Patricia McKissack, who with her husband transformed a career crisis into a prolific literary partnership that produced scores of children’s books about black history and folklore, died on April 7 in Bridgeton, Mo. She was 72.
The cause was cardiorespiratory arrest, her son Fredrick L. McKissack Jr. said.
Ms. McKissack, who grew up in the segregated South and was the only black student in her sixth-grade class, wove the back-porch fables she remembered from childhood together with her own personal anecdotes (including a false accusation of thievery and a dinner at a whites-only restaurant) in fictional narratives.
She also championed black exemplars whom her husband, Fredrick, had exhaustively researched in biographies for young people of all races.
“We try to enlighten, to change attitudes, to set goals — to build bridges with books,” she once told Prof. Jessie Carney Smith of Fisk University in “Notable Black American Women,” a series of reference books she edited.
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Fred Jr. said his parents had shared a “missionary zeal” to write books about black personalities “where there hadn’t been any before.”
While Ms. McKissack always said that her books were the product of a lifelong partnership with her husband, who died in 2013, most of her folkloric fiction appeared under her name alone and was written, she explained, to fill another void in the canon.
“When children don’t see themselves in books, they aren’t motivated to read,” she told Professor Smith, who has written extensively about black heroes. “If children don’t read often they usually don’t read well. And soon that translates into failure. I don’t want that to happen, so I try to create characters children enjoy reading about.”
Her “Mirandy and Brother Wind” (1988) won a Caldecott honor for distinguished picture book, and “The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural” (1992) won another prestigious award, a Newbery honor, for an outstanding contribution to children’s literature. The couple’s books won nine Coretta Scott King Author and Honor awards.
The New York Times Book Review called the couple’s “Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?” (1992), about the 19th-century black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, “arguably the best” biography of her for young readers. And it praised Ms. McKissack’s “refreshing candor” in a 1989 biography of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
“At first glance, it may seem the book is meant for an intelligent student in the middle grades,” the reviewer, Rosemary L. Bray, wrote. “But Patricia McKissack is excellent at conveying sophisticated themes and ideas, so that ‘Jesse Jackson: A Biography’ can be read with pleasure by both children and young adults.”
Ms. McKissack and her son Fred Jr., a writer, together wrote “Best Shot in the West: The Adventures of Nat Love” (illustrated by Randy DuBurke and published in 2012), which The Times called a “gripping graphic novel.”
She was born Patricia L’Ann Carwell on Aug. 9, 1944, in Smyrna, Tenn. Her family moved to St. Louis when she was 3.
Her father, Robert, was successively an administrator of the city jail, convention center and airport. Her mother, the former Erma Petway, was a hospital admissions aide. She was raised in St. Louis and in Kirkwood, Tenn., and moved to Nashville after her parents divorced when she was in junior high school.
As a young girl, she had pen pals in three countries, wrote poetry and was a frequent visitor to her local library, which she later remembered as a lifesaver.
In 1964, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville, where she became reacquainted with her childhood friend Fred McKissack, who was studying civil engineering and hailed from a family of prominent architects. He proposed marriage on their second date.
In addition to Fred Jr., she is survived by two other sons, John and Robert; a brother, Robert Carwell; a sister, Sarah Stuart, and five grandchildren.
Ms. McKissack earned a master’s degree at Webster University in Missouri while teaching English to eighth graders and writing to college students. At the same time, she wrote radio scripts and freelance magazine articles. She was children’s book editor of Concordia Publishing House, an affiliate of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, from 1976 to 1981.
But in the early 1980s, the couple had a transformative conversation on a park bench. She was in tears because his contracting business was failing. He asked her what she would do if she could choose anything. Write books, she said.
“Let’s do it,” Mr. McKissack said, “and I’ll help you.”
He closed his business — temporarily, he thought — and they began a three-decade collaboration, working at almost identical desks in their home library.
Their first book together was a biography of her mother’s favorite poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, published a decade after she had been unable to find one for her students in the junior high school library. They wrote a dozen more.
Her latest book, published in January, was “Let’s Clap, Jump, Sing & Shout; Dance, Spin & Turn It Out!,” a celebration of childhood stories and songs. Another, “What Is Given From the Heart, Reaches the Heart,” is to be released in 2019.
In writing “Let’s Clap,” she told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she was struck that some of the same songs and stories that defined the civil rights movement of the 1960s still reverberate.
“It bothers me that we still have reason to sing them,” Ms. McKissack said. “You have to ask, ‘Why are we singing songs that applied to us in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s?’ Here we are in the new century, and we’re still dealing with the craziness.”
She wrote her hundred or more books, she said, “to tell a different story — one that has been marginalized by mainstream history; one that has been distorted, misrepresented or just plain forgotten,” and she urged other blacks to write more, too.
“Writing,” she said, “is a kind of freedom.”
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