The Crossover
The Crossover
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Kwame Alexander on The Crossover
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A father’s nickname and a son’s notebookThe book began with a relationship, not a sport. Alexander has been specific about this in multiple interviews: the emotional engine was a father-son dynamic he wanted to examine, and everything else, the basketball, the twins, the verse form, came after.
I guess the first thing is I wanted to talk about the relationship between fathers and sons. So that’s sort of where it started.
The fictional father in the book is not a biography, but the real Edward Curtis Alexander left enough behind in newspaper clippings and memory to give his son a portrait worth writing toward. Alexander has described going into his father’s room as a child and finding those clippings, a quiet discovery that lodged itself for decades before it became fiction.
My dad, Edward Curtis Alexander, was a big basketball star in high school and in college... I always thought that was really cool, and that one day I’d like to tell a story about my dad. The Crossover isn’t about him, but it certainly was inspired by him.
The twins at the center of the novel, Josh and Jordan Bell, did not arrive from plot logic. They arrived from a childhood absence. Alexander grew up as the oldest of four siblings, all younger, and found himself writing the sibling he had never had. His real-world models were his nephews in New Orleans, twins who played basketball and could finish each other’s sentences.
I always wanted to have a brother my age or a bigger brother. I grew up with two younger sisters and a younger brother. I was always the oldest. So when I was writing this book, I was thinking of how cool it would be to write a brother for the main character so that I could sort of live my life over through these pages.
How he wrote it
Five years, a Panera, and twenty-two no’sTo write convincingly for twelve-year-olds, Alexander did not rely on memory alone. He treated school visits as field research, going at least three days a week to listen to how young people actually talked. The Charleston City Paper asked him directly how he gets inside a twelve-year-old’s head.
I visit a lot of schools. I go to schools at least three days a week and share with them, listen to them, eavesdrop. I’m inspired by young people. I feel like they’re my muse.
That listening shaped every line. The manuscript took five years to finish, written almost entirely at a single Panera Bread in Herndon, Virginia, with jazz playing throughout, and the breakthrough came not from any single revision decision but from sustained immersion in the characters.
The verse form of the book, a novel told entirely in poems, posed a compression problem that Alexander describes as the genre’s defining challenge. A novelist can spend a paragraph setting a scene; a poet in a novel must do the same work in far fewer words while also keeping a plot moving. He addressed this tension directly in a BBC Bitesize interview.
Poetry is the right words in the right order. So you’re not just putting down words, you’re choosing the right words that are going to work... it’s still a novel, so you’re still trying to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. So you’re still doing all this stuff and you’re only using a very few words to do that. It’s the hardest thing to do, but it’s easy for me because I’m a genius.
Publishers pushed him toward formal consistency, a verse novel that stayed in one recognizable mode throughout. He refused. Each scene in the book demanded its own form: haiku for a mother’s text messages, couplets for rapid back-and-forth dialogue, visual arrangements where words drop down the page to mirror a physical slip or appear in capitals to mark stress. His explanation of this principle came in a conversation with Zibby Owens.
There is no one way for me to write verse. And I want kids to be exposed to a variety of verse... Not all facets can be told well with a rhyme and couplet or a haiku. They all deserve their own style. I feel where I am in the story and what type of poem dictates that.
The visual dimension of the poems extended to how words were arranged on the page as physical objects. Alexander wanted a reader’s eye to do work that the reading voice would then confirm. He explained this principle when the book was adapted for the screen and interviewers asked what had been lost in translation.
In the book, I played with words visually, the way they looked on the page, so that I could mirror how they would sound.
Twenty-two publishers rejected the manuscript before it found a home. The rejection letters shared a common argument: boys would not read a novel in poems and girls would not read a novel about basketball. Alexander kept returning to the same chair at the same Panera regardless. He described what those rejections actually felt like in a conversation with Zibby Owens.
Every time I got a rejection, I couldn’t write the rest of the day. I packed up my bags, sad. Inevitably, I knew I was doing something that was pretty good even though I was being told it wasn’t. I knew that it was good.
The personal thread
A playground bet his father refused to loseThe book’s title reaches back to a story Alexander tells across many interviews, a memory from when he was three years old. A playground supervisor offered to lower the basketball goal so the child could make a free throw. His father said no. That refusal became the emotional spine of everything that followed.
Never let other people try to lower your goals or your expectations. So, basketball, in general, and The Crossover, in particular, they’re metaphors for me with this story. And so, when life crosses you over, are you going to fall off balance? Are you going to pick yourself back up? To extend the metaphor even further, how do you rebound?
Alexander has consistently resisted the label ‘middle-grade novel’ for The Crossover, not out of modesty about the category but because the label flattens his actual ambition. He wrote it for himself as much as for any young reader, testing every page against what would have mattered to him at twelve and what still matters to him now.
When I wrote The Crossover, my intent was not to write a middle-grade novel. It was to write a really good book that I would have loved to have read when I was twelve years old and I would love to read now.
What he wants us to sit with
The game ends; the questions don’tAt the 2015 National Book Festival, Alexander acknowledged the strategic bet he made on basketball as a hook, specifically to get reluctant boy readers to pick up the book and turn the first page. But he was equally direct about what the book was actually about once they did.
It’s about family and love and brotherhood and jealousy and all the things that make for a family. [paraphrased from audio]
He has said in multiple interviews that the standard he holds his own work to is simple and demanding in equal measure: if he would not read it himself, the odds of anyone else caring drop to near zero. He put that principle plainly in a BookTrust interview, framing it as his baseline test for whether a manuscript is worth finishing.
I write books that I would have wanted to read at their age and I want to read now. Because if I don’t like my book the chances of you liking it are probably zero.
Beyond the book’s plot, Alexander wants young readers to come away having practiced a particular cognitive move: looking outward. He describes books as serving two distinct functions for readers, and insists both have to work. The mirror alone is not enough.
You’ve got to be able to see what’s possible, I can overcome that challenge, I can get over grief or I can fall in love, I can do what’s impossible because I read it in a book. But here’s the thing books are also like windows. I’ve got to see outside myself so I can become more empathetic to the world.