Ashley Bryan, recipient of the fifth annual Virginia Hamilton Literary Award has spent his career bringing African culture to life through folktales, spirituals, visual art, and performance.  A brilliant colorist, he brings to the page a magical sense of rhythm and movement. Whether he’s illuminating the pranks of a rascally trickster character, or celebrating the richness of African traditions, he communicates a sense of pride and wonder in the themes and textures of his ancestors’ stories. His passionate style, both on the page and with an audience, reveals the universal themes found in particular experiences through charming, rhythmic verses and a language that dances into the hearts of audiences. He is a performer of language who holds his audiences captive, young and old alike, in a mesmerizing mix of humor and deeply felt emotion. 

Ashley Bryan is well known the richness and vibrancy he brings to the stories of African cultures. His work celebrates the oral tradition by playing with sound, rhythm and rhyme in prose that becomes a type of call and response between teller and audience, between writer and reader. These characteristics are deeply imbedded in his painstaking research and in the careful way he structures his stories, spirituals, retellings, and poetry and lays them out visually on the page. This results in cultural integrity that draws attention to what he has called the relationship between “sound, spirit, and meaning.”   A dedicated craftsman and teacher, he cannot remember a time when he was not an artist. He attended Cooper Union art school in New York City and Columbia University where he received degrees in art and philosophy. He taught drawing and painting at Queens College, Lafayette College, the Dalton School, and the Brooklyn Museum. For a many years he taught painting and visual design at Dartmouth College, where he is currently emeritus professor. He has exhibited his paintings in many one-man shows and has lectured and written extensively on his own work and on African American poets.  In 1990, he was invited by the American Library Association to deliver the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture.
 

Ashley Bryan has been richly honored for his works. Beat the Story Drum, Pum-Pum was a Parents’ Choice Award and received the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. He received Coretta Scott King honor book citations, for his illustrations in 1983 for I’m going to Sing: Black American Spirituals; for his writing in 1986 for Lion and the Ostrich Chicks and Other African American Folktales; for his illustrations in 1988 for What a Morning! The Christmas Stories in Black Spirituals; and for his illustrations in 1992 for All Night, All Day: A Child’s First Book of African American Spirituals.