her mom as a constant cheerleader and teacher—her first educator, and the person who turned her onto books as a kid.
“What was one thing your mom did that helped you in your writing?” Márquez-Greene asked, reemerging from the wings and beaming as students peppered Thomas with questions.
Thomas wound back the clock to her own time in middle and high school, during which she faced a depression that was so serious she considered self-harm. Her mom knew that she loved the group TLC, at a time when members—Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas, and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes—were so big that Beyoncé was opening for them. In particular, Thomas was enamored of Left Eye’s rap on their song “Waterfalls.”
So Julia did what any concerned mom would do: she found Left Eye’s home phone number and called her. When Thomas made her way to the phone, a sullen and angsty teenager, she was shocked, and then delighted, and then overwhelmed, at the voice on the other end. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Left Eye asked her to talk about the difficulty she’d been having. Thomas, who has since spoken openly about the bullying that she faced in school. did.
If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.
“She was like, ‘Listen, you can do something great, but you need to stick around for it,’” Thomas remembered. Back in the audience, it looked like some of Co-Op’s students were going to cry. Lopes died suddenly in a car accident a few months later, and it reminded Thomas of how precious and fleeting her life on earth was.
Now, Thomas is that kind of steady and motivational voice for young people, including those in whom she sees glimmers of her younger self. That was clear on the school’s second floor, as Nia Jackson stepped out into the hallway to tell Thomas about her musical, which has been in the works for “a while.” By the end of the conversation, she was telling Thomas about her hopes for opening night—which she estimates is still two years away. She’s in it for the long haul, holding onto Thomas’ acronym for HOPE.
“To hear her speak was amazing,” Jackson said. A few summers ago, she read The Hate U Give while with her family on Martha’s Vineyard. It transformed the way she saw the Black Lives Matter Movement, she said—and the way she showed up in the world. During middle school, Jackson didn’t think of herself as a very nice person. In high school, she’s worked to be more outgoing and vocal, from her creative work to her participation in classes. Even as she spoke, she paused mid sentence to say hi to one of her classmates as they scurried by.
Back inside Webber’s creative writing classroom, students munched on baked goods, sipped hot cocoa and chatted with Thomas as she signed copies of her 2021 novel Concrete Rose, her mom looking on knowingly. Senior Arianna Ellison, who wants to be a stage manager after high school, stood patiently beside her, lifting copies from a large cardboard box and moving others out of the way as if it were a ballet that the two had practiced.
“How do you overcome impostor syndrome?” piped up a voice from the back of the room.
Thomas smiled, in that way that says she had a whole conversation ready. She still deals with imposter syndrome, she told students. No matter how many times she sees an event poster or book jacket with her face on it, she still finds herself asking “should I be here?”
“Yes,” her mother said matter-of-factly from her place beside her as the two women exchanged a quick glance. A few laughs floated through the classroom, students pressed up against the walls when all the desks had been taken.
“Y’all are writers already,” Thomas said. “Period.” She later joked that sometimes, to shoo away imposter syndrome, she tells herself “I need to have the confidence of a mediocre white man.”
“And when a door opens, it means a foot is supposed to go through it,” Julia Thomas added.
Another hand popped up from the left side of the room. “The world feels like it has changed so much” in recent years, a student said, adding that she read several of Thomas’ books in middle school.
Thomas took a beat, then remembered when she was first writing drafts of The Hate U Give after college. She was working as a secretary in a church, “and this book was scary to write.” But it was also necessary: at the time, there were more children’s books with animals and trucks (yes, reader, trucks) than there were with people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous characters. She wrote the book in which the teenage Angie would have felt witnessed. Fifteen years later, she’s still doing that work.
“Write it because it’s something you want to enjoy,” she said. “This was a story I wanted to write.”