Celebrate National Poetry Month with these titles!
Elizabeth Acevedo embraces all the complexities of Black hair and Afro-Latinidad--the history, pain, pride, and powerful love of that inheritance. Paired with full-color illustrations by artist Andrea Pippins in a format that will appeal to fans of Mahogany L. Browne's Black Girl Magic or Jason Reynolds's For Everyone.
Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't.
In this novel in verse, two very different girls bond while hospitalized for Crohn's disease.
The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds.
A unique verse novel of queer love, lust, and vampires... It starts when Claudia offers her a yellow rose. Immy has been in love before -- many times, across many lifetimes. But never as deeply, as intensely as this. Claudia has never been in love like this before either. But then, this is her first time with a vampire.
Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduing companions.
A confrontation with a teacher and a family crisis force high school senior Cerulean Gene to drop out of twelfth grade and derails their dreams of moving cross-country and living off the grid. Told in verse format.
With the help of her cousin and their friends, Danna scours the city, searching for her grandfather's favorite foods and hoping the remembered flavors will bring back his memories.
Chronicles the story of the last Africans brought illegally to the United States on the Clotilda in 1860.
A powerful biography in poems about Augusta Savage, the trailblazing artist and pillar of the Harlem Renaissance.
Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on-to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted, and to offer safety when darkness closed in. Throughout a coming of age marked by violence and dysfunction, Abuela's red-brick house in Abilene, Texas, offered Rex the possibility of home, and Abuela herself the possibility for a better life.
A smash up of art and text that viscerally captures what it means to not be able to breathe, and how the people and things you love most are actually the oxygen you most need.
In the wake of being sexually assaulted by her pastor, sixteen-year-old Amina struggles to regain her footing until she finds the strength within herself to confront her abuser in court.
Performance poet Sophia Thakur offers a powerful new collection touching on intergenerational relationships, finding your voice, and what it means to be a woman.
A contemporary poetry anthology that offers girls and young women wisdom and compassion for a vital, formative time in their lives.