Kimbilio Mourns Joyce Carol Thomas

Prolific children’s author and poet Joyce Carol Thomas has passed.

Ms. Thomas took night classes in education at Stanford, while raising four children and received her master’s degree in 1967.  Her 1982 novel Marked by Fire won a National Book Award in category Children’s Fiction and an American Book Award. Thomas has been one of three to five finalists for the Coretta Scott King Award thrice, in 1984 for Bright Shadow, in 1994 for Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea, and in 2009 for The Blacker the Berry in 2009.  Ms. Thomas was 78