Dept. of Word Lists
Walter Dean Myers Merged the Vocabularies of Literature and the Street
Best-selling and award-winning children's author Walter Dean Myers, who died last week, wrote masterfully about young people, drawing on the struggle with hopelessness he experienced as a young black man in 1960s Harlem.
In his 2001 Bad Boy: A Memoir, he framed the double life he experienced then in the context of vocabulary.
By this time there were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life, and establishing myself as a male…. The other voice, the one I hid from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.
His life's work was to carefully merge these two vocabulary sets. Today, we remember him with lists that show how they came together.
Vocabulary from Slam! Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-10, Chapters 11-15, Chapters 16-21
