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Dear Hank and John

Dear Hank and John (or as John likes to think of it, Dear John and Hank) is a comedy podcast about death. Hank and John Green (YouTubers and etc) answer questions, give questionable advice, and talk about Mars (the planet) and AFC Wimbledon (the 3rd tier English football club). Email your questions to hankandjohn at gmail.com. This podcast is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios.

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Dear Hank and John (or as John likes to think of it, Dear John and Hank) is a comedy podcast about death. Hank and John Green (YouTubers and etc) answer questions, give questionable advice, and talk about Mars (the planet) and AFC Wimbledon (the 3rd tier English football club).

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Teacher Resource:  Middle East Book Awards

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Teacher Resource:  Middle East Book Awards

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Youth Literature Honorees | Middle East Book Award

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DARIUS THE GREAT IS NOT OKAY by Adib Khorram (Dial Books, 2018) Darius Kellner knows a lot about tea, Tolkien, and taroffing, one of many Iranian customs Adib Khorram shares with the reader of this...

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The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet-from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu-on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene 's reviews have been praised as "observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy." John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book.

Out now!

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The Anthropocene Reviewed Book - John Green

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The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet-from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu-on a five-star scale.

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In John Green’s ‘Turtles All the Way Down,’ a Teenager’s Mind Is at War With Itself - The New York Times

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Poetry Poetry Magazine “Narco” “Kingdom of Debt” “Six Months After Contemplating Suicide” Boston Review “Poem of My Humiliations” “Quinceañera&…

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Finalist, National Book Awards 2017 for Young People's Literature

ISBN 9781524700485
Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Erika L. Sánchez

Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family.

But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role.

Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed.

But it's not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first kiss, first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister's story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal?

Judges Citation

Part mystery, part love story, part inner quest. In I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, the vibrant teen protagonist struggles to prove who she is not, and in that journey, discovers who she is: stronger, braver, more worthy of loving and living than she ever imagined. Bold new voice Erika L. Sánchez carries us through an amazing exploration of family, grief, and culture, reminding us that we are all flawed, and it is those flaws that make us priceless.

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I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter - National Book Foundation

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Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family.

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Erika L. Sánchez: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter [CC]

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Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times Bestselling author of MY LIFE AS AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH (Penguin, 2019), a middle-grade debut; the Young Adult novels, AMERICAN STREET (HarperCollins, 2017), a National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book, and PRIDE (HaperCollins, 2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. She is also the co-author of PUNCHING THE AIR (HarperCollins, 2020) with prison reform activist, Dr. Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five, and editor of BLACK ENOUGH: STORIES OF BEING YOUNG & BLACK IN AMERICA (HarperCollins, 2019).

Ibi holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Book Review, the Horn Book Magazine, and The Rumpus, among others. As an educator, she is the recipient of several grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council for her community-based programs for teen girls in both Brooklyn and Haiti. She's worked for arts organizations such as Teachers & Writers Collaborative and Community Word Project as a writer-in-residence and teaching artist in New York City public schools.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and raised in New York City, Ibi now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey with her husband and their three children.

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Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times Bestselling author of MY LIFE AS AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH (Penguin, 2019), a middle-grade debut; the Young Adult novels, AMERICAN STREET (HarperCollins, 2017), a National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book, and PRIDE (HaperCollins, 2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

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On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie-the good life. But after leaving Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud, American cousins-Chantal, Donna and Princess-the grittiness of Detroit's west side, a new school, and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world, a dangerous proposition presents itself, and Fabiola must learn that freedom comes at a cost. Trapped at the crossroads of an impossible choice, will she pay the price for the American dream?

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On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie-the good life.

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The Story Behind Punching the Air | with Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

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- Booklist (starred review)
Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today-Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and Black in America.
Black is...sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon, as written by Renée Watson.

Black is...three friends walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything, in a story by Jason Reynolds.

Black is...Nic Stone's high-class beauty dating a boy her momma would never approve of.

Black is...two girls kissing in Justina Ireland's story set in Maryland.

Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more-because there are countless ways to be Black enough.

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Booklist (starred review) Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today-Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and Black in America.

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Ibi Zoboi reads from 'Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America'

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THE PEOPLE REMEMBER
By Ibi Zoboi
Illustrated by Loveis Wise

Like storytelling, memory can carve a path to freedom. As Joan Didion wrote in "The White Album," "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." In an often illogical, chaotic world, narratives can be a salve or a method of survival. They can help us grasp what Didion called "the shifting phantasmagoria" of the human experience. But what if a community's identity is intertwined with the incomprehensible cruelties of human bondage?

In "The People Remember," a picture book written by Ibi Zoboi, a 2017 National Book Award finalist for her young adult novel "American Street," and illustrated by Loveis Wise, African American history begins with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But Zoboi and Wise don't sensationalize violence or wallow in sorrow. Their collaboration focuses on Black resilience, a cultural inheritance powerful enough to break the curse of generational trauma. Guided by the seven principles of Kwanzaa (unity; self-determination; collective work and responsibility; cooperative economics; purpose; creativity; and faith), Zoboi's narrative explores both the burden and the strength of collective consciousness.

The book begins "during a time of war," with the capture and enslavement of Africans across the continent. Zoboi chants the names of the various nation-states of the diaspora ("the Ashanti and the Fulani, the Empire of Mali, the Hausa and Ibo, as well as the Kongo, the Yoruba and Akan, the Empire of Songhai, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Mende and the Fon") and recounts how chiefs and kings sold "the people" to white men who forced them into "ropes that bound them." She alludes to the horrors of the journey across the ocean by noting that "some jumped" into the embrace of the water spirit Mami Wata, who "maybe, just maybe ... was their mother."

Wise's illustrations imbue Zoboi's lyrical text with mythological import. A particularly effective spread depicts a Black woman leading another Black woman and a girl with braids through the dead of a blue-velvet night. She points out the constellations above, as a waxing crescent moon glows with soft yellow light. Zoboi's accompanying text discusses how, when slavery ripped families apart, "the North Star was freedom" and Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner "led the way." The image and the words work in harmony to emphasize the limitless potential of the human spirit. Later spreads spotlight the innovation and creativity of Black trailblazers in the arts.

As Zoboi moves farther along the timeline of American history, she rejects the belief that Blackness is rooted in suffering and focuses on the sacred refuge of community. "All these people from different African nations had to learn one common language and create a culture that combined their memories of home in Africa with new traditions that allowed them to survive and thrive," she explains in her author's note, which is paired with educational back matter. Those on the younger end of the book's target age group will appreciate Wise's illustrations more than they will the text's lessons, but all ages should enjoy the cadence and rhythm of Zoboi's verse.

"The People Remember" provides an overview of the genesis and evolution of African American culture, but it is not meant to be a definitive tribute. Survival is in part the result of adaptation, of metamorphosis. For Zoboi, to remember is to honor both the wisdom of the dead and the gospels of the living.

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The Pillars of African American History: Ibi Zoboi's Kwanzaa Picture Book

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THE PEOPLE REMEMBERBy Ibi ZoboiIllustrated by Loveis Wise Like storytelling, memory can carve a path to freedom. As Joan Didion wrote in "The White Album," "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." In an often illogical, chaotic world, narratives can be a salve or a method of survival.

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By Christine Lively Today we’re pleased to welcome Ibi Zoboi to the WNDB blog to discuss middle grade biography Star Child, out now. Acclaimed novelist Ibi Zoboi illuminates the young life of…

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Description

Ibi Zoboi, a National Book Award Finalist and New York Times best-selling author, joins Marvel Universe storytelling with this heartfelt novel that takes Okoye to America for the very first time.

Before she became a multifaceted warrior and the confident leader of the Dora Milaje, Okoye was adjusting to her new life and attempting to find her place in Wakanda's royal guard. Initially excited to receive an assignment for her very first mission and trip outside Wakanda, Okoye discovers that her status as a Dora Milaje means nothing to New Yorkers.

When she meets teenagers not much younger than herself struggling with the gentrification of their beloved Brooklyn neighborhood, her expectations for the world outside her own quickly fall apart. As she gets to know the young people of Brownsville, Okoye uncovers the truth about the plans of a manipulative real-estate mogul pulling all the strings-and how far-reaching those secret plans really are.

Caught between fulfilling her duty to her country and listening to her own heart urging her to stand up for Brownsville, Okoye must determine the type of Dora Milaje-and woman-she wants to be.
In this fish-out-of-water story, New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi combines the high-stakes adventure of the world of the Black Panther with the grounded and real-world challenges that bring her work to life.
Complete your Marvel collection with these best-selling fan-favorite novels:

Black Panther: The Young Prince (Book 1)by Ronald L. Smith

Black Panther: Spellbound (Book 2) by Ronald L. Smith

Loki: Where Mischief Lies by Mackenzi Lee

Gamora and Nebula: Sisters in Arms by Mackenzi Lee

Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds

Unstoppable Wasp by Sam Maggs

Black Widow: Red Vengeance by Margaret Stohl

Black Widow: Forever Red by Margaret Stohl

Captain Marvel: Higher, Further, Faster by Liza Palmer

About the Author

Ibi Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her YA novel American Street was a National Book Award finalist, and her debut middle grade novel, My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, was a New York Times best seller. She is the author of Pride, a contemporary YA remix of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and editor of the anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America. Her most recent best seller, Punching the Air, is a YA novel-in-verse coauthored by prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five. Raised in New York City, Ibi now lives in New Jersey with her husband and their three children. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ibizoboi or visit her website at www.ibizoboi.net.

Praise For...

In the latest Black Panther novel, Zoboi takes the reader to the U.S. with the Dora Milaje . . . this novel explores problems rooted in inequities in race, power, and economics and forces readers to confront real and complex social constructs in a semi-imagined world. Thoughtfully takes on issues facing real Black communities.--Kirkus Reviews

n her compelling story, Zoboi effectively underlines the resilience of Black people and the ability to find joy in times of strife . . . The popularity of Black Panther in the hands of such a skilled, sharp writer as best-selling, award-winning Zoboi means this one's liable to fly off the shelf.--Booklist

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Okoye to the People: A Black Panther Novel (Hardcover)

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Ibi Zoboi, a National Book Award Finalist and New York Times best-selling author, joins Marvel Universe storytelling with this heartfelt novel that takes Okoye to America for the very first time. Before she became a multifaceted warrior and the confident leader of the Dora Milaje, Okoye was adjusting to her new life and attempting to find her place in Wakanda's royal guard.

