Kwame Alexander - He Said, She Said
Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 33º
Rookie Season: Debuts
Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought
Genre: Romance, YA
“We’re taking a stand. The students at West Charleston High School are no longer sitting idly by while our school slides down the academic gutter. You can try to take our band and our library and our drama and our teachers away, but you can’t take our souls. And our souls will never let the powers that be take the arts from us. Our souls are on fire.”
— Kwame Alexander, He Said, She Said
Back Cover (Amistad):
“You’ve heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, right? Well, forget that planetary ish—Omar and Claudia are from different solar systems. Meet Brooklyn transplant Omar “T-Diddy” Smalls: West Charleston High’s football god and full-blown playa. He’s got a ton of Twitter followers, is U Miami bound, and cannot wait to hit South Beach . . . and hit on every shorty in a bikini.
Then there’s Claudio Clarke: headed for Harvard, straight-A student, school newspaper editor, and all-around goody two-shoes. She cares more about the staggering teen pregnancy rate than about hooking up with so-called fly homies and posting her biz on Facebook.
Omar and Claudia are thrown together when they unexpectedly lead (with a little help from Facebook and Twitter) the biggest social protest this side of the Mississippi. The stakes are high, the romance is hot, and when these worlds collide, sparks will FLY! Believe that!”
He Said, She Said is the 2013 debut novel by #1 New York Times bestseller American author Kwame Alexander. A roller-coaster ride of shifting perspectives—from his, to hers—Alexander deftly navigates themes of love, happiness, and social responsibility, all with the raging high school hormones and angst that remains seething under the surface when teenaged opposite’s attract!
More than simply a gifted writer, poet, and captivating public speaker, Alexander is also the executive producer of Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band and Acoustic Rooster: Jazzy Jams, a couple of PBS KIDS specials produced by GBH Kids based on his beloved children’s book of the same name.
He opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic, in 2018, as part of LEAP for Ghana, an international literacy program he co-founded in Ghana, West Africa, and named after his late mother.
In 2024, Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover Disney+ series won the Emmy® Award for Outstanding Young Teen Series (based on his Newbery-Medal winning novel of the same name)1
As recently as February 2025, Kwame Alexander was a recipient of the 2025 NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry category.2
“‘What I think is everybody has their purpose, their mission. . . . Whether you’re occupying Wall Street or starting a schoolwide protest at your high school, there are different ways to change the world, homegirl.’”
— Kwame Alexander, He Said, She Said
Did You Know?
Did you know that Kwame Alexander not only gets down with the word and pen, but also with aromas, forks, knives, and spoons?
For delicious proof, in 2021, Kwame Alexander contributed a 4.5 star-rated recipe to Bon Appétit magazine, entitled, “Barbara’s Picnic Fried Chicken”—named after his late mother, Barbara.3
Tell Me More . . .
As Alexander writes, “Fried chicken was one of my mother’s signature dishes, as it was my grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s before that.”
“Frying chicken right can feel like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It’s hard, sometimes elusive. But there is a form to guide you, and with practice you can find the flow. For me it took a dozen tries, and yet the ecstatic look on my kid’s face when she bit into that twelfth and final chicken wing was worth the wait. She got what she’d asked for. So did I. Through cooking I’d reunited with my mother, forged a powerful kinship. It was life-giving.”
— Kwame Alexander
Some Food For Thought:
Stop playing. Get Barbara’s Picnic Fried Chicken recipe4 and try it yourself.
It’s Kwame Alexander (and daughter, Samayah) approved.
You may just find out why so many Black folk say a good meal ain’t just something worth having for body and mind—but also the soul.
Rookie Season: Debuts
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