Andrea.Davis Pinkney author page

Andrea Davis Pinkney biography

Andrea Davis Pinkney is an American author, editor, publisher, and librettist whose work for children and young adults includes picture books, novels, historical fiction, biography, and nonfiction. Alongside her writing career, she has held senior roles in children’s publishing and helped launch Jump at the Sun, an imprint of Hyperion Books for Children created to publish books by and about Black people. She has also worked as an executive editor at Scholastic.

Pinkney has written more than 50 books for young readers. Her titles include The Red Pencil, Bird in a Box, A Poem for Peter, Rhythm Ride: A Road Trip Through the Motown Sound, and Because of You, John Lewis: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship. She has frequently collaborated with illustrator Brian Pinkney on books including Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down, Martin Rising: Requiem for a King, and Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America.

Hand in Hand, a collection of biographies of ten Black men who shaped American history, received the 2013 Coretta Scott King Author Award. Pinkney was selected by the Association for Library Service to Children to deliver the 2014 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture in recognition of her contribution to literature for young people. Her other honors include the Regina Medal and the University of Minnesota’s 2022 Kerlan Award.

Pinkney has also written for the She Persisted series, contributing volumes about Harriet Tubman and Ella Fitzgerald. Beyond books, she wrote the libretto for an operatic adaptation of Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day, which premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 2021.

Her 2025 picture book And She Was Loved: Toni Morrison’s Life in Stories, illustrated by Daniel Minter and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, presents Toni Morrison’s life and literary career in poetic form.