Project HBW Blog

Remembering Joyce Carol Thomas (May 25, 1938 – August 13, 2016)


Dominique Waller (HBW Staff Member)

Thomas, Joyce
Image courtesty of Balkin Buddies

The African-American Literature community has lost another treasure. On August 13, 2016 Joyce Carol Thomas died in Stanford, California. The award winning children’s author, poet, and playwright’s passing was confirmed by her sister Flora Krasnovsky, stating that Thomas contracted cirrhosis of the liver from a blood transfusion. Read more about Joyce Carol Thomas at Joyce Carol Thomas, Who Wrote of African-American Life, Dies at 78

Thomas wrote primarily adult plays and poetry before her first young-adult novel Marked by Fire was published in 1982, and adapted into a gospel musical under the name of Abyssinia in 1987. The novel went on to win the National Book Award for children’s fiction the next year. Her first picture book, The Blacker the Berry (2008), received Coretta Scott King Honors, an award she received previously for I Have Heard of a Land (1998) along with an IRA/CBC Teachers’ Choice Award. Living in Ponca City, Oklahoma as child she drew from her own life experience. In 1998, Thomas told the African American Review that her works were dedicated to showing young readers a versions of black life that was seldom shown in books. Read more about the African American Review at Evoking the "Holy and the Horrible": Conversations with Joyce Carol Thomas. She believed these stories deserved being told.

Along with leaving behind her literary legacy, Mrs. Thomas leaves behind daughter Monica Pecot, sons Gregory and Michael Withers and Roy T Thomas III, along with seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. 

You can read more extensively on Mrs. Thomas’ life and legacy at Obituary: Joyce Carol Thomas.

Dominique Waller is a sophomore in Biology at the University of Kansas and HBW staff member. 

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Remembering Joyce Carol Thomas (May 25, 1938 – August 13, 2016)