Project Lit 2020–2021 Middle Grade Selections

After researching Glenn Burke, the first major league baseball player to come out as gay, sixth-grader Silas Wade slowly comes out to his best friend Zoey, then his coach, with unexpected consequences.

When boys in seventh-grader Mila's class start touching her and making her feel uncomfortable, she does not want to tell her friends or mother until she reaches her breaking point.

Seventh-grader Tristan Strong reads his dead best friend's journal, which allows him to see folk heroes John Henry and Brer Rabbit. When a character from the Anansi story steals the journal, Tristan tries to retrieve it, but accidentally rips open a hole into Alke, where African American folk characters are gods. Tristan learns that his actions have led to the suffering of the people of Alke, and in order to get back home and save his friends, Tristan,...

Lucely and her best friend, Syd, cast a spell just before Halloween that releases evil spirits on their hometown of St. Augustine, Florida. Now they must team up with Syd's witch grandmother Babette and her cat Chunk to reverse the spell and save the town before it's too late.

Twelve-year-old Donte is the darker-skinned brother of Trey, which in his racist, mostly-white school has earned him the nickname Black Brother. When the captain of the school fencing team successfully frames him for something he didn't do, Donte is arrested and suspended from school. Joining a local youth center, Donte meets former Olympic fencer Arden Jones and begins training to defeat his school bully and find courage to confront the racist system...

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's--and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In a stunning graphic memoir, Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as...

Thirteen-year-old Genesis tries again and again to lighten her black skin, thinking it is the root of her family's troubles, before discovering reasons to love herself as is.