Metal Man Written by Aaron Reynolds Illustrated by Paul Hoppe Published by Charlesbridge Publishing, June 2008 On a scorching hot day, Devon, a young Black child, skips out of the house and heads over to visit Mitch, “the metal man,” an artist and welder who creates art with scrap metal. Devon’s mother isn’t impressed with [ Read the full article… ]
The International Reading Association has released it’s Choices Booklists for children, teachers and young adults. And the lists are quite diverse. Here are a few titles from the Teacher’s list, that are either by or about African Americans: Primary winners: Ain’t Nobody a Stranger to Me by Ann Grifalconi, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, Hyperion, Jump [ Read the full article… ]
Christian fiction is not a new phenomenon. I grew up reading Catherine Marshall and Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly series in the 80s. In the 90s, the Left Behind series gained widespread notoriety on the literary scene. Within African American Christian fiction, there are several well known authors including Jacquelin Thomas, Kendra Norman Bellamy, Michelle [ Read the full article… ]
Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane Written by Carole Boston Weatherford Illustrated by Sean Qualls Published by Henry Holt and Company, April 2008 Life can be a rat race, I know. We get so busy we never take the time to stop and listen, taking a chance on missing life’s [ Read the full article… ]
I dislike controversy. I’m drawn to controversy. In between my two realities lies the author of young adult fiction. While the conscious side of me never wants to piss off the literary influencers by writing something they’d deem censor-worthy, when I’m writing (my unconscious side) I’m not thinking about anyone except the characters at hand. That [ Read the full article… ]
The wild popularity of the Gossip Girl series has resulted in a strange and often contentious divide among those looking for good books for young adult readers and those who read them, regularly. On one side, you have some influencers who absolutely cannot understand the appeal of a book where girls are catty, fashion rules and [ Read the full article… ]
What’s the old saying? Last but not least! Recently, Sherri L. Smith was the guest blogger over at Finding Wonderland and after reading these words “But, let’s get one thing straight—multicultural is a made-up word. The proverbial “Great American Novel” by its very name is a multicultural novel—America is made up of too many different [ Read the full article… ]
I still remember the third grade where I was a student at John Dewey Elementary School – my teacher Mrs. Kaveney, recess, hundreds of games of kickball, our Black History Month program, the school spelling bee, the end of the year class picnic at Mrs. Kaveney’s house. Thanks to Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Willimena Rules’ series, [ Read the full article… ]