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Author Ibi Zoboi, the author of American Street, called out a racist book review from The Wall Street Journal that was written by Meghan Cox Gurdon.

Zoboi did so with the utmost grace, making it clear that she didn't have a problem with criticism, but with the language that Gurdon used to talk about the book and the lack of cultural information/insight she gave it how she discussed Zoboi's latest novel Pride, a modernized version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

This is an insulting review from a major publication (@WSJ) by a very problematic reviewer, Meghan Cox Gurdon. So I'd like to review her review as an example of the "classical narrative tact" she was looking for in my book. pic.twitter.com/XjQFjsafR9

- Ibi Zoboi (@ibizoboi) September 22, 2018

"Unlike Austen, Ms. Zoboi doesn't write here with literary formality or what has been called classical narrative tact. For her characters, a bad attitude is "stank," a rich family is "bougie as hell," and an instant attraction is a "you-look-so-damn-good-that-my-eyes-are-eating-your-face thing." Her heavy use of slang will undoubtedly amuse and validate those readers ages 13-17 who use it themselves, but it may otherwise limit the book's appeal."

I truly, deeply hate the idea that "slang" invalidates the literary value of formality of the novel when there are plenty of classic and "literary" novels are written with the slang and vernacular of its time. Has she not read James Joyce, has she not read 18th-century novels which were so obsessed with being as "authentic" as possible, which led to them using a lot of very common language. Or you know ... Shakespeare!

Also, you think Jane Austen had no slang in her novels, just because you have accepted it to be posh now, does not mean that is the case. Do you not feel like A Clockwork Orange has no literary value because that book is written heavily is slang? Does the fact that The Color Purple or T heir Eyes Were Watching God features heavy, poor Southern vernacular limit its greatness? This literary elitism is not only racist, but it is classist and dismissive of the flexibility of language.

The reviewer quotes a few lines of AAVE to falsely highlight the novel's presumed intellectual inferiority. Clearly, she has a limited understanding of metaphor, wordplay, & the overall verbal ingenuity that Black children bring to the English language.

- Ibi Zoboi (@ibizoboi) September 22, 2018

What also stings about these words by Gurdon is that for a long time I had internalized this type of thinking in my own life. I would read novels with heavy Cockney accents without any question of its value or if it was inferior, but when I was first introduced to The Color Purple as a pre-teen I dismissed it because "black speak" is never seen as educated, and I felt it would reflect badly on me to read something written "incorrectly."

I remembered my father making sure to correct every single "ain't" that came out of mouth until I learned to loathe it and anyone who ever said it. That's not proper English, he would say ... even though it is.

The OBVIOUS racism aside, she clearly doesn't like or respect the audience for whom YA books are written - readers age 13-17. The disdain with which she dismisses them and their need to be amused and validated is shameful.

- And Riaa Maral (@andriaamaral) September 22, 2018

Thread and wtf. I appreciate @ibizoboi raising this and taking the time to break it down, as authors are often taught/expected not to clap back on problematic reviews. This review reads like a butt hurt lit-bro comments section gripe. Linguistic racism is alive and well. @WSJ https://t.co/24tOPQ9JFB

- Daniel José Older (@djolder) September 22, 2018

This thread is a tightly controlled, cerebral breakdown and incisive rebuttal of a bloated, lazy, and intellectually dishonest (and bigoted) review. Well done.

Five stars. https://t.co/w98xodXrro

- A witch, probably. (@kellybarnhill) September 22, 2018

This @WSJ review is absolutely disgusting and I'm so sorry, @ibizoboi is having to go through this. The even worse thing being that this happens again and again to Black writers. We are told what is acceptable to the (white) mainstream (aka not us) via "professional" reviews. https://t.co/gcQM9vRiWm

- Patrice Caldwell (@whimsicallyours) September 22, 2018

I can't get over how awful and absurd and insulting this review is. PRIDE is a wonderfully compelling read on its own, AND it's an excellent/relatable gateway into classic lit. https://t.co/3bZEh7eECS

- Preeti Chhibber @ NYCC oh god too soon tho (@runwithskizzers) September 23, 2018

Thread. This is why all publications need reviewers who have read widely, reviewers from a diversity of backgrounds, and who are at least able to recognize the ways in which their lack of lived experience disqualifies their analysis. Oh - and fact-checking is a thing, @WSJ. https://t.co/GOjFWJGbxE

- N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) September 23, 2018

Finally, what really galls me about this is that it furthers literary self-segregation. I love Jane Austen, she has created some of my favorite literary leads. Pride both pays tribute to a piece of literature but also shows the universal issues within Austen that make it accessible to everyone. The fact that you can transport the themes of Regency England to modern day Bushwick is a good thing.

Too often black and brown kids think those stories can't be for them or that they must shun anything that is not Penguin classic approved and that is because of elitist like Meghan Cox Gurdon who create literary divisions where they need not be. I could have loved Miss Celie much sooner in life if I had been taught to appreciate all slang and not just ones with an English accent, instead of feeling shame.

Pride by Ibi Zoboi is out now!

(image: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Foundation Of Letters)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site! -The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.- Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

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Calling Out Racism and Classism in The WSJ's Review of a Modern Spin on Jane Austin | The Mary Sue

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Author Ibi Zoboi, the author of American Street, called out a racist book review from The Wall Street Journal that was written by Meghan Cox Gurdon.

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Epic Author Facts: Ibi Zoboi | American Street

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The Pillars of African American History_ Ibi Zoboi’s Kwanzaa Picture Book - The New York Times

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John Green discusses his new book 'Turtles All The Way Down'

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A Very Large Expanse of Sea (2019), a novel following 16-year-old Shirin, a Muslim girl in the post-9/11 US who endures physical violence and verbal abuse because of her religion and hijab, and who struggles with her romantic relationship with a non-Muslim boy. Mafi has said the book, described as her most autobiographical work, will be adapted for film by the team behind Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures.

Background: Mafi is an Iranian-American author based in California. Both herself and her husband Ransom Riggs - author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children - are New York Times bestseller writers.

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A powerful, gripping YA novel about the insidious nature of racism, the terrible costs of unearthing hidden truths, and the undeniable power of hope, by New York Times bestselling author Samira Ahmed. Perfect for fans of Sadie and Dear Martin.

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New ‘Ms. Marvel’ comic writer teases where she wants to take Kamala Khan

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Samira Ahmed is the first female South Asian writer to tackle Marvel’s premier Muslim superhero. In an exclusive interview with EW, she discusses her plans.

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Who Will Speak for America? - Samira Ahmed

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A young adult anthology featuring fictional stories of everyday resistance.

You might be the kind of person who stands up to online trolls.
Or who marches to protest injustice.

Perhaps you are #DisabledAndCute and dancing around your living room, alive and proud.

Or perhaps you are the trans mentor that you wish you had when you were younger.

Maybe you call out false allies, or stand up to loved ones.

Maybe you speak your truth and drop the mic, or maybe you take it with you when you leave.

Arthur A. Levine Books, Scholastic, 2019

Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestseller Samira Ahmed, anthologist and contributor Bethany C. Morrow, Darcie Little Badger, Keah Brown, Laura Silverman, L.D. Lewis, Sofia Quintero, Ray Stoeve, Yamile Mendez, and Connie Sun, with cover and interior art by Richie Pope.

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Take the Mic: Fictional Stories of Everyday Resistance - Samira Ahmed

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A young adult anthology featuring fictional stories of everyday resistance. You might be the kind of person who stands up to online trolls. Or who marches to protest injustice. Perhaps you are #DisabledAndCute and dancing around your living room, alive and proud. Or perhaps you are the trans mentor that you wish you had when you were younger.

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Home is Not a Country was absolutely a book I read for the title. It spoke to me as a third culture kid who has lived around the world, in constant search of what home could mean and how I could create it for myself. But it also felt like a love letter to anyone who has ever been an outsider, or searched to understand their history, no matter where they come from.

Nima is a first-generation Muslim teenager who feels caught between her life in America and her dreams of her homeland (which is unnamed, but hints at being Sudan). Having lost her father before she was born, Nima is preoccupied with the life she feels was taken from her. She can't help but think of her home country, and when she is bullied and called a terrorist in school, she tries to get as close to that old world as she can. Her story captures a familiar wistfulness for the places we come from but have never truly known. It's a tapestry of life in small moments, and the revelations we have about our pasts over time.

[Nima's] story captures a familiar wistfulness for the places we come from but have never truly known. It's a tapestry of life in small moments, and the revelations we have about our pasts over time.

Safia Elhillo wrote Home is Not a Country as a novel in verse, with poems that let you sink your toes into being 14, feeling invisible, and desperately wishing for another life. Nima feels a strong connection to the spirit world; she constantly thinks of Yasmeen, the name her father wanted to give her, and that she sees as representing a more graceful and confident version of herself. As Nima aches for her other half, she feels resentful towards the life she was given, and loses herself in the search for Yasmeen and the old world.

Growing up outside of my own country, the book felt endearingly familiar. Nima's story reminded me of my younger self, of how I also felt frustrated about not belonging to either world, investigated my family history for answers, and slowly realized that I couldn't change the life I was given - but I could choose to belong to myself and feel complete with who I am.

It took me some time to get into the narrative, which slowly introduces the characters through vignettes from Nima's life. It felt like a poetry chapbook, collecting moments that seemed to be stuck in time, so I carefully savored every detail and observation. But then the story quickly changed tone, leaving me delighted by the adventure that unfolded and making me rush through the pages.

From the beginning, Elhillo introduces elements of magical realism that quickly take over the story, pulling the reader into a completely different world. They took me by surprise, as they revealed what would happen if Nima's dreams did come true. It helped me reflect on how, when we are young, we feel so certain that one decision or twist of fate would solve all our problems. But in reality, what we desire usually doesn't turn up in the way we expected it. Home is Not a Country felt most memorable because of how it explored this tension between our fascination with the what-ifs, and how they distract us from enjoying where we are right now.

More than anything, the book exquisitely captures how the questions about where we come from can take over our life. It's a portrait of perspective, which holds up a mirror to show that ultimately, we are telling our own stories, and we can choose to see them differently. With my eyes heavy from reading late into the night, I finished Home is Not a Country with the feeling of walking out of a movie theater into the sunshine, where the world feels brighter and inexplicably more hopeful than when you last left it.

Nayantara Dutta is a freelance writer, poet and strategist. You can find her @nayantaradutta.

