TEMPLE, Texas — Bonham Middle School sixth grader Mack Lee Thomas is one of the newest and youngest authors to have a book available on Amazon after the 11-year-old became a published author when a book of his poem “A Problem Here?” went online earlier this month.
Thomas first submitted his poem to the district’s “Voices of Temple” writing contest and was selected as one of Bonham’s two campus winners in that competition. At an author’s breakfast celebrating the students who submitted works, Central Texas author Sarah Doran encouraged Mack and his mother to pursue publishing the poem. The family spent much of the holiday break submitting his work through Amazon’s KDP system and received official notice that “A Problem Here?” had published on New Year’s Day.
“I am really proud and really happy as a parent and a teacher who is surrounded by children his age,” Mack’s mother, Krystal Thomas, an eighth-grade math teacher at Bonham, said. “I am excited to see a kid his age that is interested in writing and reading and is expressive of his emotions. I want to do anything I can to help him get that out there for others to read his work. It is encouraging and inspiring that he did this all on his own and is interested in literary arts.”
“The author thought my poem was good and told us that we should look into trying to get it published,” Mack Thomas said. “It took me a while to write this. I feel good about having done it, and writing is something that I enjoy doing.”
Thomas was inspired to write the poem after a wasp sting at school at the beginning of the year sent him to the emergency room with anaphylactic shock. When he returned to school, he was afraid to go outside and says he was scared of other flying insects. Writing the poem helped him deal with his fear and express how that fear can linger, grow, and change the way he sees the world. Thomas hopes the poem will inspire readers to face their fears and explore anxiety, resilience, and the strength it takes to keep showing up.
“I first wrote this in a day and my mother told me that I should expand the poem to tell more of the story,” Mack Thomas said. “When I first got back to school, I was scared of a lot of different things. I want people to know how long it took me to get over that fear. Writing this helped me with that. I want others to know that they can do that, and that anyone can write books no matter what age they are.”
“It definitely helped me as a parent to understand what he was going through and I think it helped him reflect on it,” Krystal Thomas added. “I got emotional reading it and I realized what he was feeling. Sometimes we might think kids are overreacting, but reading this helped me understand what he was dealing with, and I learned to be more patient.”
The book “A Problem Here?” is available through Amazon.com at the following link https://a.co/d/g3hMKJU. Thomas is already working on a follow-up. His next poem recounts what he calls “his misadventures with basketball.”
All of the winning submissions to the “Voices of Temple” writing contest have also been compiled in an anthology that is available in each of the Temple ISD campus libraries.