Kekla Magoon

Kekla Magoon (born 1980) is an American author, best known for her NAACP Image Award-nominated young adult novel The Rock and the River, How It Went Down, The Season of Styx Malone, and X. In 2021, she received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her body of work. Her works also include middle grade novels, short stories, and historical, socio-political, and economy-related non-fiction.

Personal life Magoon was born in Michigan and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is the biracial daughter of a white American mother with Dutch and Scottish ancestry and a black Cameroonian father. and served as a judge for School Library Journal. In 2017, she was faculty at the Highlights Foundation, a non-profit organization in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, where she taught a workshop about developing new creative strategies through meditation sessions, workshop elements, and discussion, together with authors Laurie Calkhoven and Nicole Valentine.

She is a member of the NWP Writers Council.

Magoon lives in Vermont and teaches writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her debut novel, The Rock and the River, set in 1968 Chicago and follows the story of the 13-year-old son of a civil rights activist and follower of Martin Luther King Jr., who has to deal with his brother joining the Black Panther Party. It discusses issues of class, race, and poverty. Magoon says she spent time deliberately researching the non-violent civil rights movement, has always had an interest in history, and majored in History in college. Frustrated by the media coverage's bias, she decided to write a fictionalized story that explored what it would be like to be personally affected through a close family member or friend being killed. Shabazz says her agent chose Magoon as a co-writer based on the quality of her previous work and the themes she tackled in her novels.

Her seventh Middle Grade novel, The Season of Styx Malone, about three African American boys living in a small town in Indiana, United States, who swap their little sister for fireworks, was published by Wendy Lamb books in 2018. Magoon says that she loosely based the novel on a real event from her childhood, when an ice cream parlor clerk in North Carolina told them about how his father and uncle once tried to trade their baby sister.

Critical reception Magoon's novels have earned starred reviews from multiple literary magazines.

Her novels Light It Up, The Season of Styx Malone, and Ibi Zoboi's anthology Black Enough that she contributed a short story for, and How It Went Down have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly. They also chose How It Went Down as a Publishers Weekly Pick. How it Went Down, Marc Aronson and Susan Campbell Bartoletti's 1968: Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change, and The Season of Styx Malone a starred review, calling the latter "Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around them, striving to be more otherwise than ordinary."

School Library Journal gave starred reviews to Rebellion of Thieves, Jessica Spotswood's anthology A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers and Other Badass Girls, and The Season of Styx Malone. The Season of Styx Malone was especially praised by critics, also earning a starred review from Shelf Awareness and The Horn Book, and being named one of the best books of 2018 by Kirkus Reviews.