Angie Thomas won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Young Adult Fiction Book, Best Goodreads Debut, Audie Award for Short Stories or Collections, and Best of the Best. Miss Thomas, a former teen rapper, was born and raised in Mississippi. She was the winner recipient of the "Walter Dean Myers Grant" in 2015, and a few years later, while still in college, she began writing her debut book, "The Hate U Give" (popularly known as T.H.U.G) In the movie T.H.U.G., 16-year-old Starr manages to live in both the Garden Heights neighborhood and her predominantly white private school. Concrete Rose, on the other hand, is a sequel to T.H.U.G. that is mostly based on Maverick's (Starr's Dad) background of growing up in Garden Heights and his involvement in the “King Lords.” I chose Angie Thomas as the author to study about mainly because of the book “The Hate U give” and how much of an impact it had on the black community and the limelight it had on police brutality. Angie Thomas was born on September 20th, 1988 in Jackson, Mississippi. Thomas grew up in a predominately African-America area “and was exposed to gun violence at an early age,” Before becoming an author, she was a rapper in her teen years. According to Thomas, “hip-hop was a form of expression and rapped in performances when she was a teenager.” T.H.U.G …show more content…
Thomas communicated these themes between these two books by bringing them to reality based on similar real life events. For example, Angie Thomas identifies “code-switching’ in the T.H.U.G by placing Starr in two different worlds were she can’t act the same way in both worlds without being stereotyped. Thomas also shows the themes of “poverty, community, responsibility, and loyalty” in Concrete Rose by showing the inside life of Maverick as he’s in a gang, in prison, and becoming a