Kwame Alexander Will Start His Own Imprint. The Name? Versify. Get It?

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and later, Chesapeake, Va., Mr. Alexander was surrounded by books: His father was a college professor, book publisher and Baptist pastor, and his mother worked as a teacher and then a school principal.

Mr. Alexander, who lives in Virginia and is married with two daughters, decided in college that he wanted to be a writer, even though he found little encouragement at first. At Virginia Tech, he studied medicine, but then he took a writing class with the poet Nikki Giovanni, and became determined to be a poet. She gave him a C, but he signed up for more of her classes, he said. (She later became a mentor to him, and recently agreed to write a book of poetry for his new imprint).

After graduating, he gave poetry readings at universities, coffee shops, churches, community centers and any other place that would have him. He sold copies of his self-published poetry collections for around $10 a piece. He started his own publishing company, the Alexander Publishing Group, and ran the company for 10 years. But he lost money on the venture, and abandoned the company in 2005 to focus on writing.

A few years later, he started working on “The Crossover.” When the book came out in 2014, it catapulted him to prominence. He has since published six other children’s books — including the best-sellers “Solo” and “Booked,” coming-of-age stories that unfold in verse — and his books have collectively sold more than a million copies. Following “The Crossover,” he signed two separate seven figure, multi-book deals, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Blink, a HarperCollins young adult imprint. His next book, “Rebound,” a novel in verse and prequel to “The Crossover,” comes out this spring.