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'Home Is Not A Country' Imagines The Lives We Could Have Led

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Home is Not a Country was absolutely a book I read for the title. It spoke to me as a third culture kid who has lived around the world, in constant search of what home could mean and how I could create it for myself.

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Title: A Time to Dance
Author: Padma Venkatraman
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Pages: 307
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Reivew Copy: Public Library
Availability: On Shelves Now

Summary: Padma Venkatraman's inspiring story of a young girl's struggle to regain her passion and find a new peace is told lyrically through verse that captures the beauty and mystery of India and the ancient Bharatanatyam dance form. This is a stunning novel about spiritual awakening, the power of art, and above all, the courage and resilience of the human spirit.

Veda, a classical dance prodigy in India, lives and breathes dance-so when an accident leaves her a below-knee amputee, her dreams are shattered. For a girl who's grown used to receiving applause for her dance prowess and flexibility, adjusting to a prosthetic leg is painful and humbling. But Veda refuses to let her disability rob her of her dreams, and she starts all over again, taking beginner classes with the youngest dancers. Then Veda meets Govinda, a young man who approaches dance as a spiritual pursuit. As their relationship deepens, Veda reconnects with the world around her, and begins to discover who she is and what dance truly means to her. - Cover image and summary via IndieBound

Review: From the very first scene of the book, it is obvious that dance is not just something that Veda does, it is her passion. When she dances, she is fully alive and she feels beautiful. Her accident threatens to bring all of her dreams crashing down, but Veda finds the determination to start again. She has a doctor and family that believes in her and it helps that she is stubborn too.

Not long ago, I saw a comment on Twitter about how not many young adult novels deal with religion. In A Time to Dance, religion and spirituality play a very big role. By the second page, the connection between God and dance has been made. Veda and her family visit a temple with sculptures of dancers on the walls. When she climbs up to see them, a priest explains, "You don't have to climb ladders to reach God. He dances within all He creates." In the aftermath of her accident and other issues she faces throughout the book, Veda questions her belief though. She questions the value of prayer and wonders what God is. Veda has a physical journey as she relearns how to walk and dance, but she also has a spiritual journey as she begins to see dance as more than just a skill to learn. As she had been competing and performing, she was working for the applause and awards, but she begins to learn that there is more to dance than she had imagined.

I really appreciated the family relationships in the story. Her grandmother is very influential in her life. She models a spiritual life and she nurtures Veda daily with snacks, massages, hugs, listening and much more. Their relationship is beautiful. Her grandmother is also the person who suggests a new dance teacher for Veda - one who is focused on the emotional expression and devotion in dance and not on competition. This new school brings Veda much to think about and also happens to contain a young man who catches her eye.

Padma Venkatraman manages to pack a lot of content into this book. Part of that economy is the verse format. I tend to gravitate towards novels in verse because I enjoy poetry and I find the format keeps me from speeding through a book. The poetry causes me to pause more and savor the text. Venkatraman's writing brought me to tears, but also gave me many opportunities to smile. Above all, as Veda found out more about herself and explored her beliefs, readers will be likely to think about their own beliefs and spiritual life. Here is one quote that got me thinking:

"Meditation isn't about pushing your body,
it's about respecting it,
the way you'd respect
every other space within which God dwells."

While reading A Time to Dance, I became curious about Bharatanatyam dance. There are many videos on YouTube and it was wonderful to see what it looked like. If you are unfamiliar with this dance form, I highly recommend seeking out some of the videos. Learning about this particular type of dance was fascinating. It was also intriguing to learn more about Shiva especially since I had just spent time in the Indian section of the Art Institute of Chicago last weekend and saw a great sculpture of Shiva as Lord of the Dance.

Recommendation: Get this one soon. The story is rich and inspiring. Veda's journey is one you won't want to miss.

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Title: A Time to Dance Author: Padma Venkatraman Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books Pages: 307 Genres: Contemporary, Romance Reivew Copy: Public Library Availability: On Shelves Now Summary: Padma Venkatraman's inspiring story of a young girl's struggle to regain her passion and find a new peace is told lyrically through verse that captures the beauty and mystery of India and the ancient Bharatanatyam dance form.

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Eleven-year-old Brooklynite Genie has "worry issues," so when he and his older brother, Ernie, are sent to Virginia to spend a month with their estranged grandparents while their parents "try to figure it all out," he goes into overdrive.

First, he discovers that Grandpop is blind. Next, there's no Internet, so the questions he keeps track of in his notebook (over 400 so far) will have to go un-Googled. Then, he breaks the model truck that's one of the only things Grandma still has of his deceased uncle. And he and Ernie will have to do chores, like picking peas and scooping dog poop. What's behind the " nunya bidness door"? And is that a gun sticking out from Grandpop's waistband? Reynolds' middle-grade debut meanders like the best kind of summer vacation but never loses sense of its throughline. The richly voiced third-person narrative, tightly focused through Genie's point of view, introduces both brothers and readers to this rural African-American community and allows them to relax and explore even as it delves into the many mysteries that so bedevil Genie, ranging from "Grits? What exactly are they?" to, heartbreakingly, "Why am I so stupid?" Reynolds gives his readers uncommonly well-developed, complex characters, especially the completely believable Genie and Grandpop, whose stubborn self-sufficiency belies his vulnerability and whose flawed love both Genie and readers will cherish.

This pitch-perfect contemporary novel gently explores the past's repercussions on the present . (Fiction. 9-12)

Did you like this book?

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In bright, quick free-verse snapshots, Russell highlights her childhood path to writing. At five, Ying visits relatives in Mainland China and effortlessly memorizes classical poems better than her older cousins, earning a life-changing reward: dan lai. "[I]t looks like a big, round moon / has fallen into my bowl," and after eating it, she refrains from brushing her teeth to savor the taste forever.

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When you ask me where I'm Going, Jasmin Kaur

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When you ask me where I'm Going, Jasmin Kaur

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WHEN YOU ASK ME WHERE I’M GOING | Kirkus Reviews

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Poetry and prose that explore the Punjabi experience.

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Reviewed by: Cindy L. Rodriguez

Skila Brown's debut novel in verse tells the heartbreaking story of Carlos, who is forced from his devastated village and treks up a mountainside to save his grandmother and her neighbors from a similar fate.

One thing that struck me most was Brown's ability to create a touching coming-of-age narrative set in such tragic events. The novel is not graphic, although the topic is brutal. And while it is a civil war, fueled by politics, Brown does not support or condemn any side. Instead, more than anything, it's about the ability of the human spirit to survive and persevere even after an unexpected, horrific loss. Continue reading.

Publisher's Synopsis: Set in 1981 Guatemala, a lyrical debut novel tells the powerful tale of a boy who must decide what it means to be a man during a time of war.

Carlos knows that when the soldiers arrive with warnings about the Communist rebels, it is time to be a man and defend the village, keep everyone safe. But Mama tells him not yet - he's still her quiet moonfaced boy. The soldiers laugh at the villagers, and before they move on, a neighbor is found dangling from a tree, a sign on his neck: Communist. Mama tells Carlos to run and hide, then try to find her. . . . Numb and alone, he must join a band of guerillas as they trek to the top of the mountain where Carlos's abuela lives. Will he be in time, and brave enough, to warn them about the soldiers? What will he do then? A novel in verse inspired by actual events during Guatemala's civil war, Caminar is the moving story of a boy who loses nearly everything before discovering who he really is.

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Reviewed by: Cindy L. Rodriguez Review Source: Latinxs in Kid Lit Book Author: Skila Brown's debut novel in verse tells the heartbreaking story of Carlos, who is forced from his devastated village and treks up a mountainside to save his grandmother and her neighbors from a similar fate.

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Punching the Air, Ibo Zoboi/Yuzef Salaam

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Punching the Air, Ibo Zoboi/Yuzef Salaam

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didn't start on the day Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. "Boys just being boys" turns out to be true only when those boys are white. The story that I think will be my life starts today Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal's bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it?

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didn't start on the day Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy.

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Today we're pleased to welcome Tami Charles to the WNDB blog to discuss her YA novel Muted, out February 2, 2021!
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 lies the girls have to tell are all worth it. Until they're not. Denver begins to realize that she's trapped in Merc's world, struggling to hold on to her own voice. As the dream turns into a nightmare, she must make a choice: lose her big break, or get broken.
Inspired by true events, Muted is a fearless exploration of the dark side of the music industry, the business of exploitation, how a girl's dreams can be used against her-and what it takes to fight back.
How much did your experience in the music industry inspire Denver's? What advice do you have for young artists entering the industry?
My experience played a role for sure. I definitely had my moments as a teen, where I was a bit of a rebel, much like Denver (sorry Mom and Dad!). My advice to any young artist is to never diminish yourself for the sake of someone else. In some ways, this is where Denver messed up. Also, I advise aspiring artists to prioritize your family and friends over power players in the music industry. Your family and true friends will be the ones to help you navigate and make proper choices.
What was it like writing Muted? What kind of research did you conduct to bring this story to life?
Writing was difficult for so many reasons. First, I almost didn't want to write it because in some ways, it felt too personal. Once upon a time, I navigated the world that is the music industry. Did I come out unscathed? Yes. Do all girls? No. Did I see some ? Yup.

Growing up, my village was tight, but that's not always the case for girls of color with stars for eyes. So I wanted to shine a close lens on all the complexities that can exist in the pursuit of fame.
The reader can observe from the (absolutely gorgeous) cover that Denver has heterochromia. What did you want to convey by featuring a protagonist with this unique condition?
My research included lots and lots of reading. I read many poetry books but gravitated to Rupi Kaur, Jason Reynolds, Maya Angelou, and Amanda Lovelace. I also read a ton of news articles that featured personal interviews and stories of young women who were exploited by some of the top men in power in the entertainment and television industry. I also watched documentaries such as Surviving R. Kelly (parts one and two), The Reckoning , and Leaving Neverland .
Do you like to write songs yourself? If so, would you like to share one of your favorite lyrics you've ever written (in or beyond Muted)? I always do what you say, put aside my dreams every day. I give my time, sacrifice my life, just so you could fly....
Denver retells the story of what happened to her singing group while on a plane ride home. Part of her story includes a welfare check conducted by Atlanta PD. For those reasons, I also personally interviewed a pilot and a police detective to ensure authenticity in key scenes.
Muted is as much a story about family, friendship, and self-love as it is about the insidious, lesser-known evils of the music industry. Why did you choose to write about the aforementioned topics as well? Throughout the novel we see Denver's family use Haitian Creole words to express love to each other. How does Denver's heritage shape her?
Thank you! I was very intentional about why I chose heterochromia and how it plays a role in the story. The blue eye represents the sky, which is literally where Denver is telling the story from while on the plane. The brown eye represents Earth...home, which is where Denver is (thankfully) headed.

