This award-winning picture book brings together Kwame Alexander's rousing text, a lyrical poem to honour the triumphs and sorrows of myriad black lives and their embodiment in a succession of heroic figures with large scale oil paintings by Kadir Nelson which radiate a sense of monumental power by using a hyper-realistic style of portraiture with close up focus on faces set against plain white backgrounds. The words weave a tribute to inspirational figures, athletes, politicians, artists, heroes and victims, and everyday survivors of life in America during its turbulent history. An afterword gives the author's account of the genesis of the poem, and a glossary gives brief biographies of all those featured. The striking pictures and rhythmic, incantatory text have an immediate power, likely to make young readers want to find out more about why these black lives matter.