# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga Educator's Guide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
THE UNDEFEATED by Kwame Alexander, Illustrated by Kadir Nelson

# data[].attributes.body
It is important to note that this is NOT a definitive list of texts, but a resource that can be used to spark conversations, programming, displays, and develop collections around the theme of Journeys to Niles Township. We encourage communities to help curate more lists and share them. The age groups are general suggestions since texts can be read across many ages. Please let us know if there are any errors or broken links. Feel free to share additional resources.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From award-winning actress and political activist America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America Ferrera: My identity is a superpower -- not an obstacle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hollywood needs to stop resisting what the world actually looks like, says actor, director and activist America Ferrera. Tracing the contours of her career, she calls for more authentic representation of different cultures in media -- and a shift in how we tell our stories. "Presence creates possibility," she says.

# data[].attributes.headline
America Ferrera Discusses American Like me, with Uzo Aduba and Linda Sarsour

# data[].attributes.subject
America Ferrera Discusses American Like me, with Uzo Aduba and Linda Sarsour

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America Ferrera Discusses American Like Me

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Actress and activist America Ferrera reflects on her life growing up Honduran and American.

# data[].attributes.headline
America Ferrera in conversation with Anjelah Johnson at Live Talks Los Angeles

# data[].attributes.subject
America Ferrera in conversation with Anjelah Johnson at Live Talks Los Angeles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America Ferrera in conversation with Anjelah Johnson at Live Talks Los Angeles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
George Takei  “They Called Us Enemy” - One morning in Los Angeles

# data[].attributes.headline
ALA Annual 2019 - George Takei, Team on 'They Called Us Enemy'

# data[].attributes.subject
ALA Annual 2019 - George Takei, Team on 'They Called Us Enemy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ALA Annual 2019 - George Takei, Team on 'They Called Us Enemy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Actor George Takei has told his family's story in an autobiography, a TED talk and a Broadway musical. With a new graphic memoir, "They Called Us Enemy," he wants to reach a generation that may know little of how 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.

The book, a recent Los Angeles Times Book Club selection, begins when armed soldiers force 5-year-old George, his parents and his two younger siblings from their Los Angeles home. "It is burned into my memory," Takei writes of that day.

The soldiers took the family to a horse stall at Santa Anita Racetrack. Later, they were shipped to the Rohwer Relocation Center in southeastern Arkansas and later to the high-security Camp Tule Lake in Northern California.

Takei, known for his role as Mr. Sulu on the original "Star Trek" series, details his experiences during four years spent behind barbed wire. "They Called Us Enemy" addresses family, identity, displacement and political issues that have shaped Takei and the United States from the 1940s to the present day.

(Harmony Becker / Top Shelf Productions)

Topics for Discussion

1. What did you know about Japanese American incarceration during World War II before reading the book? What new information or details did you learn?

2. Are there any West Coast locations referenced in the book that are familiar to you? Did you see those places differently?

3. George Takei recounts his experience from the perspective of a small boy. How does that benefit or take away from the narrative?

4. Takei's mother smuggled in a sewing machine to make clothes for her children, even though it was forbidden. What items would you bring?

5. Readers see Takei deal with the trauma of the camps (pages 141-145). He argues with his father and questions the choices his father made during that time. What do you make of the argument? Is Takei's critique of his father fair?

6. How do you think being incarcerated at a young age shapes identity or affects someone as an adult?

7. As a teenager, Takei became curious about the internment camps but couldn't find information in history books. What historical events are tied to your family history? How and when did you learn about them?

8. After Takei's family leaves the camps, he writes that he felt longing for "those barbed-wire fences ... to us, that was home." To you: What makes a home a home?

9. What was the most powerful moment or scene from the book?

10. Takei and his father argue about American democracy (Page 195). What do you think about the following statement by Takei's father: "Despite all that we've experienced, our democracy is still the best in the world because it's a people's democracy."

11. In 1988, President Reagan apologized on behalf of the United States and signed an act granting $20,000 to each of the surviving 60,000 internees. What are your thoughts? Can we place a price on what was done?

12. Takei has told the story of Japanese American internment camps in different forms during the years. What do you think about his decision to share this story in 2019 as an illustrated graphic memoir? Have you read other graphic novels?

13. How does Takei's story connect with issues going on in the United States today?

14. What will you take away from this story?

More information

Author Interview: George Takei talks about "They Called Us Enemy" and his career as an actor and activist.

Review: " They Called Us Enemy " by George Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott; illustrated by Harmony Becker. Top Shelf Productions: 204 pages; $19.99.

Community discussion: Takei joined L.A. Times Book Club readers on Sept. 10. Read a news account. Watch a recap on Spectrum News1.

TV episode: The AMC series " The Terror: Infamy," is set during World War II; producers built a scaled-down replica of the Manzanar internment camp in Central California. Takei plays an elder in the Japanese American fishing village at Terminal Island, which was wiped away by the internment order after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Reading list: Immigrant tales to read and embrace.

Los Angeles Times Book Club: Sign up at latimes.com/bookclub. Join the discussion in the book club Facebook Group.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Discussion guide to 'They Called Us Enemy' by George Takei

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Actor George Takei has told his family's story in an autobiography, a TED talk and a Broadway musical. With a new graphic memoir, "They Called Us Enemy," he wants to reach a generation that may know little of how 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Amanpour and Company
Clip: 09/04/2019 | 16m 51s

Veteran actor George Takei may be best known as Sulu from "Star Trek," but he also has a darker story to tell. During World War II, thousands of Americans of Japanese descent were forced from their homes and sent to internment camps, Takei among them. Now at 82 years old, he says that the Trump administration's treatment of immigrants motivated him to speak out and revisit this in a new memoir.

Aired: 09/04/19

Rating: NR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
George Takei on His New Memoir, "They Called Us Enemy" | Season 2019 Episode 09/04/2019 | Amanpour and Company

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amanpour and Company Clip: 09/04/2019 | 16m 51s Veteran actor George Takei may be best known as Sulu from "Star Trek," but he also has a darker story to tell. During World War II, thousands of Americans of Japanese descent were forced from their homes and sent to internment camps, Takei among them.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why I Love a Country that Once Betrayed Me - TEDTalk 

# data[].attributes.subject
Why I Love a Country that Once Betrayed Me - TEDTalk 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why I love a country that once betrayed me | George Takei

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
George Takei may be best known for his role in Star Trek, but his legacy extends far beyond the screen. In addition to his activism for LBGTQ rights, Takei is the author of five books. His newest, "They Called Us Enemy," is a graphic memoir that recounts Takei's experience of being forced into a Japanese American internment camp with his family at age 4. Takei joins us in studio.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
George Takei Recalls Japanese American Internment in 'They Called Us Enemy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
George Takei may be best known for his role in Star Trek, but his legacy extends far beyond the screen. In addition to his activism for LBGTQ rights, Takei is the author of five books. His newest, "They Called Us Enemy," is a graphic memoir that recounts Takei's experience of being forced into a Japanese American internment camp with his family at age 4.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The power of pride: George Takei at TEDxKyoto

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. George Takei draws his inspiration and strength from one of the darkest chapters of American history: the World War II uprooting and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-American citizens.

