Profiles and Perspectives: Phillip Hoose: Writing for a Better World

This article features a profile of award-winning author, Phillip Hoose. Though Hoose wears many hats in his day-to-day world, thoughts of social justice are never far from his mind and heart. It might seem that books about basketball (i.e., Hoosiers, 1986), an early civil rights pioneer, teen activists, and a mysterious bird have little in common, but underneath each of those books lies the author’s determination to bring attention to little-known stories. Obviously, he relishes finding and telling the complicated, often multifaceted stories that rarely appear in today’s history texts. Claudette Colvin: Twice toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) nabbed the National Book Award, was named an Honor Book for the Newbery, Sibert, and Jane Addams Awards, and made just about every best-of list for books published in 2009. Curious about how Hoose manages to take events that are decades old and breathe life into them, the authors of this article reread all of his books and then interviewed Hoose for this profile.