Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson by Jen Bryant (review)

Bryant, Jen Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson; illus. by Cannaday Chap-man. Abrams, 2019 48p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-3653-7 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-68335-624-0 $15.54 R* Gr. 4-8

How does a voracious young reader turn into a high school dropout? How does a high school dropout become an accomplished poet? And how does a poet morph into Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright? In this picture-book-in-verse, Bryant portrays August Wilson's rising career as a triumph of possibility over improbability: Frederick August Kittel Jr., son of a Black mother and an absent white father, tracked down words from a young age, reading ads and library books, eavesdropping on conversations throughout his Pittsburgh neighborhoods. A Black kid with talent didn't have a fair chance in schools that didn't support that ability, but by age twenty, he had chosen his name for life, and his writing had begun to take direction—poetry inspired by fruits of his eavesdropping: "To a fatherless son, this man talk is a gift/ from the Hill's tribal elders, warriors who survive/ in this hard world/ And his job as a poet? To keep them alive." Mentoring, much encouragement, some nagging, and exposure to the visual language of Black artists such as Romare Bearden drew him to theater, where the pieces of collected words and ideas coalesced into dramatic narrative collage. Chapman's mixed-media illustrations are sophisticated and engrossing, packed with visual metaphors to engage the older crowd at whom this title is directed. When Wilson "reads with delight and with a fearsome hunger,/ like a guest at a royal feast," the solid young man is seated on an airy throne at a sturdy wooden table laid with arrangements of tiered and garnished books; when adult Wilson recalls snippets of conversation ("He leans over the blank page, listening./ Who's there?"), he's a heavy black silhouette observing faces emerging in near-translucent memory. An author's note, timeline, source notes, and bibliographies support readers' further interest, but reading aloud for pure pleasure would be a meaningful tribute to Wilson's legacy.