Christopher Paul Curtis

Christopher Paul Curtis (born May 10, 1953, Flint, Michigan, U.S.) is an American author of young people’s literature who received the 2000 Newbery Medal, awarded annually by the American Library Association (ALA) to the author of the most distinguished American work of children’s literature published in the previous year. Many of his books were narrated from the perspective of an African American boy living in Flint, Michigan, Curtis’s hometown.

Curtis’s father practiced podiatry until he was forced to take a job in an automobile-assembly plant for a better salary. After high school Curtis followed his father into the auto plant, earning money to pay for his part-time enrollment at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus. In 1993 he took a year off from work to concentrate on writing. It was during that time that Curtis wrote his first book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 (1995; TV movie 2013). An early draft of the book won a Jules Hopwood Prize from the University of Michigan, and the published version merited a Newbery Honor Award in 1996.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 is the story of an African American family from Flint that travels to the South during the days of the civil rights movement. Told from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy, the book starts out as a comic adventure but turns darker and more tragic as the family is exposed to, and changed by, the ugliness of racial tensions in Birmingham, Alabama, including the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

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Curtis’s second book, Bud, Not Buddy (1999), narrated by a motherless boy who embarks on a search for his unknown father during the Great Depression, earned Curtis the Newbery Medal as well as the ALA’s Coretta Scott King Award. Bucking the Sarge (2004), a modern-day fairy tale set in a poor urban neighbourhood, is narrated by a teenaged boy whose mother, a selfish slumlord, is called “the Sarge.” Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money (2005) details the adventures of Steven Carter, an overachieving seven-year-old who aspires to become a detective.

Curtis’s next book, Elijah of Buxton (2007), is set in the 1850s and follows the first child born into freedom in a Canadian community of formerly enslaved people; he faces danger and learns the realities of slavery when he ventures into the United States. The work earned Curtis another Newbery Honor Award and a Coretta Scott King Award. It was the start of a series that later included The Madman of Piney Woods (2014) and The Journey of Little Charlie (2018). The Mighty Miss Malone (2012) is set during the Depression and centres on a 12-year-old girl named Deza Malone, a character that first appeared in Bud, Not Buddy.

Curtis did not intend to write specifically for children, but he felt that his stories were best told from a child’s perspective. The characters’ experiences were often coloured by events from Curtis’s own life, and the tales were told in a fresh, original voice that appealed to young readers.