The crack-cocaine epidemic began in earnest in the mid-1980s and in response, President Ronald Reagan encouraged a nationwide effort to respond harshly to this new form of cocaine, which was most common in inner-city Black communities. The most important historical events mentioned in the novel, though, are the crack-cocaine epidemic and the war on drugs. will ever get to a Black president, readers know that Barack Obama will become president just a little more than a decade after the novel ends. Characters also reference Bill Clinton’s presidency-and though Ma thinks that President Clinton is the closest the U.S. Maverick also constantly refers to Carlos as Carlton, a reference to the highly popular sitcom T he Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which aired its last episode in 1996, not long before Concrete Rose begins. Maverick mentions the recent assassination of the famous rapper Tupac in 1996. Though fictional, Maverick’s world in Garden Heights exists within the real-life context of the late 1990s. The Hate U Give has won a number of prizes and awards, including the Coretta Scott King Award and the William C. To write it, Thomas received a grant from the organization We Need Diverse Books in 2015. Initially, these influences led to Thomas's first book The Hate U Give, which was an immediate bestseller when it was released in 2017. And she was influenced to write Concrete Rose after seeing the Black Lives Matter movement reignite in the wake of the May 2020 death of George Floyd.

Thomas's work is greatly influenced by the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, and the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole. She went on to receive a BFA in creative writing from Belhaven University, the first Black student to graduate from the program. She was inspired to write when she was six years old: after witnessing a shootout, her mother took Thomas to the library to introduce her to the world beyond what she witnessed. Angela “Angie” Thomas was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi.

Rose in the concrete book