Sharon Draper is an American author, poet, and master educator. She has won many awards for teaching and written many books, poems, and short stories. She was a teacher in Cincinnati from 1970-1997 and became an author in 1991, which is the career she is currently pursuing. Her first piece was “One Small Torch”, a short story published in the Ebony magazine in 1991 as the winner of a short story contest with 20,000 entries. In her writing, she choses African-American male characters to give a voice to African-American young men.