Recalling his childhood spent behind the barbed wire of America's concentration camps, Mr. Takei reveals his life-long journey from bitter confusion to an impassioned admiration and pride in his fellow Japanese-Americans and his country that encompasses and celebrates us all.

For actors projected onto a movie screen, or performing upon stage, the audience sees only the barest sliver of the real person inside the performer. By the time George Takei stepped in front of a television camera for the first time at the age of 22, he had already endured challenges that his audiences would never have been able to guess, much less truly comprehend. After a childhood spent behind the barbed wire of United States internment camps, placed there simply for the face he wore, George Takei nurtured-and fulfilled many, many times over-the dream of becoming an actor on television, in movies and on stage in a career that spans five decades. And with this dream arose so many others, including his vital work as a political activist, social commentator, author and powerful internet presence. Each dream is individually inspiring, collectively leading George boldly to go where few, if any, have gone before.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The power of pride: George Takei at TEDxKyoto This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. George Takei draws his inspiration and strength from one of the darkest chapters of American history: the World War II uprooting and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-American citizens.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Shame is a cruel thing," writes George Takei in They Called Us Enemy, his new graphic novel about his childhood years in an American concentration camp during World War II. "It should rest on the perpetrators, but they don't carry it the way the victims do."

This irony becomes most evident at the conclusion of Takei's book, where he depicts the U.S. government's tardy attempts to establish a sense of collective shame about America's wartime internment of Japanese Americans. "Here we admit a wrong: Here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under law," President Reagan is shown saying in 1988. But no matter how polished his words - or how many zeros on the restitution check Takei receives in 1991 - such attempts at official remorse ring hollow. What the government did to Takei and some 120,000 other Japanese Americans can't be undone, no matter how many speeches public officials deliver or how many checks they send.

The very structure of Takei's narrative underlines this fact more than a political speech ever could. It's young George's point of view that shapes the story, imbuing it with childlike energy. Even as the Takeis are wrenched from their home, transported hundreds of miles and forced to live in camps, young George's openness and curiosity are unflagging. His outlook provides a striking contrast to government officials' stale attempts to explain, excuse and ultimately seek forgiveness for the evil they've done.

In fact, despite the grimness of its subject matter, They Called Us Enemy is a lively, vibrant book. After years spent acting on stage and screen (he's best known for his role as Star Trek's Lieutenant Sulu), Takei has clearly learned a lot about shaping and directing his audience's emotions. He's helped by his co-writers, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, and artist Harmony Becker. It's a shame Becker's artwork isn't in color, but she provides a master class on what one can do in a black-and-white format. By incorporating textures ranging from fine hatching to Ben Day dots, she demonstrates how digitally created drawings can have all the dimensionality of work drafted on paper.

Becker also helps dramatize the contrast between George's and his parents' experiences of their ordeal. It's spring of 1942 when Takei's family is first taken from their Los Angeles home. Allowed to keep only what they can carry, Takei's parents must sell off their belongings for next to nothing. At one point they're forced to sleep in horses' stalls, but George views this as an adventure: "We get to sleep where the horses slept! Fun!" For his parents, of course, it's no such thing. "It was a devastating blow," Takei writes. "They had worked so hard to buy a two-bedroom house and raise a family... Now we were crammed into a single, smelly horse stall."

That's the first of numerous occasions when young George's innocence protects him. When everyone is forced to wear tags - "to keep track of us, like cattle" - he thinks it's just another train ticket. "I saw people crying and couldn't understand why," he remembers. At one camp, another boy tells him the barbed wire is there to keep dinosaurs out. For Takei's parents, meanwhile, it's a constant struggle to maintain a sense of order and humanity. Takei's father helps other families settle in and serves as a translator and mediator, while Takei's mother sews clothes and makes curtains and rugs.

The family's ordeal doesn't end in the camps. Once the Takeis are allowed to return to Los Angeles in 1945, they have to live on the street. Enrolled in public school, George endures discrimination from a racist teacher and begins to feel the shame his parents felt. "I was old enough by then to understand that camp was something like jail, but could not fully grasp what we had done to be sent there," he remembers. As he grows up and becomes an actor, he fights a two-pronged battle: to overcome shame and to reconcile his experiences with America's stated ideals.

It's a struggle that can probably only be fully understood by a survivor of internment - and probably not by politicians seeking exculpation for acts of bureaucratic evil. But Takei hopes some of those politicians will try. He concludes They Called Us Enemy with a critique of our current government's policies treating certain people as "Enemy."

Takei closes with a quote from President Obama saying, in part, that "history ... must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past." It may be too late to undo what was done to Japanese Americans almost 70 years ago, but Takei suggests it's not too late to learn from it.

Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She tweets at @EtelkaL.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
George Takei Recalls Time In An American Internment Camp In 'They Called Us Enemy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Shame is a cruel thing," writes George Takei in They Called Us Enemy, his new graphic novel about his childhood years in an American concentration camp during World War II. "It should rest on the perpetrators, but they don't carry it the way the victims do."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
He's gone to the stars and back via the starship Enterprise as Hikaru Sulu on the classic television show Star Trek. With an influential social media presence, he's a passionate advocate and activist for social justice and LGBTQ rights. He's the author of several books for adults. Now George Takei is adding YA author to his list of credentials with the publication of his exemplary graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy.

He's gone to the stars and back via the starship Enterprise as Hikaru Sulu on the classic television show Star Trek. With an influential social media presence, he's a passionate advocate and activist for social justice and LGBTQ rights. He's the author of several books for adults. Now George Takei is adding YA author to his list of credentials with the publication of his exemplary graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy (co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott and illustrated by Harmony Becker; Top Shelf, 12 years and up), which relates five-year-old Takei and his family's internment in Japanese American "relocation centers" during World War II.

