Tom Feelings

Feelings died aged 70 in 2003, in Mexico, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer.

Feelings's book The Middle Passage won the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award. In addition, it won a special commendation at the 1996 Jane Addams Children's Book Award ceremonies.

Feelings was an artist in residence and professor of art at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC from 1990 to 1996.

Feelings was the recipient of numerous awards for his art in children's picture books. He was the first African-American artist to receive a Caldecott Honor, and was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he lived in New York City, Ghana, Guyana, and Columbia, South Carolina.

Muriel and Tom Feelings also received a 1974 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for the picture book Jambo Means Hello: A Swahili Alphabet Book. Jambo Means Hello was also 1975 Caldecott Medal Honor recipient.

Feelings was a 1972 Caldecott Medal Honor recipient with his wife Muriel Feelings for their book Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book.

Feelings was married to fellow children's book author and his frequent collaborator Muriel Feelings from 1969 to 1974.

In 1967, Feelings illustrated Crispus Attucks and the Minutemen, the third in Bertram Fitzgerald's Golden Legacy series of comic books about black history that eventually included sixteen volumes and was published until 1976. Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution, was also one of the historical figures that Feelings included in the Tommy Traveler comic strip.

Feelings moved to Tema, Ghana, in 1964 and served as illustrator and consultant for the African Review, a magazine published by the Ghanaian government, until 1966.

In 1960 Feelings illustrated The Street Where You Live, a four-color comic for the NAACP's pamphlet on voter registration. Another example of Feelings's early work are the illustrations that accompanied "The Negro in the U.S." for Look Magazine, in 1961.

Feelings created the groundbreaking comic strip Tommy Traveler In the World of Negro History for the New York Age in 1958. Tommy Traveler is a black youth's dream adventures in American history while reading of notable black heroes. This material was released in book form in 1991.

His earliest known (signed) comic book work may be the story "Scandal" in Key Publication's third issue of Radiant Love (February 1953).

Feelings studied cartooning at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School from 1951 to 1953 and, after serving in the Air Force working in the Graphics Division, returned to New York to study illustration at the now-renamed School of Visual Arts from 1957 to 1960.

Tom Feelings was born on May 19, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was married to Diane Johnson and Muriel Grey.