In November I reviewed the timely and relevant novel How It Went Down (Henry Holt, 2014) by Kekla Magoon, a novel that begins with an incident all too timely — an African American teenager has been shot and killed by…
Category: Black history
BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Celebration of Books, New & Old
This month, Black History Month, we celebrate books by and about African- Americans, old and young, who have been leaders, artists, musicians, teachers, activists, and courageous citizens. Last month as a nation we celebrated the life, work, and words of…
Civil Rights and Intersectionality: Lies We Tell Ourselves
The past ten years have seen 50-year milestones for significant events in the Civil Rights Movement, and with them have come a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, for young readers. Stories of school desegregation, in which a white student…
J is for Jazz
The geometric shapes and the vigorous colors on the cover (representative of every page inside) of J is for Jazz may very well have this book bebopping off the shelves into little hands. (It’s going to my nearly-two-year-old nephew next.)…
A Great Migration Story of Hope
St. Louis, MO, near neighbor of Ferguson, was a “receiving station” of the Great Migration. Isabel Wilkerson’s THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, magnificently recreates many journeys out of the Jim Crow states of the south to major eastern and midwestern…
Exploring False Consciousness and Intersectionality: A Review of Willow
In Willow (Candlewick, 2014), Tonya Cherie Hegamin’s historical novel set in 1848, Knotwild Plantation borders the Mason-Dixon Line between slave state Maryland and free state Pennsylvania. There are no fences or guards—only a stone marker that separates the enslaved black…
Marilyn Nelson, Poetry and Prejudice
Novels and Biographies in Verse! Sometimes we are moved by a whole collections of poems and sometimes the power of one poem causes us to pause, to wonder over. I would like to share the beginning of this poem by…
POETRY AND PREJUDICE, NOVELS IN VERSE, MARILYN NELSON!
Sometimes we are moved by a whole collections of poems and sometimes the power of one poem causes us to pause, to wonder over. I would like to share the beginning of this poem by Arnold Adoff: “… t r…
A Child on Her Own: Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Sugar
A poet and author of fiction for adults, Jewell Parker Rhodes turned to writing for children with the highly acclaimed Ninth Ward, the story of an 11-year-old girl whose ailing grandmother—and her grandmother’s stories—help her to survive Hurricane Katrina in…
On Basketball, Race, and Life: An Interview with Kevin Waltman
Kevin Waltman’s YA novel Next (Cinco Puntos Press, 2013) is the first in a four-book series that chronicles the high school years of talented basketball player Derrick (D-Bow) Bowen. As a freshman, Derrick struggles for playing time with a hard-nosed…