Derrick Barnes
Derrick D. Barnes is the #57 Bestselling Black Author in America
Derrick Barnes is a Top 100 AALBC.com Bestselling Author Making Our List 16 Times
Biography of Derrick Barnes
Derrick D. Barnes is a National Book Award Finalist for his graphic novel Victory. Stand!—Raising My Fist For Justice, which also won the YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award, and a Coretta Scott King Award Author Honor. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed, multi-award-winning picture book Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut which received a Newbery Honor, a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers. In 2020, he became the only author to win the Kirkus Prize twice for the New York Times bestseller, I Am Every Good Thing, which also won a Charlotte Huck Award and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor. Derrick is also the creator of the New York Times bestselling companion picture books, The King of Kindergarten and The Queen of Kindergarten.
His first hardcover title is the middle-grade novel We Could Be Brothers (Sankofa Books). He is also known for writing bestselling copy for various Hallmark Card lines and as the first African American male staff writer for Hallmark.
Derrick is a native of Kansas City, MO, but currently [2025] lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his enchanting wife, Dr. Tinka Barnes, and their four sons, Ezra, Solomon, Silas, and Nnamdi, the “Mighty Barnes Brothers.”
Learn more at Derrick Barnes’s official website.
