The Children's Writer's Guild
sections
search
about
posts
features
reviews
JoAnn Allen Boyce, one of twelve African American students who desegregated Clinton High School in eastern Tennessee in 1956, is the co-author along with Debbie Levy of this riveting and important personal narrative of the battle for school equality.
Kingston James lives in rural Louisiana and thinks his brother has returned to this world as a dragonfly. King searches for that one dragonfly—his brother—in the bayou in Kacen Callender’s winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature as well as the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry.
Laura Dean, the most popular girl in high school, was Frederica Riley's dream girl. There's just one problem: Laura Dean is maybe not the greatest girlfriend. Laura drops Freddie, picks the relationship back up, drops her over and over. Freddie can’t seem to help herself - can she find herself?
Based on the immigration story of her maternal grandmother, the author tells a beautiful story in verse about her Greek American heritage. Mary, Smith’s grandmother, is one narrator and Mary’s parents Jeanne from France and Giorgos from Greece are the second and third narrators. The reader must unravel the puzzle of who each person is.
Nima, suffers in America as a Sudanese immigrant. Furious at her single mother for bringing her into this life, she magically enters an old photo of her parents, which takes her to old Islamic Sudan where she learns the truth of her beautiful parents and their fun-loving courtship. This magnificent novel-in-verse shows so much about living between two cultures.
Detroit the center of U.S. car manufacturing. In 1982 the city is suffering auto worker layoffs and many blame the success of Japanese car companies. A bar fight leaves a Chinese American man, Vincent Chin, beaten to death at the hands of two white auto workers, Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz. This is the story of the families, the investigations and the court cases which ensue.
Written by a pediatric hospice nurse—who can really write—delivers the story of a depressed mill town in Maine. Two families, neighbors, best friends among its members, are torn apart when one father leaves a loaded gun in the attic, and the son of the neighbor family accidentally shoots himself in the head.
This humorous, insightful, touching graphic novel memoir about the author’s mother dying of cancer, is a comfort to anyone who has known loss. Feder’s insights into grieving will offer solace to every reader, no matter the loss they’ve experienced.
No one in his Oklahoma third grade believes the stories Daniel tells. By his own admission, he smells like pickles, has hairy arms and is just too different. His stories of his own life in Iran, the khans of his ancestral past, and the Persian myths all help him understand himself, but they are outlandish stories and the kids just think he’s trying to get attention. But Daniel wants them to know who he is.
When four Los Angeles police officers are acquitted after the 1992 beating of Rodney King, (a black man) the city erupts in riots. Ashley, a wealthy and popular girl, becomes drawn to her black school community for the first time in this poetic book examining race, class, and violence.
From Warsaw, Poland—1941—Lillia and her acrobatic/dancing family flees to Shanghai, one of the few places on Earth that welcomed Jews. After a performance with the Stanislav Circus, the family takes off, but Mama is missing. Papa searches for Mama, but they must get to the ship or lose their only means of escape. And the adventures are only just beginning.
Allison, a runaway teen, is hiding her identity. Marla, a woman with dementia is searching for her identity. Allison is willing to be Toffee, if it gets her food and lodging. In spite of a rough beginning built on dishonesty, the two develop a beautiful relationship—they need each other. I love this book.