I do like to write songs! I actually stopped writing them about twenty years ago, when I gave up pursuing a singing career. Writing this book helped me revisit my love of songwriting, which allowed me (well, Denver) to write some original lyrics throughout the book. My favorite song is I'm Through.

This is the point in the story where Denver is fed up with waiting for her parents to sign the contract that would allow her to work with Sean "Mercury" Ellis. She has done everything her parents have asked and yet, they still won't make her dreams a priority.
What other books would you recommend to those who enjoyed Muted?
By the end of the book, these lyrics come full circle, and (hopefully) the reader understands them on many levels.

I chose those topics because they represent the rollercoaster ride that is the music industry. In the late 1990s, I was a member of an R&B singing group. We tried our best to hit the big time, but it didn't happen for us. We were friends. We were family. The journey was both beautiful and rough. There were times where we felt like quitting. Personally, there were times when I felt like I wasn't good enough or talented enough or skinny enough to be on anyone's album cover. And sure, there was a time or few where I met some shady characters in the industry. Aspiring artists grapple with so much in their journey to becoming a star. There are the chosen few who make it. But then there are many who don't. I wanted to shine a light on all of that and let readers know that no matter what, their voice matters both on and off the stage.

Denver's heritage definitely plays a role in how she's shaped as a character. I was inspired by my sister-in-law's teen years and I wanted to juxtapose that with my own experiences, for balance. My mom and dad-in-law were very strict...as in "you can't go to any parties without your brother" kinda strict. The Haitian motto is: " Lekol, Legliz, Lakay " which translates to "school, church, and home." My sister followed this motto to the letter, but she did leave home at a young age to give herself some sense of independence.

Those values stayed with her and she is very successful today, and I think leaving home to spread her wings was necessary. As for me, my parents weren't as strict as hers. My mom was on the rise in her career and very busy, much like Denver's mom in the story. My father was busy as well, but a bit stricter than my mom. My parents allowed me to go to sleepovers and parties with friends. My in-laws would've never let this slide! These decisions and ideologies very much boiled down to culture.

In , I wanted to depict an Americanized teen with a (sometimes strict) Haitian American father and an (often busy but loving) Black American mother. The ideals of being dedicated to school and home are there, but so is that sense of independence, which is what emboldens Denver to make the choices that she does even if those choices go against the cultural grain.

I think the following books would pair well with :

*****

Tami Charles is the critically acclaimed author of numerous books for young readers, including Like Vanessa and Becoming Beatriz. In her teens and early twenties, Tami enjoyed a taste of fame as a member of an all-girl R&B trio. They performed for Boyz II Men, BET, Showtime at the Apollo, and had a one-hit wonder on the radio. Those were the good old days! Tami's adult years would lead her to the classroom, where she worked as an educator for thirteen years before pursuing her childhood dream of becoming an author. For more information on Tami and her books, visit tamiwrites.com.

******

Nithya Ramcharan is a high school senior from New Orleans. She loves reading and writing fantasy and science-fiction stories. When she isn't busy with schoolwork, she also loves art, music, playing with her dogs, and dreaming of all the places she would love to visit. Diversity in literature is something she is passionate about, as it was relatively scarce when she was young and its lack impacted her writing and outlook negatively.

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Today we're pleased to welcome Tami Charles to the WNDB blog to discuss her YA novel Muted , out February 2, 2021! For seventeen-year-old Denver, music is everything. Writing, performing, and her ultimate goal: escaping her very small, very white hometown.

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Finalist, National Book Awards 2021 for Young People's Literature
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Moth has lost her family in an accident. Though she lives with her aunt, she feels alone and uprooted.

Until she meets Sani, a boy who is also searching for his roots. If he knows more about where he comes from, maybe he'll be able to understand his ongoing depression. And if Moth can help him feel grounded, then perhaps she too will discover the history she carries in her bones.

Moth and Sani take a road trip that has them chasing ghosts and searching for ancestors. The way each moves forward is surprising, powerful, and unforgettable.

Here is an exquisite and uplifting novel about identity, first love, and the ways that our memories and our roots steer us through the universe.

Judges Citation

With haunting lyricism and mellifluous free verse, Me (Moth) is equal parts ancestor veneration and land acknowledgment that honors the spiritual traditions of African and Native people. Amber McBride registers themes of death, survivor's guilt, and mental illness that pulse in the veins of Moth and Sani's love songs. Me (Moth) reminds us that monuments of America's past are like ghosts that plague our collective dreams-dismantling them will guide our healing and reconciliation.

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Moth has lost her family in an accident. Though she lives with her aunt, she feels alone and uprooted. Until she meets Sani, a boy who is also searching for his roots. If he knows more about where he comes from, maybe he'll be able to understand his ongoing depression.

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The Way the Light Bends, Cordelia Jensen

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The Way the Light Bends, Cordelia Jensen

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THE WAY THE LIGHT BENDS | Kirkus Reviews

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Artistically gifted, academically challenged Linc is the biological child of white professional parents who wish Linc could be more like her black, transracially adopted sister, Holly—smart, athletic, popular.

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The Sky between You and Me, by Catherine Alene

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The Sky between You and Me, by Catherine Alene

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"An exceptional novel in verse...absorbing and evocative."
-Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Written in evocative verse, with notes of wonder and despair, the cadence flows across and down the pages with grace."
- Kirkus Reviews

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Publishers Weekly, starred review - Kirkus Reviews

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Jack and Annabel have been dating for two years. With high school over they're about to start university - until Jack decides to chuck it all in.
I think you and Annabel should get out of here as fast as possible. Have a year doing anything you want. My going-away present is enough money to buy a car - a cheap old one, okay? You'll have to work somewhere to buy the petrol, and to keep going.
No destination in mind, Jack and Annabel leave town and discover themselves in a place they never knew existed.

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Jack and Annabel have been dating for two years. With high school over they're about to start university - until Jack decides to chuck it all in. I think you and Annabel should get out of here as fast as possible. Have a year doing anything you want.

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National Jewish Book Award Finalist * Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book * YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, Top 10 pick * Colorado Book Award Finalist * Nerdy Book Award * Amelia Bloomer List * Mighty Girl Book * Best Books of the Year, Bank Street College * Best Books of the Year, New York Public Library * Best Jewish Children's Books of 2015, Tablet Magazine * Best Children's Books for April, The Washington Post * Editor's Choice, Bookbrowse.com * Top Pick, BookPage.com

* "Crowder breathes life into a world long past....Compelling, powerful and unforgettable." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

* "This book stands alone....an impactful addition to any historical fiction collection."-School Library Journal, starred review

* "...graceful, affecting poetry..." -BCCB, starred review

* "...an excellent title..." -School Library Connection, starred review

"It's thrilling to watch this young woman grow from questioning her role as an untutored Jewish daughter to a firebrand." -The Washington Post

Discussion Guide for book clubs & schools
The inspiring story of Clara Lemlich, whose fight for equal rights led to the largest strike by women in American history
A gorgeously told novel in verse written with intimacy and power, AUDACITY is inspired by the real-life story of Clara Lemlich, a spirited young woman who emigrated from Russia to New York at the turn of the twentieth century and fought tenaciously for equal rights. Bucking the norms of both her traditional Jewish family and societal conventions, Clara refuses to accept substandard working conditions in the factories on Manhattan's Lower East Side. For years, Clara devotes herself to the labor fight, speaking up for those who suffer in silence. In time, Clara convinces the women in the factories to strike, organize, and unionize, culminating in the famous Uprising of the 20,000.

Powerful, breathtaking, and inspiring, AUDACITYis the story of a remarkable young woman, whose passion and selfless devotion to her cause changed the world.

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National Jewish Book Award Finalist * Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book * YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, Top 10 pick * Colorado Book Award Finalist * Nerdy Book Award * Amelia Bloomer List * Mighty Girl Book * Best Books of the Year, Bank Street College * Best Books of the Year, New York Public Library * Best Jewish Children's Books of 2015, Tablet Magazine * Best Children's Books for April, The Washington Post * Editor's Choice, Bookbrowse.com * Top Pick, BookPage.com * "Crowder breathes life into a world long past....Compelling, powerful and unforgettable."

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October Mourning:  A Song for Matthew Shepard, Leslea Newman

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October Mourning:  A Song for Matthew Shepard, Leslea Newman

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October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard

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On the night of October 6, 1998, a gay twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was lured from a Wyoming bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a remote fence, and left to

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Yaminah Okar left Obsidian and the wreckage of her family years ago. She and her father have made lives for themselves in Brooklyn. She thinks she's moved on to bigger and better things. She thinks she's finally left behind the city she would rather forget. But when a Facebook message about her estranged mother pierces Yaminah's new bubble, memories of everything that happened before her parents' divorce come roaring back. Now Yaminah must finally reckon with the truth about her mother and the looming collapse of a place she once called home.

Out May 24, 2022. Go here for a sneak peak!

IN EVERY BODY LOOKING Candice Iloh weaves the key moments of Ada's young life-her mother's descent into addiction, her father's attempts to create a home for his American daughter more like the one he knew in Nigeria, her first year at a historically black college-into a luminous and inspiring verse novel.

SEE LESS

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Brown Girl Dreaming tells the story of my childhood, in verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, I always felt halfway home in each place. In these poems, I share what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and my growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.
It also reflects the joy of finding my voice through writing stories, despite the fact that I struggled with reading as a child. My love of stories inspired and stayed with me, creating the first sparks of the writer I was to become.

Where it takes place:

Columbus, Ohio, Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.

Where I wrote it:

In all of those places but mostly in Brooklyn.

Why I wrote it:

I wanted to understand who my mom was before she was my mother and I wanted to understand exactly how I became a writer. So I started researching my life, asking relatives and talking to friends - and mostly, just letting myself remember.

