Floyd Cooper (January 8, 1956-July 15, 2021) was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His artistic talents began early. In an interview for Mackin Community, he said, “I began my artistic sojourn by erasing. When I was three years old I plucked a piece of gypsum board from a scrap heap left by my Dad [ Read the full article… ]
Author: Tracey Baptiste
Generations Book Club: Love!
With all that has been happening in the world, I thought we could use a little extra love. Loving on ourselves, each other, and our environments. So I’m happy to give you a little love for this generations book club post. First up for the littles is JAYDEN’S IMPOSSIBLE GARDEN. A boy in the city [ Read the full article… ]
Generations Book Club: Civic Duty
Generations Book Club continues in October with an eye toward the coming election. We felt it was a good time to focus on all the ways a person can be a good citizen, including understanding the candidates, following social causes, understanding our history, and participating in the things we believe in. With that in mind [ Read the full article… ]
Generations Book Club: Life Lessons
This marks the end of our Summer Generations Book Club. We thank all of you for participating with us! I certainly found books that I wouldn’t have otherwise. My favorite was Questlove’s CREATIVE QUEST. I read it twice. Once as an audiobook and once in paperback because I wanted to take notes on the page. [ Read the full article… ]
Throwback Thursday: Jesmyn Ward
Since this post was published in 2015, Jesmyn Ward has come out with two new titles: The Fire This Time is an anthological response to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time which addressed race on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In Ward’s anthology several writers reexamine race in America. Sing, Unburied, Sing is due out [ Read the full article… ]
Throwback Thursday: Justina Ireland
As a follow-up to Tuesday’s Black Kids on Covers post, here’s a look back at one of the authors included as she discusses her first two novels and how music helped her to write them. I wonder what music she wrote to while working on her upcoming Dread Nation! Enjoy this throwback post… What [ Read the full article… ]
Black Kids on Covers
This is a wonderful time in children’s book publishing, where the faces of black girls and boys on covers is not an anomaly. When I was a kid, I almost never saw myself on the cover of a book, and certainly not ones as spectacular as those upcoming in the next few months. There was [ Read the full article… ]
The “Hole” in KidLit
For years I worked as an anthology editor for McGraw-Hill and other educational publishing houses. My job was choosing literature for elementary schools, pairing fiction with nonfiction, commissioning new pieces to work with published works, and balancing a very long list of authors and illustrators to ensure that we had even numbers between sexes and [ Read the full article… ]