1. Why did you choose the comics format to tell your story?

GT: Well, I've been speaking out about the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II for decades. I've made it my life's mission to ensure that this story is remembered. But to this day, when I mention my childhood imprisonment in barbed-wire camps to people that I consider educated and well-informed, they're often shocked to learn that such a thing happened in our own country, the United States. I became convinced that we had to do something to reach young people, at the time when they're absorbing information and building their ideas of the world, so this story would become a fundamental part of their understanding of America. I grew up on comic books, and I thought, what a wonderful way to dramatize the story and engage those young readers. Our hope is that when they become the next generation of voters and leaders, they will stand up for "liberty and justice for all," and make sure this never happens again.

2. This is your memoir, but it's so rich with detail and history - how did you do your research?

GT: This book is built on a foundation of my own memories as a young boy, five and six and seven years old. But at that age, I could only see a small part of the story. In the years after our imprisonment, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about the camps, trying to understand what had happened to us. I was so fortunate to have him as a father. Many Japanese Americans of that generation didn't talk about the camps, because of trauma or an unfair burden of shame, but Daddy was willing to answer all of my questions, and he taught me so much about the camps and about our American democracy. And because he was elected block manager inside the camps, he had a very informed perspective on the community. Finally, as my co-creators - Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker - and I put this graphic memoir together, we expanded the story beyond my family to show the wider context: the prejudice and hysteria that led our government to force 120,000 of its own people into barbed-wire prison camps, and how those same forces are at work today.

3. In writing, how did you balance your happy, "normal" childhood events and experiences with the frightening and far-from-normal ones growing up in the camp?

GT: My own memories of the camps were often surprisingly warm. I was a five-year-old kid, and my parents did everything they could to protect me and my siblings from the harsh realities of our situation. Daddy said we were going on a long vacation to a place called Arkansas . . . and you know, to a young boy who has never left Los Angeles, the word "Arkansas" sounds just as magical as "Barcelona" or "Honolulu." I had never been inside a horse stable before, or seen a swamp where tree roots rose high out of the water, so for me it was often an exotic adventure. At night, when I would walk to the latrine and the guard towers would shine searchlights on me, I thought, how nice that they lit the way for me to pee. But as I grew older, I began to understand what a devastating and painful experience it was for my parents, how much danger and deprivation we were subjected to, and how these outrages made a mockery of our country's ideals of democracy and due process. So in the book, we show this experience through the eyes of adorable little five-year-old me - and Harmony does an amazing job of making me look cute as a button! - but we also pull back the curtain to show the more painful truths.

4. What's the biggest myth about internment you encounter?

GT: Many people have heard of the Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. United States, which approved President Roosevelt's unjust Executive Order 9066, concluding that our internment was constitutional. But many people do not know that this inhumane 1944 court decision, although it was vacated by lower courts several decades later, was never officially overruled by the Supreme Court until June 2018 - with a stray comment in the very same ruling that upheld Donald Trump's outrageous Muslim travel ban, Trump v. Hawaii. Have we learned nothing from the past? We must be better than this. We must demand better.

5. How do you think children today can be activists and allies?

GT: My father taught me that our country is a people's democracy, that it is existentially dependent on us - all of us - to participate in the democratic process. He took me to the Adlai Stevenson for President campaign headquarters and showed me how I could get involved as a volunteer. I also began to use my voice to raise awareness of the issues that I cared about. Through performing, through protesting, through social media, or simply through conversations over the dinner table, we all must use our voices to help this nation live up to its bright, shining ideals.

From the August 2019 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
He's gone to the stars and back via the starship Enterprise as Hikaru Sulu on the classic television show Star Trek. With an influential social media presence, he's a passionate advocate and activist for social justice and LGBTQ rights. He's the author of several books for adults.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
George Takei is probably best known for his role as Lt. Hikaru Sulu on the classic 1960s science fiction TV series, Star Trek and its many feature film sequel. Since then, he has gone on to become an iconic pop culture figure, advocating for LGBTQ rights and cultivating his trademark exclamation of "Oh, My" into a meme-worthy catchphrase for the ages.

But what many people don't know, is that during the second World War, Takei and his family (as well as thousands of other Japanese-Americans) were stripped of their civil rights and sent to internment camps following the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.

IDW Publishing has teamed up with Takei to tell his story in the upcoming graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy ( MAR190630). George was kind enough to take the time to speak with us about this important new graphic novel, that tells the true story of the dark time for our country as they dealt with their sudden and unexpected entry into World War II in the worst possible way imaginable... giving in to anger, fear and racism and destroying the lives of thousands of American citizens and their families without due process.

************

PREVIEWSworld: George, what can you tell us about your decision to tell your story in a graphic novel?

George Takei: It's been my mission in life to raise the awareness of my childhood imprisonment - with no charges, no trial, and no due process - to other Americans, because I'm always shocked to learn how unknown this is. People I consider well-informed, when I tell them about my child imprisonment, they are shocked. And so, it's been my mission in life to raise the awareness of the subject of imprisonment of innocent citizens.

I wrote my autobiography, To The Stars, which deals with my childhood, but I think it's important that the story be known by young people because they are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. And the best way to reach them is via the medium that they are attached to, and that's graphic novels. I remember when I was a kid that I loved picture books. Putting the story into a graphic novel will make it accessible to young people who are curious and want to know more about the world they live in. And who knows, maybe their parents and grandparents are Star Trek fans, so we sort of combine those audiences and educate them with this story.

PREVIEWSworld: What does They Called Us Enemy mean to you, and the ability to tell this story right now to American readers?

George Takei: The title, They Called Us Enemy, is certainly a grabber, but it is also factually true. All Japanese-Americans, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, were categorized as "Enemy Aliens", simply because we're of Japanese ancestry. It is also a phrase that is crazy, because we're Americans. My grandparents were the ones that immigrated to this country. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. My siblings and I were born in Los Angeles. We're Americans. But simply because we look like this they called us the enemy. We were at war with Japan, yes. But we are Americans, and it's this history of racism, and hysteria, and simplistic thinking that characterized us as the enemy.

PREVIEWSworld: Can you tell us about the fateful morning that began your family's removal from Los Angeles?