Awards

National Book Award winner

NAACP Image Award winner (in the category of Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teens)

Coretta Scott King Author Award winner

Newbery Honor winner

Sibert Honor winner

Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist

New York Times Bestseller (for over 20 weeks)

ALA Notable

Bank Street College of Education's Claudia Lewis Award

New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book

Kids' Indie Next List (Autumn 2014)

Kirkus Best Book

Booklist Editors' Choice

Publishers Weekly Best Book

School Library Journal Best Book

Horn Book Fanfare

Bulletin Blue Ribbon

NPR's Great Reads List

TIME magazine Top 10 YA of 2014 List

CCBC Choice

NPR's Book Concierge's 2014 Great Reads List

NPR's The Diane Rehm Show's "Readers' Reviews" on-air book club pick

Notable Books for a Global Society (NBGS) 2015 winner

BookPage Best Children's Book

Amazon Best Book (in two categories: Children's Books and Nonfiction)

Buzzfeed Best YA Books of 2014

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

Bustle.com's Top 25 Young Adult Novels of 2014 list

Audio edition: ALSC Notable Children's Recording

Audio edition: E.B. White Read-Aloud Award Winner: Middle Grade

State Lists

Indiana's Young Hoosier Book Award

Washington D.C.'s Capitol Choices Master List

Georgia's Children's Book Award Finalist

Wisconsin's Just One More Page! Master List

Virginia's Jefferson Cup Overfloweth 2015 Master List

California's ACL 2014 Distinguished Books Master list

Maryland's Black-Eyed Susan Book Award 2015-2016 (nominee)

Kentucky Bluegrass Award 2016 (nominee)

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Middle Grade/Young Adult | Brown Girl Dreaming | Jacqueline Woodson

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Brown Girl Dreaming tells the story of my childhood, in verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, I always felt halfway home in each place. In these poems, I share what it was

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This month, we're interviewing Marilyn Hilton about her book, Full Cicada Moon. Marilyn talks to us about her writing process, her inspiration for the book, and how she chose to deal with a delicate topic with "wonder and terror and awe."

Keep reading! As always, we've got a writing challenge for you, a fantastic interview, and some updates about Society of Young Inklings. Want to catch up? Check out last month's Ink Splat here.

This week's challenge comes straight from Marilyn: To start a writing session, I often set a timer and write as fast as I can, about something on my mind, a scene, or an idea. Ten minutes is a good sprint, as it's long enough for my mind to move into a creative zone. And by the time ten minutes is up, I want to keep writing.

Submit your responses by emailing submit@younginklings.org and you might be published on our website!

Full Cicada Moon is written in verse, but you have also written previous novels in prose. How do you choose which style to write in? What impact do you think this style choice has on readers?

The character, the character's situation and personality, and the tone of the story have dictated how I tell the story. My first novel, Found Things, was written in first-person point of view and present tense. It was just the way that story needed to be told, and how River (the main character) needed to tell it. But Full Cicada Moon is more introspective and closer to the tender places in the main character, Mimi, so telling her story in free verse felt just right for her. Verse has an intimacy and immediacy that can take the reader deep into the story and the heart of the character. And the arrangement of lines on the page allow the reader to provide unsaid words and unstated thoughts and feelings better, I think, than prose.
In the book I'm writing now, two characters tell their stories-one in prose and the other in free verse. Each style suits the particular character.

In the acknowledgments of Full Cicada Moon you write, "I wrote Mimi's story in wonder and terror and awe, not knowing if I could or should write it." Why did you write it, and why did you question whether you should?

I wanted to write a story about a mixed-race girl who wanted to be an astronaut at a time when girls weren't encouraged to pursue scientific careers. My children are mixed race and have never known a time when they couldn't have the career they aspire to. But there were no books with a character like them or a story like theirs, so I decided to write it. Actually, because of them, I felt compelled to write it. But I knew I would need to approach the story with much respect, and as a quiet and observant guest in Mimi's world.

What's the most difficult part of your creative process? Most surprising?

The most difficult part for me is having the courage to sit down and write-to create something out of nothing-and believe that even bad writing has value, because the practice brings me closer to good writing. I've been writing for years, but that fear is always present. Over time, though, I've come to understand that the fear is part of the creative process, and have learned to push through it and write anyway.

The most surprising part of the creative process are those moments when inextricable beauty flows from me, through my fingers, and onto the page. And that is joyous! It surprises me because I never plan it-it just comes from somewhere deep inside. Those are often the passages that readers connect with most strongly. And a story is complete not when I've finished writing it but when reader's heart responds to what I've written.

What do you think is the most common misconception about publishing?

One common misconception is that the first draft is the final draft and ready for publication. The first draft is only the beginning. Most manuscripts go through several revisions before they're ready to be sent to an agent or editor, or to be self-published. Recently I read something like this about revision: a book is never finished; you just have to know when to stop revising it.

If you could tell your younger writer self something, what would it be?

Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to be a writer. But when I was younger, I didn't always honor that call. I spent a lot of time not writing, worrying about not writing, thinking about writing, and procrastinating instead of writing. Much of my not-writing was caused by fear (see above!). I would now tell my younger self to have faith in what my heart tells me, have the courage to try-even if it means failing-have the fortitude to persist, have confidence in my ability, and have the humility to learn from those who can teach me. And, finally, something that Mimi's science teacher tells Mimi in Full Cicada Moon:

"Our dreams are a serious matter.
When you take them seriously,
everyone else does too."

The Inklings Book Contest is here! Submit your work by March 15. We can't wait to read it!

Confused, lost, frustrated, miserable ... these are not productive ways to feel! Still, stuck happens, no matter how creative you are. That's why we invented the Idea Storm. This online masterclass will help lead you to "Eureka!" moments.

Are you in the Bay Area? If so, we hope you'll join us for our Launch Your Novel Workshop. Click the link to learn more.

Join our society! We'll send you a FREE Inklings Starter Kit with tips and tricks personalized to your creativity style.

A special thanks to Marilyn Hilton!
Marilyn Hilton is the author of two novels and two nonfiction books. She has also published numerous articles, devotions, short stories, and poems in literary and consumer magazines, and has contributed to various compilations. Her work has won awards including the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Jane Addams Peace Association Children's Honor Book Award, the Sue Alexander Award, and the Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Award. She holds a MA in English/Creative Writing and has worked for several years in the computer software industry as a technical writer and editor.

Visit her website here and grab your copy of Full Cicada Moon here.

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An Interview with Marilyn Hilton: February 2018 Ink Splat

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This month, we're interviewing Marilyn Hilton about her book, Full Cicada Moon. Marilyn talks to us about her writing process, her inspiration for the book, and how she chose to deal with a delicate topic with "wonder and terror and awe.

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Clap When you Land or anything Elizabeth Acevedo

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Clap When you Land or anything Elizabeth Acevedo

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This novel in verse is rich in character and relationships. . . . Poet Alexander deftly reveals the power of the format to pack an emotional

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This novel in verse is rich in character and relationships. . . . Poet Alexander deftly reveals the power of the format to pack an emotional

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Mahogany L. Browne

Mahogany L. Browne is the Executive Director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders & community members. This position is informed by her career as a writer, organizer, & educator. She is the author of recent works: Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, & Black Girl Magic.​

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Mahogany L. Browne is the Executive Director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders & community members. This position is informed by her career as a writer, organizer, & educator.

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Clap When you Land or anything Elizabeth Acevedo

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Clap When you Land or anything Elizabeth Acevedo

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In CASE YOU DON'T SEE ANYTHING YOU LIKE ABOVE.

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In CASE YOU DON'T SEE ANYTHING YOU LIKE ABOVE.

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148 books based on 252 votes: Crank by Ellen Hopkins, Identical by Ellen Hopkins, I Heart You, You Haunt Me by Lisa Schroeder, Burned by Ellen Hopkins, I...

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James Baldwin - National Book Foundation

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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James Arthur Baldwin (1924 - 1987) was born in Harlem, New York on August 2, 1924 to Emma Berdis Jones, originally from Deal Island, Maryland. He was reared by his mother and stepfather David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, whom Baldwin referred to as his father and whom he described as extremely strict. He did not know his biological father. As the eldest of nine children, Baldwin took seriously the responsibility of being a big brother and his mother's right hand. He cared for and protected his three younger brothers and five sisters in a household governed by the rigid rules of their father.

Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, Baldwin became a preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, where he developed a celebrated preaching style. His brief experience in the church would have a sustained impact on his rhetorical style and on the themes, symbols, and biblical allusions in his writings. Baldwin's Pentecostal experience is, in fact, essential to understanding his complex views on Christianity, which he espoused in his speeches and publications. His experience in the pulpit also served to inflect his overall stance on religion, and his ultimate rejection of it in the name of humanistic love. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin proclaims, "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, it is time we got rid of Him."

During his early teen years, Baldwin attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he met his French teacher and mentor Countee Cullen, who achieved prominence as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Baldwin went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, where he edited the school literary magazine Magpie and participated in the literary club, just as Cullen had done when he was a student there. By high school graduation, he had a group of close friends from DeWitt Clinton-Richard Avedon, Emile Capouya, and Sol Stein-with whom he kept in touch and even collaborated on some of his works (e.g., Avedon and Stein).

The 1940s marked several turning points in Baldwin's life. In 1942, he graduated from high school, and a year later he witnessed the Harlem Race Riot of 1943 and experienced the death of his father. After this emotional loss, Baldwin felt more than ever that it was important to play father figure to his eight brothers and sisters. He could not even dream of college and, therefore, worked at menial jobs during the day and at night played guitar in Greenwich Village cafes, where he also wrote for long hours, trying to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer.

In 1944, Baldwin met Richard Wright, who was the famous African American male writer at the time, and whose work spoke to his sensibility. In time, Wright would also become his mentor, for Baldwin appreciated Wright's strong opinions about race in America, and he also greatly valued their intellectual exchanges. Wright helped Baldwin to obtain a fellowship to write his first novel, which enabled him to leave for Paris in 1948, where the older writer had relocated a few years earlier. However, while in France, the two were often at odds about the ways in which they approached race in their writings. Baldwin wrote three essays explicating his critique of Wright's "protest art" in the novel Native Son (1940); their disagreement eventually led to the demise of their friendship, which Baldwin regretted after Wright's death in 1960.

In 1948, at age twenty-four, Baldwin left the United States to live in Paris, France, as he could not tolerate the racial and sexual discrimination he experienced daily. As Kendall Thomas, professor of law and critical race studies at Columbia University, explains, Baldwin left his country because of racism, and Harlem because of homophobia-two aspects of his identity that made him a frequent target of beatings by local youth and the police. When asked about his departure, Baldwin explained in a The Paris Review interview from 1984, "My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed." In Paris, Baldwin began to interact with other writers. He reconnected with Richard Wright, and for the first time, he met Maya Angelou, with whom he maintained a close relationship until the end of his life.

