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"In this collection of poetry, Nikki Grimes looks afresh at the poets of the Harlem Renaissance -- including voices like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and many more writers of importance and resonance from this era -- by combining their work with her own original poetry. Using "The Golden Shovel" poetic method, Grimes has written a collection of poetry that is as gorgeous as it is thought-provoking. This special book also includes original...
2) Americanah
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English
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"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
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A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...
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In her first book of poetry since Why Don't You Sing? Maya Angelou, bestselling author of the classic autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, writes with lyric, passionate intensity that reaches out to touch the heart and mind.
This memorable collection of poems exhibits Maya Angelou's unique gift for capturing the triumph and pain of being black and every man and woman's struggle to be free....
This memorable collection of poems exhibits Maya Angelou's unique gift for capturing the triumph and pain of being black and every man and woman's struggle to be free....
5) Dough boys
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English
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Told in two voices, thirteen-year-old best friends Simp and Rollie play on a basketball team in their housing project, but Rollie dreams of being a drummer and Simp, to impress the gang leader, Coach Tez.
7) The jungle
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A documentary novel portraying industry's conditions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Sinclair's novel prompted public outrage which led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand an official investigation. This eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws.
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Sexual Assault Awareness Month
Summer Challenge 2023: Banned & Challenged Books
Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 | Right to Read Day | National Library Week 2024
Summer Challenge 2023: Banned & Challenged Books
Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 | Right to Read Day | National Library Week 2024
Description
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare...
9) The help
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English
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Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Aibileen is a wise, regal black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Minny, Aibileen's best friend, can cook like nobody's business but can't mind her tongue. It is 1962, and these three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step that forever changes a town and the way women --mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends -- view one another. (Bestseller)...
11) On the come up
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Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
Formidable Females in YA
High School Project Lit Titles
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Formidable Females in YA
High School Project Lit Titles
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Description
Sixteen-year-old Bri hopes to become a great rapper, and after her first song goes viral for all the wrong reasons, she must decide whether to sell out or face eviction with her widowed mother.
12) Electric arches
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English
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Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewings narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstancesblues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objectshair moisturizer, a spiral notebookas precious...
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In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...
14) The skin I'm in
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Thirteen-year-old Maleeka, uncomfortable because her skin is extremely dark, meets a new teacher with a birthmark on her face and makes some discoveries about how to love who she is and what she looks like.
15) Invisible man
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Banned Books That Shaped America
Juneteenth for All Ages
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
Juneteenth for All Ages
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
Description
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an American Black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a Black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly...
17) Bronx masquerade
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English
Description
While studying the Harlem Renaissance, students at a Bronx high school read aloud poems they've written, revealing their innermost thoughts and fears to their formerly clueless classmates.
19) The wedding
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English
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In her final novel, “a beautiful and devastating examination of family, society and race” (The New York Times), Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's Black bourgeoisie on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s.
Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of
20) Muted
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"For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown. So Denver is more than ready on the day she and her best friends Dali and Shak sing their way into the orbit of the biggest R&B star in the world, Sean Mercury Ellis. Merc gives them everything: parties, perks, wild nights -- plus hours and hours in the recording studio. Even the painful sacrifices and the...