George Takei: My parents got me up very early one morning, together with my brother that was a year younger, and my baby sister, an infant, and they dressed us hurriedly. We were kind of groggy with sleep, and my parents told my brother and me to wait in the living room while they did some last minute packing back in the bedroom. We were standing by the front window, gazing out, and suddenly we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them. They stomped up the porch and began pounding on the door. It was a horrific, terrifying sound that seemed to tremble and resonate through the house My father answered the door at gun point and we were ordered out of our home. My father gave my brother and me little packages to carry, he had the two heavy suitcases, and we followed him out into the driveway and stood there waiting for our mother to come out. When she finally came out she had our baby sister in one arm and a heavy duffle bag in the other... and tears were streaming down her cheeks. It was a terrifying morning that I will never be able to forget.

PREVIEWSworld: Why is it so important now to make sure your story is passed on to a new generation?

George Takei: What happened in the past is so easily forgotten. There are so many people that have never heard of the internment of Japanese-Americans. And some people who have heard of it only have a sketchy understanding of that. It is a vital part of American history. Because our democracy, as glorious as it is, is also very fragile. It is as fallible as people are. Ours is a people's government, a people's democracy. President Abraham Lincoln said "A government of the people, by the people and for the people..." They sound like noble words, but people can make horrible mistakes. Our democracy depends on people who hold dear the ideals of American democracy.

That means we have an important responsibility as the people. We the people. And some people... some powerful people, can make terrible mistakes.

PREVIEWSworld: Who do you want to read this book?

George Takei: I'm an octogenarian, and to me, everyone under the age of 65 are "youngsters." So, I want youngsters, people who are going to be taking over our country, to be aware of this dark chapter of American history. So that's the group the graphic novel is aimed at.

We live in a society with many different people, and we're all Americans. That's what makes America interesting... we're not all the same.

PREVIEWSworld: What do you want people to take away with them after reading the book?

George Takei: I hope the young people that read this book understand the importance of their being active participants in the process of our democracy. Our democracy is great, but it depends on us as a people to make the ideals of this country true. I want people that read this book realize that prejudice is not what makes this country great, in fact, it makes it horrible. We have to be better than that. And we can.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
George Takei Revisits His Haunting Childhood in 'They Called Us Enemy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
George Takei is probably best known for his role as Lt. Hikaru Sulu on the classic 1960s science fiction TV series, Star Trek and its many feature film sequel. Since then, he has gone on to become an iconic pop culture figure, advocating for LGBTQ rights and cultivating his trademark exclamation of "Oh, My" into a meme-worthy catchphrase for the ages.

# data[].attributes.headline
“We Are Better Than This” SLJ Talks to George Takei

# data[].attributes.subject
“We Are Better Than This” SLJ Talks to George Takei

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo courtesy of George Takei

The opening scene of George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy (Top Shelf, 2019) is a memory that is still vivid to the 82-year-old actor, although he was not quite five years old when it happened.

"My parents got us up very early" on that spring day in 1942, he recalls, "and my brother and I were told to wait in the living room while our parents did some last-minute packing in the bedroom. Suddenly, we saw two soldiers marching up the driveway, carrying rifles with shiny bayonets. They stomped up the front porch and with their fists began pounding on the front door. Bang! Bang! Bang!"

What happened next is the stuff of nightmares: Takei and his family were taken from their home and imprisoned, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, in camps situated in remote areas of the country.

The mass internment of American citizens and legal residents of Japanese descent followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order enabling the creation of military areas from which "any and all persons" could be removed. California, Oregon, and Washington were declared military areas, and thousands of Japanese Americans were taken by force from their homes and imprisoned in concentration camps.

Takei's book is a reminder of a dark period in American history, one that he cautions is being repeated in the present day.

Beauty in an ugly place

But his story is also a hopeful one: The Japanese American child who was once put on a train with a numbered luggage tag grew up to become an American icon, thanks to his acting role as Mr. Sulu in Star Trek, his public affirmation of his identity as a gay man, and his role as an activist for LGBT rights. What brought him through the ordeal of the camps was his parents' love and their refusal to lose faith in the country that had betrayed them.

After the soldiers banged on the door, the Takei family was taken to the Santa Anita racetrack, where they were held for a few weeks, then transported to Rohwer, Arkansas. Rohwer was a concentration camp, Takei states emphatically. The reason for their incarceration was very clear: "We looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor," he says.

Takei's parents did their best to shelter their children from the reality of what was happening. They presented the trip as a vacation, and on the long train ride from California to Arkansas, his mother produced a series of treats from a bag of goodies to keep them entertained. Once they were settled in Rohwer, Takei's father became the manager of their block of residences.

They Called Us Enemy © George Takei, courtesy Top Shelf Productions/IDW Publishing.

"He spoke English and Japanese fluently, so he could communicate with the immigrant generation as well as the American-born generation," Takei says.

He also did what he could to improve morale. "Resilience isn't all just teeth-gritting, strength, and fortitude," Takei says, quoting his father. "It's also the ability to find beauty in an ugly place, to find joy, and to fall in love." His father organized a baseball league, dances for the young people, and talent shows for the old-timers to build a sense of community.

Takei's parents shielded him from the awful uncertainty about what might happen next. When Takei was a teenager, his father talked openly about his feelings at the time. "He said the thing that tore him up the most was to see those barbed wire fences-they had guns pointed at us from the sentry towers-and wonder what's going to happen to his kids," Takei says."

During one of those conversations, the teenage Takei questioned why his parents hadn't fought for their civil rights, as African Americans were doing at the time. "I said 'Daddy, I would have organized my friends at school and gone down to the federal building and we would have protested,'" Takei says. "And my father said 'Well, the situation was different. I had to think about your mother, you, your brother, and your sister. They were pointing guns at me. If something happened to me, what do you think would have happened to you?'"

Takei was too young then to know how the soldiers and those who worked at the camps felt about what was happening, although he does depict some instances of kindness in the book. As an adult, though, he has heard from people whose parents worked in the camps. "One was a guard at the Tule Lake segregation camp, and her father was deeply sorry for it," he recalls.

One of those advocating for the internment was California attorney general Earl Warren, who would go on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In 1942, he had ambitions of running for governor and rode the tide of prejudice against Japanese Americans. "[Warren] made an amazing statement," Takei says. "He said, 'We have no reports of spying or sabotage or fifth-column activities by Japanese Americans, and that is ominous because the Japanese are 'inscrutable.' You can't tell what they are thinking. So it would be prudent to lock them up before they do anything.'"

