Black And White

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes racism and racial discrimination.

Paul Volponi is a New York City-based writer, journalist, and teacher. He holds an MA from City College of New York and a BA from Baruch and has authored over 20 books, mostly in the young adult fiction genre.

Much of his fiction work is based on his experiences as an educator in New York City. Between 1992 and 1998, Volponi taught reading and writing to incarcerated youth on Rikers Island, which provided the inspiration for Black and White as well as Rikers High (2010). He also taught youth in a drug treatment program from 1999 - 2005, inspiring the award-winning novel Rooftop (2006). Volponi’s novels predominantly follow teenagers and explore race relations, the criminal justice system and its inequities, and the struggles that youth—and particularly young men—face in urban settings.

Black and White and Volponi’s other works exemplify how an author’s real-life experiences bleed into their work. For example, Jason Taylor’s tragic death is based on a real event that Volponi witnessed on the news, in which a star player on the Long Island City High School basketball team was stabbed with a chair leg after a riot broke out due to racist taunting from the stands. Volponi explains in the Author’s Note that “the seeds of that incident stayed with [him] for more than ten years, finally germinating in the character of Jason Taylor [...] His racially driven murder provides Marcus and Eddie with a reference point to evaluate their own growing divide” (188). The incident on the train, in which an unhoused man shouts racist slurs at fellow passengers, is also based on a real experience that occurred while Volponi himself was riding the train.

By grounding his novels in real-life experiences, Volponi illustrates the realities and tensions inherent to living in New York City. He highlights the troubling realities of racial tension.