Jeffery Boston Weatherford is an award-winning children’s book illustrator, author, and a Hip Hop artist whose work is rooted in the belief that art can awaken, heal, and educate. His illustrations blend bold symbolism, expressive linework, cultural memory, and contemporary imagination to create visual narratives that speak to identity, transformation, and collective power.

At the heart of Jeffery’s work is a deep reverence for hip hop as a higher infinite power: a force of rhythm, poetry, truth, resistance, and healing. To him, hip hop is more than sound. It is a language of survival, a classroom without walls, and a sacred technology born from the genius of the people.

Through illustration, Jeffery seeks to honor the ancestors that demonstrate that power by creating images that uplift, challenge, and inspire. His work explores how rhythm and poetry can help heal our communities, strengthen cultural pride, and increase literacy across America by making words feel alive, necessary, and unforgettable.

Every piece is created with purpose. Whether drawing from music, mythology, spirituality, history, or the unseen codes within everyday life, Jeffery builds visual worlds that invite people to read deeper, think higher, and remember who they are.

His mission is to use art as a bridge between imagination and education, between culture and consciousness, between the page and the people. Through his illustrations, Jeffery Boston Weatherford creates more than images. He creates visual medicine for a generation learning to see, speak, and rise.

His latest work, “Rap It Up!” a NCTE Notable Poetry Book was inspired by workshops merging writing and technology. “KIN: Rooted in Hope” won a Coretta Scott King Honor and Boston Globe / Horn Book Award for poetry. His debut “You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen”, was named an ALSC Notable Book and a best book of the year by National Council for the Social Studies and Kirkus Reviews.

Jeffery’s art has been exhibited in Washington, DC, Georgia, Maryland, and North Carolina.

Formerly a National Book Foundation teaching artist, he holds an M.F.A. from Howard University where he was a Romare Bearden Scholar.