The loyalty question

That suspicion began to dissipate as the war went on and the need for manpower in the armed forces increased. When the war broke out, Japanese Americans were classified as "enemy aliens." Those who were in the service were told to surrender their weapons, and those who tried to enlist were turned away. By 1943, the government needed more soldiers, and the president declared that Japanese Americans could serve, provided they were "loyal citizens." The internees who volunteered to join the army served in a segregated unit, which suffered heavy casualties and was one of the most decorated units of the war.

The government's need to determine loyalty led to a moment of crisis for Takei's parents, when they were asked "Will you swear loyalty to the United States of America and forswear your loyalty to the Emperor of Japan?"

"We're Americans," Takei says, still indignant 75 years later. "My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. We kids didn't have to answer to that, but we were born in Los Angeles. For the government to presume that we had an inborn, racial loyalty to the emperor was insulting. So if you answered 'no,' meaning 'I don't have a loyalty to the emperor to forswear,' that 'no' applied to the first part of the very same sentence, 'will you swear loyalty to the United States?' If you answered 'yes,' meaning 'I do swear my loyalty to the United States,' then that 'yes' applied to the second part." Because Takei's parents answered "no," they were deemed "disloyals" and relocated to the more prison-like camp in Tule Lake, California.

Life after camp

As the war drew to a close, the Takeis faced another choice: Whether to return home or stay in the camp. By then the danger was greater outside the camps, as anti-Japanese sentiment continued to rage.

When the internees were released, they were each given $25 and a one-way ticket to anywhere in the country. While their dry-cleaning business was gone, the Takeis returned to Los Angeles. The first home they could afford was on Skid Row. "The smell was intolerable," Takei recalls, "and the sirens were shrieking day and night. At night, our room would glow red from the lights from the police cars."

Things got better. Takei's father worked at a series of jobs, and the family moved to a Mexican American neighborhood (where Takei learned Spanish and his mother learned to make enchiladas and tacos), and then to a mixed-race, middle-class neighborhood.

A people's democracy becomes a personal mission

Takei ends the book with a new turn of the wheel: On, June 25, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down the 1944 decision (Korematsu v. United States) supporting the internment of Japanese Americans, the same day the court upheld President Donald Trump's ban on allowing people to enter the U.S. from Muslim countries.

"It's chilling," Takei says. "This has been an unending cycle, one minority after another. And here it's happening again. The humanitarian outrage on the southern border, or the Muslim travel ban. It's the same mentality that put us in those barbed-wire concentration camps."

Nonetheless, Takei says, the reaction to the travel ban gives him hope. "Immediately after [the ban], thousands of young Americans rushed to the airports to demonstrate, and attorneys offered pro bono service to foreigners coming into the country," he says, "and the deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, said 'I will not defend this.' We are making progress. No one came to our aid in 1942."

To this day, many people, including the descendants of former internees, don't know the story of the Japanese American internment.

"My mission in life is to raise the awareness on the hope that one of these days, we will learn that we are better than this, that our democracy has to be truer than this," says Takei.

"My father said this is a participatory democracy, and we have to participate. This is a people's democracy that has produced great, noble ideals, but people are also fallible human beings, so we have to go in there and participate. Our people's democracy is existentially dependent on people who believe in these noble ideals and actively engage in making them true."

Brigid Alverson edits SLJ 's "Good Comics for Kids" blog (slj.com/GoodComics).

See also:

Takei Opens SLJ Summit With Emotional, Inspiring History Lesson | School Library Journal

SLJ's starred review of They Called Us Enemy | School Library Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"We Are Better Than This" | SLJ Talks to George Takei

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Actor andactivist George Takei is as impassioned as ever aboutsocial justice. Theauthor of They Called Us Enemy, hisgraphic memoir, Takei spoke to Brigid Alverson about the Japanese American experience and how the lessons of history can inform the current struggle for democracy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I know what concentration camps are," George Takei, the actor-activist turned social media rock star, tweeted last month to his nearly 3 million followers. "I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again."

Takei was speaking, of course, of the immigrant detention facilities along the U.S.-Mexico border. Takei has no patience for muddied political semantics. While a small boy, during World War II, the Los Angeles-born Takei and his family were kept behind barbed wire for four years, in what became known as "Japanese internment camps" - another term that he cannot abide. According to the publisher of Takei's new book, he believes such verbiage incorrectly suggests that Japan ran the camps, or that the U.S. government held exclusively Japanese people and not Japanese Americans like himself.
['Kids in cages': House hearing examines immigration detention as Democrats push for more information]
Takei, still best known for playing Sulu in the Star Trek franchise, has turned his experience into a riveting graphic novel-memoir. "They Called Us Enemy"- co-written with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker - arrives Tuesday as a necessary testament to what stoked fear and federal racism looked like eight decades ago within America's own borders.

"They Called Us Enemy" poignantly paints how Takei's father, a longtime U.S. resident, and Takei's mother, a Sacramento-born American citizen, suddenly were declared an "alien enemy" by a presidential proclamation that doomed thousands shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

"Enemy" might draw some comparisons to the graphic novel " Maus," Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning epic about his father's experiences during the Holocaust. Yet in many ways, "Enemy" more strongly echoes another American icon's memoir: " March," Rep. John Lewis's illustrated trilogy set during the civil rights movement.
[How Rep. John Lewis's 'March' trilogy found inspiration in a 60-year-old MLK comic book]
"March," also published by Top Shelf, proved popular with educators and became the first graphic novel to win the National Book Award for young people's literature. The publisher appears to be positioning "Enemy" as a similar hit: It is written in a way that is accessible to older grade-schoolers, and Takei is not only appearing at pop-culture conventions (he's scheduled to appear at San Diego Comic-Con this month) but also at American Library Association conferences (he was a star speaker last month in Washington).

This is a sage strategy, because "Enemy" deserves to be a popular recommendation at school libraries across the land - humanizing a brutal chapter in U.S. history that even many adults seem to understand only vaguely.

Takei wants us to feel, even smell, the inhumane treatment as he relives spring 1942, when his family of five was among those herded like livestock to the Santa Anita racetrack - living in small stalls that reeked of horse manure - before being "tagged" for eventual relocation by train. The pictures are heart-rending and the prose is stark as the author begins his schooling in the shadow of guard towers.

On one hand, children are remarkably adaptable, and Takei notes how his youthful lens can make him an unreliable narrator when it comes to his own small adventures: "Childhood memories are especially slippery . . . they can often be a misrendering of the truth." (Becker's monochromatic art depicts that aptly; there is light in her lines, reflecting young George's playful buoyancy.)