Baldwin would spend the next forty years abroad, where he wrote and published most of his works. Between 1948 and 1957 he lived in France and traveled in Europe, and from 1961 to 1970, Baldwin lived for long periods in Istanbul and visited many other places in Turkey. The violence and assassinations of black leaders in the United States during the politically turbulent 1960s took an emotional toll on him. After the assassination of his three friends-Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968-Baldwin suffered an emotional breakdown, became ill, and eventually moved to the South of France to recuperate. In 1971, he settled in a house in the village of St. Paul de Vence, which he would later buy piece by piece, as he received payments for his publications (accounts vary as to the final sale having taken place). In St. Paul, he would create his most enduring household.

During his earlier years abroad, Baldwin returned to the United States frequently and considered himself a "transatlantic commuter." In 1955, he signed a lease for an apartment at 63 West 97th Street in New York, and from the mid-1960s on, he maintained a home nearby at 137 West 71st Street.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Baldwin was living in California in a rented house in Los Angeles, where he was writing a screenplay based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He received the tragic news while visiting London with his sister Gloria. Many of Baldwin's extended visits to the United States were to spend time with his large and beloved family and to participate in Civil Rights Movement events. He attended the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. Baldwin also participated in literary events, such as the 1965 conference titled "The Negro Writer's Vision of America" sponsored by the New School of Social Research in New York. During his presentation, Baldwin addressed the conference theme, saying, "I know a story which America denies. And it denies it for the very good reason that my story, once told, confronts it with the truth about itself. In fact, my story, once told, will liberate America. The possibility of liberation-the necessity of becoming responsible for one's own life-is what most people most profoundly fear."

After a short battle with stomach cancer, Baldwin passed away on November 30, 1987 in his house in St. Paul de Vence. A week later, he was laid to rest at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in New York. Family members and friends participated in a large service during which Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Maya Angelou delivered touching remarks about their friend and brother. Angelou said Baldwin's love "opened the unusual door for me, and I am blessed that James Baldwin was my brother."

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Learn more about the life of James Baldwin as he traveled the world while remaining close to family and establishing enduring friendships.

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A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin's writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored Black people's aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society. Tri-Quarterly contributor Robert A. Bone declared that Baldwin's publications "have had a stunning impact on our cultural life" because the author "... succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination." In his novels, plays, and essays alike, Baldwin explored the psychological implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Best-sellers such as Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time acquainted wide audiences with his highly personal observations and his sense of urgency in the face of rising Black bitterness. As Juan Williams noted in the Washington Post, long before Baldwin's death, his writings "became a standard of literary realism. ... Given the messy nature of racial hatred, of the half-truths, blasphemies and lies that make up American life, Baldwin's accuracy in reproducing that world stands as a remarkable achievement. ... Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins of a racist nation."

Critics accorded Baldwin high praise for both his style and his themes. "Baldwin has carved a literary niche through his exploration of 'the mystery of the human being' in his art," observed Louis H. Pratt in James Baldwin. "His short stories, novels, and plays shed the light of reality upon the darkness of our illusions, while the essays bring a boldness, courage, and cool logic to bear on the most crucial questions of humanity with which this country has yet to be faced." In the College Language Association Journal, Therman B. O'Daniel called Baldwin "the gifted professor of that primary element, genuine talent. ... Secondly he is a very intelligent and deeply perceptive observer of our multifarious contemporary society. ... In the third place, Baldwin is a bold and courageous writer who is not afraid to search into the dark corners of our social consciences, and to force out into public view many of the hidden, sordid skeletons of our society. ... Then, of course, there is Baldwin's literary style which is a fourth major reason for his success as a writer. His prose ... possesses a crystal clearness and a passionately poetic rhythm that makes it most appealing." Saturday Review correspondent Benjamin De Mott concluded that Baldwin "retains a place in an extremely select group: That composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers. He owes his rank partly to the qualities of responsiveness that have marked his work from the beginning. ... Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath."

Baldwin's central preoccupation as a writer lay in "his insistence on removing, layer by layer, the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country," according to Orde Coombs in the New York Times Book Review. The author saw himself as a "disturber of the peace"-one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Pratt found Baldwin "engaged in a perpetual battle to overrule our objections and continue his probe into the very depths of our past. His constant concern is the catastrophic failure of the American Dream and the devastating inability of the American people to deal with that calamity." Pratt uncovered a further assumption in Baldwin's work; namely, that all of mankind is united by virtue of common humanity. "Consequently," Pratt stated, "the ultimate purpose of the writer, from Baldwin's perspective, is to discover that sphere of commonality where, although differences exist, those dissimilarities are stripped of their power to block communication and stifle human intercourse." The major impediment in this search for commonality, according to Baldwin, is white society's entrenched moral cowardice, a condition that through longstanding tradition equates Blackness with dark impulses, carnality and chaos. By denying Black people's essential humanity so simplistically, the author argued, whites inflict psychic damage on blacks and suffer self-estrangement-a "fatal bewilderment," to quote Bone. Baldwin's essays exposed the dangerous implications of this destructive way of thinking; his fictional characters occasionally achieve interracial harmony after having made the bold leap of understanding he advocated. In the British Journal of Sociology, Beau Fly Jones claimed that Baldwin was one of the first Black writers "to discuss with such insight the psychological handicaps that most Negroes must face; and to realize the complexities of Negro-white relations in so many different contexts. In redefining what has been called the Negro problem as white, he has forced the majority race to look at the damage it has done, and its own role in that destruction."

Essayist John W. Roberts felt that Baldwin's "evolution as a writer of the first order constitutes a narrative as dramatic and compelling as his best story." Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem under very trying circumstances. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children. Roberts wrote: "Baldwin's ambivalent relationship with his stepfather served as a constant source of tension during his formative years and informs some of his best mature writings. ... The demands of caring for younger siblings and his stepfather's religious convictions in large part shielded the boy from the harsh realities of Harlem street life during the 1930s." As a youth Baldwin read constantly and even tried writing; he was an excellent student who sought escape from his environment through literature, movies, and theatre. During the summer of his 14th birthday he underwent a dramatic religious conversion, partly in response to his nascent sexuality and partly as a further buffer against the ever-present temptations of drugs and crime. He served as a junior minister for three years at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but gradually he lost his desire to preach as he began to question Black people's acceptance of Christian tenets that had, in essence, been used to enslave them.

Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1942, Baldwin was compelled to find work in order to help support his brothers and sisters; mental instability had incapacitated his stepfather. Baldwin took a job in the defense industry in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and there, not for the first time, he was confronted with racism, discrimination, and the debilitating regulations of segregation. The experiences in New Jersey were closely followed by his stepfather's death, after which Baldwin determined to make writing his sole profession. He moved to Greenwich Village and began to write a novel, supporting himself by performing a variety of odd jobs. In 1944 he met author Richard Wright, who helped him to land the 1945 Eugene F. Saxton fellowship. Despite the financial freedom the fellowship provided, Baldwin was unable to complete his novel that year. He found the social tenor of the United States increasingly stifling even though such prestigious periodicals as the Nation, New Leader, and Commentary began to accept his essays and short stories for publication. Eventually, in 1948, he moved to Paris, using funds from a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to pay his passage. Most critics feel that this journey abroad was fundamental to Baldwin's development as an author.

"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean," Baldwin told the New York Times, "I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both." Through some difficult financial and emotional periods, Baldwin undertook a process of self-realization that included both an acceptance of his heritage and an admittance of his bisexuality. Bone noted that Europe gave the young author many things: "It gave him a world perspective from which to approach the question of his own identity. It gave him a tender love affair which would dominate the pages of his later fiction. But above all, Europe gave him back himself. The immediate fruit of self-recovery was a great creative outburst. First came two [works] of reconciliation with his racial heritage. Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner represent a search for roots, a surrender to tradition, an acceptance of the Negro past. Then came a series of essays which probe, deeper than anyone has dared, the psychic history of this nation. They are a moving record of a man's struggle to define the forces that have shaped him, in order that he may accept himself."

Many critics view Baldwin's essays as his most significant contribution to American literature. Works such as Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen "serve to illuminate the condition of the black man in twentieth-century America," according to Pratt. Highly personal and analytical, the essays probe deeper than the mere provincial problems of white versus black to uncover the essential issues of self-determination, identity, and reality. "An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian," Baldwin told Life magazine. "His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive." South Atlantic Quarterly contributor Fred L. Standley asserted that this quest for personal identity "is indispensable in Baldwin's opinion and the failure to experience such is indicative of a fatal weakness in human life." C.W.E. Bigsby elaborated in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama: "Baldwin's central theme is the need to accept reality as a necessary foundation for individual identity and thus a logical prerequisite for the kind of saving love in which he places his whole faith. For some this reality is one's racial or sexual nature, for others it is the ineluctable fact of death. ... Baldwin sees this simple progression as an urgent formula not only for the redemption of individual men but for the survival of mankind. In this at least black and white are as one and the Negro's much-vaunted search for identity can be seen as part and parcel of the American's long-standing need for self-definition."

Inevitably, however, Baldwin's assessments of the "sweet" and "bitter" experiences in his own life led him to describe "the exact place where private chaos and social outrage meet," according to Alfred Kazin in Contemporaries. Eugenia Collier described this confrontation in Black World: "On all levels personal and political ... life is a wild chaos of paradox, hidden meanings, and dilemmas. This chaos arises from man's inability-or reluctance to face the truth about his own nature. As a result of this self-imposed blindness, men erect an elaborate facade of myth, tradition, and ritual behind which crouch, invisible, their true selves. It is this blindness on the part of Euro-Americans which has created and perpetuated the vicious racism which threatens to destroy this nation." In his essays on the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin sought to explain Black experiences to a white readership as he warned whites about the potential destruction their psychic blindness might wreak. Massachusetts Review contributor David Levin noted that the author came to represent "for 'white' Americans, the eloquent, indignant prophet of an oppressed people, a voice speaking ... in an all but desperate, final effort to bring us out of what he calls our innocence before it is (if it is not already) too late. This voice calls us to our immediate duty for the sake of our own humanity as well as our own safety. It demands that we stop regarding the Negro as an abstraction, an invisible man; that we begin to recognize each Negro in his 'full weight and complexity' as a human being; that we face the horrible reality of our past and present treatment of Negroes-a reality we do not know and do not want to know." In Ebony magazine, Allan Morrison observed that Baldwin evinced an awareness "that the audience for most of his nonfictional writings is white and he uses every forum at his disposal to drive home the basic truths of Negro-white relations in America as he sees them. His function here is to interpret whites to themselves and at the same time voice the Negro's protest against his role in a Jim Crow society."

