Sharon M. Draper
Sharon M. Draper is an author.
Sharon M. Draper had a classroom before she had a readership, and the two never separated. She was named National Teacher of the Year in 1997, and her fiction reads like it was written by someone who knew precisely which book a fifteen-year-old would actually finish. Two Coretta Scott King Awards came out of the Hazelwood and Jericho novels, which follow Black teenagers through fire, addiction, violence and the ordinary business of trying to graduate.
The register is deliberately direct. Draper does not write around a subject: a Draper novel about grief opens on the grief and stays there, and the sentences are short enough that a reluctant reader keeps going. That plainness is a choice rather than a limit, and it is why the books get taught and why they get pulled off shelves.
Her range is wider than the problem novels suggest. Copper Sun is historical fiction about slavery, Out of My Mind is narrated by a girl with cerebral palsy who cannot speak, and the Ziggy books are chapter-book adventures for much younger readers with no crisis in them at all.
Books (6)
Where to start with Sharon M. Draper
Arrive at Forged by fire. It is the second Hazelwood book but stands alone, and it is the clearest example of what she does: a boy raising himself around an abusive stepfather and a mother who is not coming back to help, written without a single line of comfort that has not been earned. It is short, and it is not gentle.
Darkness Before Dawn continues the same school and cast with a senior-year narrator, and it is the one to read if the first book landed. Panic is the standalone thriller, aimed slightly older and blunter about danger than most books shelved for teenagers.
For a much younger reader, Ziggy and the Black Dinosaurs is the opposite mode entirely, a friendly chapter-book mystery with no crisis in it. Out of My Mind and Copper Sun, the two most people arrive looking for, are not among the credits listed here.