It’ll be a full-circle moment for author Tony Medina at Annual National Black Writers Conference

By David Gil de Rubio | dgilderubio@mec.cuny.edu

Author/poet Tony Medina and the Annual National Black Writers Conference that is going to be held at Medgar Evers College from March 27-29 go way back. The Bronx native has been attending for nearly a quarter century as both an attendee and a panelist. 

And this year, he’ll be honored with the National Black Writers Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Literature. 

“It was a surprise when I found out I was receiving this award,” Medina said. “But I’ve been going to that conference for so long I remember going there and being on panels with Louis Reyes Rivera and Quincy Troupe where Louis was moderating around 2003. Also, when Louis Reyes Rivera was being honored one time, so I’ve gone for a number of years.”

Medina is the first Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University. It’s a position he’s held for the past 22 years. 

But in order to find the roots of Medina’s passion for writing, you have to go back to the Throgs Neck Housing Project, where the diehard New York Yankees fan thought of the local library as being a place to hang out with his friends to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter. 

Any interaction with books was relegated to thumbing through the latest issue of Sports Illustrated or looking up entries in the Guinness Book of World Records. That is until he was forced to do a book report in ninth grade while attending JHS 101, Henry Bruckner School.

“At that time, I didn’t do this assignment which was odd, because usually I’d do all my schoolwork,” he said with a laugh. “I happened to not do it, so the makeup assignment was to do this book report and I had to choose something off this list of books. The one on the list that really attracted me was called Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.”

He added, “I went to the Contemporary American Fiction section and found it. It was kind of like a magic trick for me. It wasn’t an intimidating book. I felt like I could handle it—I’d never really finished a book. I take the book out and go home with it on a Friday. I couldn’t put the book down until I finished it that Sunday. That literally changed my life and made me want to be a writer.”

Medina immediately announced to his family that he wanted to be a writer. One aunt got him a manual typewriter and another one purchased a small desk for him to work from. 

And while television, film and anything having to do with baseball had been the teen’s primary obsessions, reading and writing quickly took over. 

Medina became a voracious reader and started saving his allowance to purchase paperbacks by J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck, Philip Roth and John Updike. Kurt Vonnegut became an early favorite. With no money to hit an institution of higher learning, Medina joined the Army for a three-year stint to pay for school. 

Once his military obligation ended, the aspiring writer enrolled at CUNY. It proved to be a fortuitous choice for Medina.

“I filled out an application for Baruch College because that was the only school that came to my mind,” Medina explained. “It just so happened that I took an African-American course and my first professor was [former SEEK educator] Addison Gayle, Jr., who happened to be the father of the black aesthetic movement. I didn’t even know that, but every time he spoke, he would drop names like James Baldwin, who he called Jimmy. And he said he was friends with him and how Baldwin let him stay in his crib in the south of France when he wasn’t there.”

Medina continued, “I was shook, because James Baldwin was one of my favorite writers at that time. It was because of James Baldwin that I learned how to write and punctuate. If it wasn’t for Baldwin, I wouldn’t have graduated high school.”

Despite graduating with a degree in marketing, Medina’s future path lay in English and literature (“…because it came easy.”) As someone who had been writing poetry and didn’t necessarily have an interest in children’s publishing, a list server request asking for writing submissions intrigued Medina. 

“Even though I never had any children’s books growing up, nor did I read any children’s books growing up, I became fascinated by this genre when I was an adult,” Medina recalled. “The marriage between the text and art—knowing that someone like Langston Hughes did both of those things became kind of a model for me.” 

Laura Atkins, an editor with Lee & Low Books, an independent children’s book publisher focusing on diversity, saw something in Medina, and asked him to submit something. Je delivered what eventually became his first children’s book, 2001’s Deshawn Days.

“I just started writing some [stuff] and I sent it to her,” Medina said. “I wanted to write about a kid from the hood because I wasn’t seeing any representation about kids like this. I wrote about this kid from the projects and put in some of my own little background stuff to some of the poems. It was in verse, so that’s kind of challenging, but I thought that was the approach I wanted to take because I was a poet. She asked if we could meet and the rest is history.” 

In-between earning his MA and PhD in English from SUNY, Binghamton, Medina taught English at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus and the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, before landing at Howard University. He’s also found time to publish a number of adult (Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam) and Young Adult (I and I, Bob Marley) books. And despite the constant hustle he’s engaging between educating and getting published, Medina is occasionally caught off guard by the impact his work has had on young readers. One specific incident he recounts was with a fourth-grader in Chicago.

“I visited this one school and was promoting Love to Langston where these fourth-graders were reading my book,” he explained. “They did a presentation and broke for a break before I gave them some writing assignment. This little White boy was sitting by himself with his chin on his fist with a pouty face. I thought they were bullying him, so I went up to him and asked what was the matter. And he emphatically said, ‘This is my favorite book in the whole world. It just choked me up.’ I was verklempt. I had tears in my eyes. It was so emotional because he was so emphatic. It just showed me that this little White boy could relate to Langston Hughes. And he was so emotional about it.” 

As for what he’d like to share with attendees of the Annual National Black Writers Conference, Medina is clear that it comes down to prospective writers being all in on investing their hearts and souls if they choose to go down this path. 

“The thing is that it’s a lifestyle and if you want to be a writer, you’ve got to be a reader,” he said. “You’ve got to be in it to win it. By virtue of being at the conference, that’s the right move, the right step. To be around the writers. You follow them. You hang out with them. You do the open mics. That’s how you get swept up into the scene itself. But you’ve got to be serious about the literature.”