Because Baldwin sought to inform and confront whites, and because his fiction contains interracial love affairs-both homosexual and heterosexual-he came under attack from the writers of the Black Arts Movement, who called for a literature exclusively by and for Blacks. Baldwin refused to align himself with the movement; he continued to call himself an "American writer" as opposed to a "Black writer" and continued to confront the issues facing a multi-racial society. Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, accused Baldwin of a hatred of Blacks and "a shameful, fanatical fawning" love of whites. What Cleaver saw as complicity with whites, Baldwin saw rather as an attempt to alter the real daily environment with which American Blacks have been faced all their lives. Pratt noted, however, that Baldwin's efforts to "shake up" his white readers put him "at odds with current white literary trends" as well as with the Black Arts Movement. Pratt explained that Baldwin labored under the belief "that mainstream art is directed toward a complacent and apathetic audience, and it is designed to confirm and reinforce that sense of well-being. ... Baldwin's writings are, by their very nature, iconoclastic. While Black Arts focuses on a Black-oriented artistry, Baldwin is concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience which is determined to avoid reality." As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Baldwin escalated his attacks on white complacency from the speaking platform as well as from the pages of books and magazines. Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time both sold more than a million copies; both were cited for their predictions of Black violence in desperate response to white oppression. In Encounter, Colin MacInnes concluded that the reason "why Baldwin speaks to us of another race is that he still believes us worthy of a warning: he has not yet despaired of making us feel the dilemma we all chat about so glibly, ... and of trying to save us from the agonies that we too will suffer if the Negro people are driven beyond the ultimate point of desperation."

Retrospective analyses of Baldwin's essays highlight the characteristic prose style that gives his works literary merit beyond the mere dissemination of ideas. In A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics, Irving Howe placed the author among "the two or three greatest essayists this country has ever produced." Howe claimed that Baldwin "has brought a new luster to the essay as an art form, a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama. ... The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence-the rhythm of oratory, ... held firm and hard-can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess." "Baldwin has shown more concern for the painful exactness of prose style than any other modern American writer," noted David Littlejohn in Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes. "He picks up words with heavy care, then sets them, one by one, with a cool and loving precision that one can feel in the reading. ... The exhilarating exhaustion of reading his best essays-which in itself may be a proof of their honesty and value-demands that the reader measure up, and forces him to learn."

Baldwin's fiction expanded his exploration of the "full weight and complexity" of the individual in a society prone to callousness and categorization. His loosely autobiographical works probed the milieus with which he was most familiar-Black evangelical churches, jazz clubs, stifling Southern towns, and the Harlem ghetto. In The Black American Writer: Fiction, Brian Lee maintained that Baldwin's "essays explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels-that of the Negro and that of the man-and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin's feelings about the condition- alternating moods of sadness and bitterness-are best expressed in the paradoxes confronting the haunted heroes of his novels and stories. The possible modes of existence for anyone seeking refuge from a society which refuses to acknowledge one's humanity are necessarily limited, and Baldwin has explored with some thoroughness the various emotional and spiritual alternatives available to his retreating protagonists." Pratt felt that Baldwin's fictive artistry "not only documents the dilemma of the Black man in American society, but it also bears witness to the struggle of the artist against the overwhelming forces of oppression. Almost invariably, his protagonists are artists. ... Each character is engaged in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment which, for Baldwin, becomes symbolic of the quest for identity."

Love, both sexual and spiritual, was an essential component of Baldwin's characters' quests for self-realization. John W. Aldridge observed in the Saturday Review that sexual love "emerges in his novels as a kind of universal anodyne for the disease of racial separatism, as a means not only of achieving personal identity but also of transcending false categories of color and gender." Homosexual encounters emerged as the principal means to achieve important revelations; as Bigsby explained, Baldwin felt that "it is the homosexual, virtually alone, who can offer a selfless and genuine love because he alone has a real sense of himself, having accepted his own nature." Baldwin did not see love as a "saving grace," however; his vision, given the circumstances of the lives he encountered, was more cynical than optimistic. In his introduction to James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Kenneth Kinnamon wrote: "If the search for love has its origin in the desire of a child for emotional security, its arena is an adult world which involves it in struggle and pain. Stasis must yield to motion, innocence to experience, security to risk. This is the lesson that ... saves Baldwin's central fictional theme from sentimentality. ... Similarly, love as an agent of racial reconciliation and national survival is not for Baldwin a vague yearning for an innocuous brotherhood, but an agonized confrontation with reality, leading to the struggle to transform it. It is a quest for truth through a recognition of the primacy of suffering and injustice in the American past." Pratt also concluded that in Baldwin's novels, "love is often extended, frequently denied, seldom fulfilled. As reflections of our contemporary American society, the novels stand as forthright indictments of the intolerable conditions that we have accepted unquestioningly as a way of life."

Black family life-the charged emotional atmosphere between parents and children, brothers and sisters-provided another major theme in Baldwin's fiction. This was especially apparent in his first and best-known novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, the story of a Harlem teenager's struggles with a repressive father and with religious conversion. According to Roberts, Go Tell It on the Mountain "proved that James Baldwin had become a writer of enormous power and skill. [It] was an essential book for Baldwin. Although clearly a fictional work, it chronicles two of the most problematic aspects of his existence as a young man: a son's relationship to his stepfather and the impact of fundamentalist religion on the consciousness of a young boy." In her work entitled James Baldwin, Carolyn Wedin Sylvander praised Baldwin's family chronicle particularly because the author "is dealing comprehensively and emotionally with the hot issue of race relations in the United States at a time ... when neither white ignorance and prejudice nor black powerlessness is conducive to holistic depictions of black experience." Indeed, the overt confrontation between the races that characterizes Baldwin's later work was here portrayed as a peripheral threat, a danger greater than, but less immediate than, the potential damage inflicted by parents on children. Sylvander wrote: "It is painfully, dramatically, structurally clear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain that the struggles every individual faces-with sexuality, with guilt, with pain, with love-are passed on, generation to generation." Littlejohn described Baldwin's treatment of this essential American theme as "autobiography-as-exorcism, ... a lyrical, painful, ritual exercise whose necessity and intensity the reader feels." Pratt likewise stated that Go Tell It on the Mountain "stands as an honest, intensive, self-analysis, functioning simultaneously to illuminate self, society, and mankind as a whole."

In addition to his numerous books, Baldwin was one of the few Black authors to have had more than one of his plays produced on Broadway. Both The Amen Corner, another treatment of storefront pentecostal religion, and Blues for Mister Charlie, a drama based on the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in 1955, had successful Broadway runs and numerous revivals. Standley commented in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that in both plays, "as in his other literary works, Baldwin explores a variety of thematic concerns: the historical significance and the potential explosiveness in black-white relations; the necessity for developing a sexual and psychological consciousness and identity; the intertwining of love and power in the universal scheme of existence as well as in the structures of society; the misplaced priorities in the value systems in America; and the responsibility of the artist to promote the evolution of the individual and the society." In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve offered remarks on Baldwin's abilities as a playwright. "Baldwin tries to use the theatre as a pulpit for his ideas," Meserve stated. "Mainly his plays are thesis plays-talky, over-written, and cliche dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy, and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life." Meserve added, however, that although the author was criticized for creating stereotypes, "his major characters are the most successful and memorable aspects of his plays. People are important to Baldwin, and their problems, generally embedded in their agonizing souls, stimulate him to write. ... A humanitarian, sensitive to the needs and struggles of man, he writes of inner turmoil, spiritual disruption, the consequence upon people of the burdens of the world, both White and Black."

Baldwin's oratorical prowess-honed in the pulpit as a youth-brought him into great demand as a speaker during the civil rights era. Sylvander observed that national attention "began to turn toward him as a spokesperson for Blacks, not as much because of his novels as his essays, debates, interviews, panel discussions." Baldwin embraced his role as racial spokesman reluctantly and grew increasingly disillusioned as the American public "disarmed him with celebrity, [fell] in love with his eccentricities, and institutionalized his outrage ... into prime- time entertainment," to quote Aldridge. Nor was Baldwin able to feel that his speeches and essays were producing social change-the assassinations of three of his associates, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, shattered his remaining hopes for racial reconciliation. Kinnamon remarked that by 1972, the year Baldwin published No Name in the Street, "the redemptive possibilities of love seemed exhausted in that terrible decade of assassination, riot, and repression. ... Social love had now become for Baldwin more a rueful memory than an alternative to disaster." London Magazine contributor James Campbell also noted that by 1972 "Baldwin the saviour had turned into Baldwin the soldier. What [observers] failed to notice was that he was still the preacher and the prophet, that his passion and rage were mingled with detachment, and that his gloomy prognostications were based on powerful observation and an understanding of the past which compelled their pessimism."

Many critics took Baldwin to task for the stridency and gloom that overtook his writings. "To function as a voice of outrage month after month for a decade and more strains heart and mind, and rhetoric as well," declared Benjamin De Mott in the Saturday Review. "The consequence is a writing style ever on the edge of being winded by too many summonses to intensity." New Republic correspondent Nathan Glazer likewise stated that Baldwin had become "an accusing voice, but the accusation is so broad, so general, so all-embracing, that the rhetoric disappears into the wind." Stephen Donadio offered a similar opinion in the Partisan Review: "As his notoriety increased, his personality was oversimplified, appropriated, and consumed. ... Mr. Baldwin created a situation in which the eye of the audience was fixed on the author as a performer, and the urgency of the race problem in America became a backdrop for elaborate rhetorical assaults which could be dutifully acknowledged but forgotten with a sigh."