Yet Takei also pulls back to reflect the sweeping scale of the tragedy, as unrecoverable assets are frozen and seized; strict curfews are enforced; and FDR's infamous Executive Order No. 9066 sends more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent to relocation centers. He details how Japanese immigrants, despite long U.S. residency, had no path to citizenship; some Japanese Americans who entered the military before Pearl Harbor were even forced to surrender their weapons. And he spotlights the sentiment of Sen. Tom Stewart, who says publicly: "There is not a single Japanese in this country who would not stab you in the back."
[Migrant children: 'Lies just big enough to stick' are all too familiar to George Takei, who was interned in America during WWII]
Takei's family is sent to Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, where more than 8,000 people are held, and later to a center in Tule Lake, Calif., after his parents fail to agree to philosophically twisted "loyalty" questions on prisoner questionnaires.

And yet Takei, despite such a bitter experience, holds on to his father's words. He "taught me the power of American democracy - the people's democracy," Takei writes, even if human fallibility can at times mar American ideals. (Takei also makes a point of spotlighting two "outside heroes" during his internment: Quaker missionary Herbert Nicholson and San Francisco lawyer Wayne Collins.)

At 82, Takei has evolved into an increasingly powerful voice for oppressed communities, and "Enemy" finds him at peak moral clarity - an unflinching force in these divisive times.

Young readers would do well to learn his story of a childhood set against a historically racist backdrop, told in clear and unmuddled prose. As our politicians trade semantics, "They Called Us Enemy" calls upon readers to see past the walls, cages and words that divide us.

Michael Cavna, creator of the "Comic Riffs" column, covers comics and illustration for The Post.

They Called Us Enemy

By George Takei with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker

Top Shelf. 208 pp. $19.99

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Review | George Takei has talked about his family's internment before. But never quite like this.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I know what concentration camps are," George Takei, the actor-activist turned social media rock star, tweeted last month to his nearly 3 million followers. "I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again." Takei was speaking, of course, of the immigrant detention facilities along the U.S.-Mexico border.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
They Called Us Enemy
Written by George Takei, Justin Eisenger, and Steven Scott
Illustrated by Harmony Becker
Top Shelf Productions
As too often happens in our country, it's a current repeat of aspects of an earlier horror that spurs us into facing up to our own guilt in regard to what happened before. It's not that the internment camps of the 1940s that imprisoned Japanese-Americans haven't been acknowledged and discussed, it's not that we haven't acknowledged that our country did the wrong thing. It's that we haven't actually learned the lesson we needed to learn - a lesson we had already not learned when the 1940s rolled around.

George Takei's new comic memoir, They Called Us Enemy, which covers his childhood in the camps and his adulthood coming to terms with his experience, hopes to help that lesson be digested more deeply. And it does so with a sense of urgency as Takei watches scores of undocumented immigrant children face the same terror as he did so long ago.

The Japanese American camps did not just happen out of nowhere. Prejudice against Japanese residents was already entrenched in American culture, particularly in California, merely exploding to an unprecedented level after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Part of what made it unprecedented was the official quality of it, with the U.S. government branding Japanese American families "suspected enemies" in order to freeze their assets and bank accounts, seizing property in home searches, rounding up and arresting community and religious leaders and making them disappear for years with a skill worthy of Iron Curtain nations.

California attorney general Earl Warren led the call to Japanese American detainment. The one person who could have stopped the racist wave, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, instead signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Not even three months had passed since Pearl Harbor before the west coast was declared a military zone and Japanese American citizens were incarcerated by their own country.

As Takei points out, while Roosevelt's executive order never specified Japanese people, the government of California were more direct, and soldiers rounded them up and took them away to camps, while also allowing the state to confiscate property, including farms, from the incarcerated people. These policies and many more were justified by public racist statements made by government officials.

Takei's family - his father was a Japanese immigrant, but he and his mother were American-born, and his two siblings also - could not escape being swept up in this paranoid nightmare. And so one night soldiers showed up at the their door.

"Our childhoods continued to be made of grotesquely abnormal circumstances which would eventually become our 'normal,'" is how Takei sums up the next four years of his life. Taken to live at the Santa Anita Racetrack horse stables and later grim camps in Arkansas and California, Takei relates a steady stream of degradation, born of paranoia and justified by racism.

In Takei's experience, the Japanese American community, despite their treatment as victims of this American condition, rose above the expectations of their captors, generally creating communities behind the barbed wire. Takei documents numerous group efforts to help neighbors and improve the quality of life within these camps regardless of whether the government helped or not.

Leadership positions followed and Takei watched his father take on the role of block manager as part of a larger effort to create order within the imposed chaos and not allow their situation to dictate how they lived. It's an admirable vision that also functions as a rebellion of sorts, particularly considering what they built could and would be torn apart by government-ordered relocations. People respond in kind to disrespect and neglectful treatment, though, and in some internment camps, the United States faced forceful resentment of its own creation, which further fractured the communities that had appeared and propelled shame across generations.

"Shame is a cruel thing," says Takei. "It should rest on the perpetrators, but they don't carry it the way victims do."

And even when the ordeal was over, the population was shoved back into the world with no consideration, no help, some deported, some left to precarious circumstances and displacement in America - not to mention good, old-fashioned, everyday American racism. Like baseball and apple pie, you might say.

With all the heaviness inherent in Takei's story, lightening the emotional load of the presentation doesn't come easy. Takei doesn't shy away from happier moments, even amusing moments, but the circumstances in which they happen taint them from being true releases. Harmony Becker does a huge amount of the heavy-lifting in keeping They Called Us Enemy from becoming too emotionally oppressive. Her work is in a Manga-style and keeps the darkness at bay even as it clearly depicts such negative events. In many ways, she is the perfect compliment to Takei's soul, visualizing his overriding emotions to his own experience.

And it is Takei's soul that is the star of They Called Us Enemy, especially in its representation of the souls of so many others. If there is any power to America, anything truly admirable, it's that despite the treatment doled out to people considered "the other," most of them choose to remain peaceful, to remain in the country, and to work to make it more fair and welcoming despite how they've been treated. Not to assimilate without question to what is wrong, but help shift the country into a better place. That's pretty amazing. People who are shit upon typically see potential and recognize their own role in making the country reach it, despite the harangue of righteous oppressors that never seems to go away.

