Ekua Holmes author page

Ekua Holmes biography

Ekua Holmes is a fine artist and children’s book illustrator whose work explores family, relationships, hope and faith. She is a painter and collage artist, and she graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Her first illustrated children’s book was Carole Boston Weatherford’s Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. The book was a Caldecott Honor Book and a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book, and Holmes won the John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award for it.

Holmes illustrated Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets by Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, and she received the 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for that book. She illustrated The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer, which won the 2019 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award.

Her later illustration work includes Dream Street, written by Tricia Elam Walker and published by Anne Schwartz Books on 16 November 2021; Hope Is an Arrow, written by Cory McCarthy and published on 5 July 2022; and Crowning Glory: A Celebration of Black Hair, written by Carole Boston Weatherford. Black Girl You Are Atlas, written by Renée Watson with full-colour art by Holmes, was published in hardcover by Kokila on 13 February 2024 and in paperback on 19 August 2025.