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On her blog Starr posts a photograph of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black child lynched in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Thomas’s novel also draws upon the historical legacy of the Civil Rights movement. These names, among many others, continue to spur protests against racial injustice throughout the United States. The final page of The Hate U Give includes a list of black individuals whose deaths at the hands of the police echo Khalil’s, such as Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile. The fact that officials “leave Khalil’s body in the street like it’s an exhibit” also echoes the treatment of Michael Brown, a black teen shot and killed by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 Brown’s body was infamously left in the street for four hours by authorities.

In Thomas’s novel, Starr says that she “can’t breathe” following Khalil’s shooting, directly invoking the death of Eric Garner Garner was an unarmed black man killed after being put in a chokehold by a police officer, and his last words, “I can’t breathe”, subsequently became a rallying cry in protests across the country. Thomas has stated that she was specifically inspired by Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man whose 2009 killing at the hands of a white police officer serves as the plot of the film Fruitvale Station. Thomas’s novel invokes the language of the modern protest movement Black Lives Matter, which grew in response to real-world incidents of police brutality. She has stated that she is deeply influenced by the work of Tupac Shakur, whose definition of the phrase “Thug Life” grants the novel its title.

Thomas is a lover of hip hop briefly performed as a rapper as a teen. Upon publication in 2017, The Hate U Give became an immediate bestseller and won numerous accolades, including the Coretta Scott King Award. In 2016, the as-of-yet unpublished Thomas won an inaugural grant from the nonprofit We Need Diverse books.

She also decided to focus specifically on a female protagonist in her debut novel, feeling that black girls’ experiences were too often overlooked by mainstream media and activism. Thomas has stated that her work initially focused on fantasy, but, following the encouragement of a professor, she decided to draw more heavily from her experience as a black woman in the southern United States. She began writing The Hate U Give as a senior project while studying creative writing at Belhaven University, a predominantly white college in her hometown. Angie Thomas was born in Jackson, Mississippi.