Former Chronicle reporter author of over 60 books
“Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre,” a children’s picture book by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by the late Floyd Cooper, has won a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor, been named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and been longlisted for the National Book Award. Weatherford calls ”Unspeakable” a lamentation for victims and survivors of the 1921 massacre, the worst incident of racial violence in U.S. history.
Weatherford invited Cooper to illustrate because he was a Tulsa native whose grandfather survived the massacre. The pair previously collaborated on the 2008 verse novel ”Becoming Billie Holiday,” winner of a Coretta Scott King Honor. Her sixty-plus books have won many other literary honors, including a Newbery Honor, three Caldecott Honors, and two NAACP Image Awards.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Weatherford is a professor at Fayetteville State University. Before entering academia, she was a columnist for the Greensboro News & Record and the Winston-Salem Chronicle. A former Triad and Sandhills resident, she now lives in the Triangle area.