Angie Thomas

Angie Thomas is an American YA author whose debut novel The Hate U Give brought the Black Lives Matter movement to young adult fiction with emotional urgency and uncompromising honesty.

Angie Thomas grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and drew on the events surrounding the death of Oscar Grant — and the broader context of police violence against Black Americans — in writing The Hate U Give. The novel had been in progress for years before it was published in 2017, but its timing, arriving in the midst of an intensifying national conversation about race and policing, gave it an enormous cultural impact.

The Hate U Give follows sixteen-year-old Starr Carter, who witnesses the shooting of her unarmed childhood friend by a police officer and faces the agonizing question of whether to speak up. Thomas handles the dual-world pressure that Starr navigates — the affluent, predominantly white prep school she attends and the Black neighborhood she comes from — with specificity and emotional intelligence. The novel does not flinch from its political content, but it never reduces Starr to a symbol; she is a fully realized teenager, funny and conflicted and real.

The book has been challenged and banned in multiple school districts, which in itself says something about the discomfort its honesty provokes. As a novel, it occasionally telegraphs its thematic intentions more than a more experienced literary writer might, but Thomas was a debut author and the emotional core of the book is so strong that the structural unevenness hardly matters. The Hate U Give is one of the genuinely important YA novels of the past decade, and it speaks to adult readers with equal force.