Baldwin's passionate detractors were offset by equally passionate defenders, however. Sylvander wrote: "Wading through vehement and sometimes shallow reactions to the deep water of the statements and works themselves, one is struck repeatedly by the power of Baldwin's prose, and by our continuing need, as readers and as citizens, for his steadying apocalyptic vision. Finally, in his fantastic, experientially various, wide-ranging, searching, and committed life, one can find a vigorous model for venturing beyond charted areas." Charles Newman made two points in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. First, Newman noted that Baldwin's experience is "unique among our artists in that his artistic achievements mesh so precisely with his historical circumstances. He is that nostalgic type-an artist speaking for a genuinely visible revolution." Second, Newman maintained that as an observer of this painful revolution, "almost alone [Baldwin] continued to confront the unmanageable questions of modern society, rather than creating a nuclear family in which semantic fantasies may be enacted with no reference to the larger world except that it stinks." Kinnamon concluded: "James Baldwin has always been concerned with the most personal and intimate areas of experience and also with the broadest questions of national and global destiny-and with the intricate interrelationships between the two. Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice-simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet-has been among the most urgent of our time."

At the time of his death from cancer late in 1987, Baldwin was still working on two projects-a play, The Welcome Table, and a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although he lived primarily in France, he had never relinquished his United States citizenship and preferred to think of himself as a "commuter" rather than as an expatriate. The publication of his collected essays, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948- 1985, and his subsequent death sparked reassessments of his career and comments on the quality of his lasting legacy. "Mr. Baldwin has become a kind of prophet, a man who has been able to give a public issue all its deeper moral, historical, and personal significance," remarked Robert F. Sayre in Contemporary American Novelists. "Certainly one mark of his achievement, ... is that whatever deeper comprehension of the race issue Americans now possess has been in some way shaped by him. And this is to have shaped their comprehension of themselves as well." Sylvander asserted that what emerges from the whole of Baldwin's work is "a kind of absolute conviction and passion and honesty that is nothing less than courageous. ... Baldwin has shared his struggle with his readers for a purpose-to demonstrate that our suffering is our bridge to one another."

Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the results of Baldwin's achievement came from other Black writers. Orde Coombs, for instance, concluded: "Because he existed we felt that the racial miasma that swirled around us would not consume us, and it is not too much to say that this man saved our lives, or at least, gave us the necessary ammunition to face what we knew would continue to be a hostile and condescending world." Playwright Amiri Baraka phrased a similar assessment even more eloquently in his funeral eulogy to Baldwin. "This man traveled the earth like its history and its biographer," Baraka said. "He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human. ... He made us feel ... that we could defend ourselves or define ourselves, that we were in the world not merely as animate slaves, but as terrifyingly sensitive measurers of what is good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This is the power of his spirit. This is the bond which created our love for him." In a posthumous profile for the Washington Post, Juan Williams wrote: "The success of Baldwin's effort as the witness is evidenced time and again by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. America and the literary world are far richer for his witness. The proof of a shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher's son, James Arthur Baldwin, has left us."

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A novelist and essayist of considerable renown, James Baldwin bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. Baldwin's writing career began in the last years of legislated segregation; his fame as a social observer grew in tandem with the civil rights movement as he mirrored...

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James Baldwin, in full James Arthur Baldwin, (born August 2, 1924, New York, New York-died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul, France), American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of western Europe.

The eldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty in the Black ghetto of Harlem in New York City. From age 14 to 16 he was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a small revivalist church, a period he wrote about in his semiautobiographical first and finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and in his play about a woman evangelist, The Amen Corner (performed in New York City, 1965).
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)
After graduation from high school, he began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village, the bohemian quarter of New York City. He left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived for the next eight years. (In later years, from 1969, he became a self-styled "transatlantic commuter," living alternatively in the south of France and in New York and New England.) His second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), deals with the white world and concerns an American in Paris torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman. Between the two novels came a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).

In 1957 he returned to the United States and became an active participant in the civil rights struggle that swept the nation. His book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores Black-white relations in the United States. This theme also was central to his novel Another Country (1962), which examines sexual as well as racial issues.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
The New Yorker magazine gave over almost all of its November 17, 1962, issue to a long article by Baldwin on the Black Muslim separatist movement and other aspects of the civil rights struggle. The article became a best seller in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963). His bitter play about racist oppression, Blues for Mister Charlie ("Mister Charlie" being a Black term for a white man), played on Broadway to mixed reviews in 1964.

Though Baldwin continued to write until his death-publishing works including Going to Meet the Man (1965), a collection of short stories; the novels Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979); and The Price of the Ticket (1985), a collection of autobiographical writings-none of his later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work.

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James Baldwin | Biography, Books, Essays, Plays, & Facts

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James Baldwin, in full James Arthur Baldwin, (born August 2, 1924, New York, New York-died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul, France), American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of western Europe.

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Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, James Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer.

Whether he was working in Paris or Istanbul, he never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America. In numerous essays, novels, plays and public speeches, the eloquent voice of James Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood.

James Baldwin - the grandson of a slave - was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. As a child, he cast about for a way to escape his circumstances. As he recalls, "I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn't know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use." By the time he was fourteen, Baldwin was spending much of his time in libraries and had found his passion for writing.

During this early part of his life, he followed in his stepfather's footsteps and became a preacher. Of those teen years, Baldwin recalled, "Those three years in the pulpit - I didn't realize it then - that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty." Many have noted the strong influence of the language of the church, the language of the Bible, on Baldwin's style: its cadences and tone. Eager to move on, Baldwin knew that if he left the pulpit he must also leave home, so at eighteen he took a job working for the New Jersey railroad.

After working for a short while with the railroad, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked for a number of years as a freelance writer, working primarily on book reviews. He caught the attention of the well-known novelist, Richard Wright - and though Baldwin had not yet finished a novel, Wright helped him secure a grant with which he could support himself as a writer. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.

After writing a number of pieces for various magazines, Baldwin went to a small village in Switzerland to finish his first novel. Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans were unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, Go Tell It on the Mountain has long been considered an American classic.

Over the next ten years, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing two books of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), as well as two novels, Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). The essays explored racial tension with eloquence and unprecedented honesty; the novels dealt with taboo themes (homosexuality and interracial relationships). By describing life as he knew it, Baldwin created socially relevant, psychologically penetrating literature ... and readers responded. Both Nobody Knows My Name and Another Country became immediate bestsellers.

Being abroad gave Baldwin a perspective on the life he'd left behind and a solitary freedom to pursue his craft. "Once you find yourself in another civilization," he notes, "you're forced to examine your own." In a sense, Baldwin's travels brought him even closer to the social concerns of contemporary America. In the early 1960s, overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the times, Baldwin returned to take part in the civil rights movement. Traveling throughout the South, he began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). This, too, was a bestseller: so incendiary that it put Baldwin on the cover of TIME Magazine. For many, Baldwin's clarion call for human equality - in the essays of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time - became an early and essential voice in the civil rights movement. Though at times criticized for his pacifist stance, Baldwin remained an important figure in that struggle throughout the 1960s.

After the assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, Baldwin returned to St. Paul de Vence, France, where he worked on a book about the disillusionment of the times, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Many responded to the harsh tone of If Beale Street Could Talk with accusations of bitterness - but even though Baldwin had encapsulated much of the anger of the times in his book, he always remained a constant advocate for universal love and brotherhood. During the last ten years of his life, he produced a number of important works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He also turned to teaching as a new way of connecting with the young.

By 1987, when he died of stomach cancer at age 63, James Baldwin had become one of the most important and vocal advocates for equality. From Go Tell It on the Mountain to The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), James Baldwin created works of literary beauty and depth that will remain essential parts of the American canon.

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James Baldwin Biography and Quotes ~ James Baldwin Biography | American Masters | PBS

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James Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of Black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood.

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There's just something about James Baldwin's gut-punching prose that compels you to keep reading, even as your heart breaks. That Baldwin's works still feel deeply relevant today, more than 30 years after his death, is a testament not only to his legacy as a midcentury thinker, but also to the United States' persistent refusal to confront and correct its anti-Blackness. The 10 must-read James Baldwin books on the list below barely scratch the surface of his body of work, but are sure provide newcomers and longtime Baldwin fans alike with hours of enlightening reading.

Born in Harlem in 1924, as the second-eldest of 10 children in Emma Joynes and David Baldwin's blended family, James Baldwin showed signs of literary talent early in life, but originally planned to follow in his stepfather's footsteps and become a Baptist minister - an experience that heavily influenced his semi-autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. His publishing career officially began with a 1947 article in .

Baldwin expatriated to France in 1948, and his first three books - Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni's Room - followed within the next 10 years. Despite spending the rest of his life in Europe, Baldwin famously wrote in Notes of a Native Son: "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." He died of stomach cancer in St. Paul de Vence, France in 1987, and was buried in Hartsdale, New York's Ferncliff Cemetery, where his mother now rests beside him.

Below, 10 must-read James Baldwin books that will help you understand one of the U.S.'s most insightful activists.
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10 Essential James Baldwin Books To Read Now & Always

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There's just something about James Baldwin's gut-punching prose that compels you to keep reading, even as your heart breaks. That Baldwin's works still feel deeply relevant today, more than 30 years after his death, is a testament not only to his legacy as a midcentury thinker, but also to the United States' persistent refusal to confront and correct its anti-Blackness.

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

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Darius the Great is Not Ok, Adib Khorram

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Darius the Great is Not Ok, Adib Khorram

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Darius the Great Is Not Okay — Adib Khorram Writes Books

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Darius the Great Is Not Okay Dial Books for Young Readers—Available Now

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Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars ( Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night ( Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in KINK: Stories (eds. RO Kwon & Garth Greenwell), Salon, The Paris Review, Shondaland, [PANK], Mizna,and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is also the guest editor of the 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue of and a Periplus Collective mentor. The Thirty Names of Night won the 2021 Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction, and was a December 2020 Indie Next Book Pick; The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and others. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

He is represented by Michelle Brower of Aevitas Creative Management. For speaking engagements, he is represented by Books In Common.

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Zeyn Joukhadar - Author of The Thirty Names of Night

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Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars ( Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night ( Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in KINK: Stories (eds.

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Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars ( Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night ( Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in KINK: Stories (eds. RO Kwon & Garth Greenwell), Salon, The Paris Review, Shondaland, [PANK], Mizna,and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is also the guest editor of the 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue of and a Periplus Collective mentor. The Thirty Names of Night won the 2021 Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award and the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction, and was a December 2020 Indie Next Book Pick; The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and others. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

He is represented by Michelle Brower of Aevitas Creative Management. For speaking engagements, he is represented by Books In Common.

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Zeyn Joukhadar - Author of The Thirty Names of Night

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Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars ( Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night ( Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in KINK: Stories (eds.