Walter Dean Myers

Illustrations and rhyming text celebrate the roots of jazz music.

Sixteen-year-old Jimmy, on probation for assault, talks about life with three old men in a Harlem barbershop and hears about the tools he can use to get what he wants.

The summer after his absentee father is killed in a random shooting, Paul volunteers at a Harlem soup kitchen where he listens to lessons about "the social contract" from an elderly African American man, and mentors a seventeen-year-old unwed mother who wants to make it to college on a basketball scholarship.

Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.

Presents blues lyrics that chronicle the history of the African-American experience, and includes information about the development of blues music.

Thirteen-year-old Darnell's twin sister and the other members of the Corner Crew have doubts about his work on the school newspaper, but the article he writes about a homeless man changes his attitude about school.

A poem celebrating the people, sights, and sounds of Harlem.

Zander and his friends are in trouble -- again. The freedom of expression they've enjoyed by publishing their own school newspaper has spread all the way to England, where kids from a school "across the pond" are now contributors to their own school's most talked-about publication. When photos start to go alongside the articles written by kids, things get suspicious.

Robin Perry, from Harlem, is sent to Iraq in 2003 as a member of the Civilian Affairs Battalion, and his time there profoundly changes him.

A visit to his Harlem neighborhood and the discovery that the girl he loves is using drugs give sixteen-year-old Anthony Witherspoon a new perspective both on his home and on his life at a Connecticut prep school.