Takei doesn't explore the ideas historically - that is, he doesn't trace a history of American mass detention prior to World War II - but he does lay out the connection between what he endured and what is going on now with undocumented immigrants, and he he doesn't try to soft sell it. He presents it as a horror that we ought to be ashamed of. And he's right. We should know better by now. Such actions do no good and it's no longer acceptable to intentionally obfuscate from ourselves the nightmares we are currently creating for others by lashing out at them about our own insecurities. And as Takei reminds us, we each play a role in the dehumanization of others, so we should also do our part in striking that from the American character.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
INDIE VIEW: 'They Called Us Enemy' lays out the history we're doomed to repeat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
They Called Us Enemy Written by George Takei, Justin Eisenger, and Steven Scott Illustrated by Harmony Becker Top Shelf Productions As too often happens in our country, it's a current repeat of aspects of an earlier horror that spurs us into facing up to our own guilt in regard to what happened before.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
*purchase Links:

Jude never thought she'd be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind her, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her home town start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives.

At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud. The American movies that Jude has always loved haven't quite prepared her for starting school in the U.S. -and her new label of "Middle Eastern," an identity she's never known before. But this life also brings unexpected surprises-there are new friends, a whole new family, and a school musical that Jude might just try out for. Maybe America, too, is a place where Jude can be seen as she really is.

This lyrical, life-affirming story is about losing and finding home, and most importantly, finding yourself.

" Poetic and powerful...There are so many reasons to read this novel. It's a book about kindness, for one; it sings, for another...And that's Jude. I wanted nothing more than to be her friend and listen to whatever she had to say about life. She deserves to shine in the spotlight, and so does Other Words for Home." (NPR)

"Warga portrays with extraordinary talent the transformation of a family's life before and after the war began in Syria.... Her free-verse narration cuts straight to the bone... [and] confront[s] the difficult realities of being Muslim and Arab in the U.S. Poetic, immersive, hopeful." (Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*)

"From start to finish, Warga's middle-grade debut puts its hands around your heart and holds it...Other Words for Home should find its way into every middle-grade reader's hands." ( Booklist, * starred review*)

[In] this timely book... rhythmic lines distill Jude's deepest emotions.... Warga effectively shows, as she writes in an author's note, that "children who are fleeing from a war zone... want the same things all of us do-love, understanding, safety, a chance at happiness." (Publishers Weekly, * starred review*)

"Told in verse and divided into five sections chronicling Jude's flight from Syria and adjustment to America, this powerful middle grade novel explores the complicated concepts of war and corruption, home, family, belonging, and how, in Jude's own words, "It is strange to feel lucky/for something that is making my heart feel so sad." ( School Library Journal, * starred review*)

"Offers offers a realistic portrait of the strength it takes to move to a new country, as well as of the complicated dynamics between first- and second-generation immigrants." (The Horn Book, *starred review*)

" Other Words For Home is a salve for the world we live in today. It's a hope-filled story that doesn't pander, but instead peels back layers of culture and identity, fear and prejudice, exile and belonging, all wrapped around a young Syrian girl-Jude. Chocked with equal parts fear and moxie, Jude is a heart trying to figure out how to beat outside the body. I ached for, but simultaneously, found that though our stories are different, I her. This is a necessary story. We're lucky to have it in the world."-(Jason Reynolds, award-winning, bestselling author of Ghost and Long Way Down)

"Through Jude's eyes readers see firsthand what it is to leave behind one's beloved home and family as many refugees do every single day. Young readers will laugh with Jude, cry with her, and root for her every step of the way. A beautiful, powerful, and necessary book." ( Aisha Saeed, New York Times bestselling author of Amal Unbound)

" An emotional, gorgeous book that takes you into the fraught interior life of Jude, a dreamer, actress, daughter and little sister--who is also a Syrian refugee. Told in verse, Jude's story is one that is rarely shared, which makes its relatability that much more powerful. An absolute must-read book." ( Sabaa Tahir, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Ember in the Ashes series)

" Other Words for Home is a gorgeously written middle grade novel with words that soar off the page. Told in stunning verse and featuring an effortlessly lovable narrator, this book will be a staple of middle grade shelves for years to come." (Rachel Strolle, Teen Librarian, Glenside Public Library)

"Jasmine Warga's exceptional middle grade debut is a moving story about family, belonging, and the difficulty of straddling two cultures. Told in sure, thoughtful verse, Warga skillfully draws parallels between the political and social climates of both Syria and the U.S. through the eyes of an insightful and relatable main character, Jude." ( Sara Grochowski, Children's Specialist, McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, MI)

"Other Words for Home is like a family recipe. At the beginning you know that this is cared for, curated, and passed down. There is an heirloom quality to this story and yet it is fresh and modern. Jude's immigrant story is rich and light and full of personality. At the end, Jude has developed her own sense of of home; she is at home with herself. This is not just an immigrant story-it's a LIFE story." ( Amanda Connor, Kids Team Leader, Joseph-Beth Booksellers.)

"Other Words for Home is such an important book and should be required reading for every student at a middle-grade reading level. The character of Jude teaches us empathy as we read what it's like to be a young teenager from Syria trying to fit in in America. She tries to learn the English language while tackling discrimination and classmates unwilling to understand and accept her, including her cousin of the same age. Jasmine Warga has created a story that is both powerful and gentle, big but full of small moments, a happy but sad story that will live in your heart." ( Marilyn Robbins, BookBar, Denver, CO)

china: Beijing Yutian

Czech Republic: Argo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jude never thought she'd be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind her, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her home town start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives. At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If I were the questing type, the type who might travel to the peak of a very high mountain and demand things of the sky, I might demand a certain kind of book.

I wouldn't expect that book to be a verse novel of remarkable sensitivity. Nor would I expect that book to be a deceptively easy-to-read middle grade novel, where reading just one more - maybe two more - okay, three, four, five - I guess I'm just reading now - sections is all too tempting.

No, if I were the questing type and I had my chance to demand things from the sky, I might say: Give me a story about the ways in which people are kind to one another; the ways in which a community leans into kindness even while some people within it are sharp and cruel and fearful. Give me a story that tells us it's okay to be more than one thing, that two different places don't exist in competition; that you can love them both and it isn't a betrayal of one. Give me a story that will revel in a nuanced understanding of what is home; a story that gives us permission to search for it even when the proverbial They tell us we should already know our place and that's it, you only get the one.

Give me a story about imperfect, loving families. About seeing others clearly as you learn to see yourself clearly. A story with humor. A story with trouble. Give me a story with a love of life and a love of joy. Give me a story that speaks - that tells us to speak, to speak up! To speak loudly! To not worry about being told skety,be quiet, hush! Give me a story that tells us to be who we are and who we want to be - to love the spotlight even if we are told it isn't for us.

