Immigrant Heritage Month celebrates the resilience, contributions, and diverse backgrounds that make up the unique patchwork of America. The titles below explore the many varied experiences of teen immigrants as well as multigenerational immigrant families.
Using a trauma-informed approach to gathering stories, this unique collection of 30 stories illuminates the range of challenges and successes met by the latest generation of immigrants attending Stevenson and Sullivan High Schools. Through their own voices, these digital and written stories showcase the resilience and courage required to overcome significant challenges and integrate into American society.
A bold and unconventional collection of first-person stories told and illustrated by immigrants and refugees living across the United States.
After the loss of her mother, high school junior Soledad finds herself struggling to balance classes and her new job in California to support her family in Tijuana, Mexico, in this thoughtful story about identity, immigration, and family.
Sixteen-year-old Ana is a poet and a lover of language. Except that since she moved to New Jersey from Argentina, she can barely find the words to express how she feels. At first Ana just wants to return home. Then she meets Harrison, the very cute, very American boy in her math class, and discovers the universal language of racing hearts. But when she begins spending time with Neo, the Greek Cypriot boy from ESL, Ana wonders how figuring out what her heart wants can be even more confusing than the grammar they're both trying to master.
Told in two voices, Nadja grows up in war-torn Bosnia in the 1990s and, in the present, refuses to discuss her youth with her daughter, Zara, until both are traumatized by a terrorist attack in Rhode Island.
A deeply honest coming-of-age story about reclaiming a heritage buried under assimilation, the bonds within families, and defining who you are for yourself.
The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.
All Nitasha's parents want is for her to be the perfect Indian daughter--something she is decidedly not. Everything she does seems to disappoint them, especially her mom. They just don't get that she'll never be like her doctor older brother. To make matters worse, her best friend and her crush seem to be more interested in the rich new girl than in her. Alcohol takes the edge off, but when that doesn't work, Nitasha turns to cutting. She can't stop asking herself: Will she ever be enough for her friends or her family? Or even for herself? This authentic and powerful teen graphic novel shines a light on how harmful the stigma of mental illness is and how lifesaving a community that is honest about mental health can be.
Soma Kear's verses have gone viral. Trouble is, she didn't exactly think her slam poetry video through. All she knew was that her rhymes were urgent. On fire. An expression of where she was, and that place...was a hot mess. Following her Ba's deportation back to Cambodia, everything's changed. With her school's spoken word contest looming, Soma must decide: Is she brave enough to put herself out there? To publicly reveal her fears of Ba not returning? To admit that things may never be the same?
Caught in the cross hairs of gang violence, seventeen-year-old fashion designer, Maya, and her mother set off on a perilous journey from Guatemala City to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Seamlessly toggling between past and present, this funny graphic memoir follows a queer Chinese American's immigration to Texas where she just wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why she is attracted to girls.
Nonbinary teen Ander is ready to leave their family's taquería and focus on their art, but when Santi, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, begins to work at the restaurant, the two teens spark a romance made complicated by immigration police.
After the death of her father, seventeen-year-old Enore Adesuwa moves with her family from Nigeria to America, where she intends to keep a low profile her senior year, but with the help from her sister, new friends, and crush, Enore finds her voice in more ways than one.
An illustrated comic travelogue about an American immigrant driving alone through all that's left of "The Mother Road," Route 66.
A Vietnam War refugee in Texas partners with a city boy with rodeo dreams to track down the younger brother she was separated from six years before when he was evacuated by American troops during the waning days of the Vietnam War.
After making a cultural blunder at her cousin's wedding, seventeen-year-old Leah travels to China to connect with her roots and winds up falling for a former classmate on the trip, who she previously blamed for ruining her life.
Seventeen-year-old Haitian American zombie Brielle seeks revenge on the wealthy elites responsible for her immigrant family's pain.
At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny. But Khosrou's stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying: from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy, and further back to the fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the Jasmine-scented city of Isfahan.
Set against the backdrop of Tehran and Los Angeles, this tale of intergenerational trauma and love is an ode to the fragile bonds of family, the hidden secrets of history, and all the beautiful moments that make us who we are today.
In 1924 at the Angel Island Immigration Station, teen Chinese immigrant Soo Tai Go is awakened to the political realities of his new home as he waits to find out if he and his family will be allowed into the country.
Sixteen-year-old Indian American Sonia, who has undocumented family members, goes viral after saving her crush James's life.
The unlikely friendship between Syrian American boxer Khadija and Syrian refugee Leene reveals the pressures and expectations of the perfect Syrian daughter and the repercussions of the Syrian Revolution both at home and abroad.
A family extending from Pakistan to California, deals with generations of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness.
When Ever Wong's parents sent her away for the summer, she's expecting Chien Tan: a strict, educational immersion program in Taiwan. Instead, she finds the infamous "Loveboat." There, Ever is surrounded by prodigies, like Rick Woo, Chinese American wonder boy and longtime bane of her existence. But her classmates are more interested in the nonstop Taipei nightlife than anything to do with the curriculum. Hookups abound, snake-blood sake flows, and adult supervision is nonexistent. For the first time ever, Ever is discovering what freedom tastes like and it's exhilarating. Will she let this glimpse of freedom go - or will Loveboat give her the courage to pursue the future she dreams of, and the Ever Wong she wants to be?