FREEDOM SUMMER Written by Deborah Wiles, Illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue Deborah Wiles’ picture book Freedom Summer strongly resonates today. The story takes place in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. It is set in the South where Wiles…
Category: civil rights
The Promise of Change, One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality
The Promise of Change, One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality Co-authored by Jo Ann Allen Boyce and Debbie Levy This book, The Promise of Change, is the most powerful book about the experience of school integration that…
The Story of a Community: A Review of Light It Up
Five years ago, Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down portrayed the fallout of a White man shooting an African-American teenager in a mid-sized Midwestern city – a story based on the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida. The vignettes in…
What May Happen Next if We Don’t Act Now: A Review of Internment
In a United States of the near future, a racist President tweets and riles up his supporters. His party, which controls Congress, has passed laws forcing Muslims to register and has dismissed them from public employment and schools. While the…
September Is #WorldKidLit Month: A Review of Don’t Cross That Line!
Several years ago, WorldKidLit Month was established to increase awareness of international literature in translation—and to make more translated titles available to English readers in North America. While the titles highlighted this month include original English-language publications from the UK,…
Ahimsa by Supriya Kelkar
Ahimsa by Sypriya Kelka Guest Post by Padma Venkatraman Ahimsa, Supriya Kelkar’s New Visions Award winning debut, is set in India in the 1940’s – a time in our shared human history about which enough can never be written. Ten…
Words for Our Time: A Review of We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices
The results of the November 2016 national election in the United States left millions of parents and children terrified about what would happen next. The triumph of a candidate and party that ran on an explicitly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist…
Announcing the 2018 Skipping Stones Honor Award Books!
This year the non-profit multicultural children’s magazine Skipping Stones celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Each year, the magazine highlights the best children’s books and educational resources about diverse cultures around the world and nature and the environment through its Skipping Stones Honor Awards.…
Learning to Take a Stand: A Review of My Year in the Middle
In a small town in Alabama in 1970, Lu Olivera sits in the middle of her newly integrated sixth grade class. On one side of the classroom are the Black kids, at Red Grove Middle School for the first time.…
Celebrate Young People’s Poet Laureate Margarita Engle – powerful voice for many who have been silenced
April is Poetry Month, a perfect time to choose a poem, a book of poems, or even a novel written in poems. Savor the words, the rhythm, the images that will touch your heart and kindle your imagination. Take…