Give me a good story, please, one which introduces me to a new friend. Bonus points if it makes me want to be more myself. Extra bonus points if it makes me think about experiences outside of myself.

... along comes Jasmine Warga with 'Other Words for Home,' and she gives us Jude's story, and it is everything I wanted.

And along comes Jasmine Warga with Other Words for Home, and she gives us Jude's story, and it is everything I wanted.

Jude is a twelve-year-old girl from Syria who leaves behind her father and brother and friends in order to come with her mother to the United States - Cincinnati, middle America, the heartland - and live with her uncle's family. She is lonely. Her best friend isn't returning her letters. Skype sessions with her father are few and far between. Nobody's heard from her brother, who's gone to help in Aleppo, and she's not even sure he's okay. Her mother is pregnant. Her cousin wants nothing to do with her; Jude stands out, and in middle school, that's never a good thing. Back in Syria she spoke English well; by Cincinnati standards, not so much.

Just when she thinks she's getting a handle on living in America, something happens that draws hatred up like blood welling from a deep scratch. When Jude decides she's going to try out for the school play, Beauty and the Beast, her new friend Layla tells her she shouldn't do it: The stage isn't for girls like them.

Jude has other ideas.

There are so many reasons to read this novel. It's a book about kindness, for one; it sings, for another, as any good verse novel should. Verse novels are coming into vogue, and Jude's voice is heightened by Warga's decision to write her story this way.

It feels true. It feels like middle school and wanting things the way you do in middle school. It feels like being in the middle of so many things and not quite knowing how to navigate that uncertainty. But our protaganist is level-headed and charismatic, clear-eyed - and did I mention charismatic? At one point, Warga writes:

There is an Arabic proverb that says:
She makes you feel like a loaf of freshly baked bread.
It is said about

the nicest

kindest

people.

The type of people

who help you

rise.

And that's Jude. I wanted nothing more than to be her friend and listen to whatever she had to say about life. She deserves to shine in the spotlight, and so does Other Words for Home.
Jessica P. Wick is a writer, freelance editor, and California native currently living in Rhode Island.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
These 'Words For Home' Are Poetic And Powerful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jasmine Warga's middle grade novel in verse follows a Syrian immigrant girl struggling to fit in with her relatives in unfamiliar Cincinnati. It's remarkably sensitive, and deceptively easy to read.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I am honored to reveal the cover for Other Words for Home and share an interview between Aisha Saeed and Jasmine Warga. Thank you, Aisha and Jasmine!

Illustration Credit: Anoosha Syed

Hand Lettering Credit: Jenna Stempel-Lobell

Aisha: This novel is beautifully written in verse. What was the experience like writing in verse as compared to prose? How did you decide?

Jasmine: It's funny because I've always LOVED poetry and actually my first attempts at writing were poems. (Angsty teenage poems, anyone?) But I never thought about writing a novel in verse. Then last fall, I was really struggling to find Jude's voice and I started hearing these lines that sounded more like verse than prose. I told myself I'd write out a few pages and see how I felt about it, and the verse format ended up feeling really right for Jude's story. Additionally, Arabic is such an inherently poetic language and I think writing in verse helped me with the mind-block I was having of trying to authentically write from the perspective of someone whose first language is Arabic since my first language is English.

Aisha: All the characters in OWFH are nuanced and well developed. Aside from Jude, which character was the most complex to write?

Jasmine: Oh, thank you so much! Probably the character who required the most soul-searching and deep-digging on my part was Sarah, Jude's American cousin, who is half white and half Arab. Sarah feels torn between her two worlds and isn't quite sure how to reconcile the two. Her struggles are very similar to mine as a middle-schooler.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cover Reveal: Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I am honored to reveal the cover for Other Words for Home and share an interview between Aisha Saeed and Jasmine Warga. Thank you, Aisha and Jasmine! Illustration Credit: Anoosha Syed Hand Lettering Credit: Jenna Stempel-Lobell Aisha: This novel is beautifully written in verse. What was the experience like writing in verse as compared to prose?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Spring 2019 Publishers' Preview: Five Questions for Jasmine Warga

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This interview originally appeared in the March/April 2019 Horn Book Magazine as part of the Spring 2019 Publishers' Previews, an advertising supplement that allows participating publishers a chance to each highlight a book from its current list.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jasmine Warga has previously published two emotionally resonant novels for teens and, with her middle grade debut, now brings her skill at writing insightful, timely stories to a younger audience. Told in verse, Other Words for Home follows 12-year-old Syrian refugee Jude as she and her mother work to build a new home in Ohio while her father and brother are still in Syria. Warga spoke with PW about portraying Jude's specific refugee story, the nuances in writing for a middle grade audience after writing for teens, and rewriting a prose novel in verse.

What first brought you to writing for young readers?

I think it goes back to the fact that I was the most passionate and dedicated reader when I was younger. I don't think I've ever loved books again in the way that I did as a young person. I was kind of a lonely, outcast kid and books were my friends, my refuge, and my window to the world. Now that I get to write for young people, I have all these other answers about how interacting with young people today is so inspiring and that I believe every cliché about kids being our future, but the most honest answer is the selfish one: that I remember what books meant to me at that age and I'm hoping to replicate that experience for someone else.

Do you recall any titles or authors you enjoyed that you feel influenced you?

I'm of the generation that grew up with Harry Potter and, while those books obviously don't need a shout-out, I think that having a series that grew with me was such a singular experience that impacted me in countless ways.

I also remember Anne of Green Gables and how real Anne felt to me, even though her life was so different than mine. I could get lost in that world. Girl of the Limberlost, which my mom read aloud to me, was memorable. I read and reread From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Claudia was just such a badass. I was drawn to books with female characters who pushed against the standards that were being imposed by society. I was young and I don't think I made the connection of why I liked those stories so much, but these stories about brave, creative girls made me think I could be, too.

Why, after publishing two novels for teens, did you decide to switch to writing for middle grade readers?

Before I wrote My Heart and Other Black Holes, the things that I was working on were often whimsical middle grade stories. I unexpectedly lost my friend and My Heart and Other Black Holes was born out of that period of intense grief in my life. And, when that book sold, I was lucky enough to be offered a second young adult book. Still, I had an itch to return to middle grade.

This story, Jude's story, was always middle grade to me. I used to teach sixth grade science, so I think I've always had an affinity for that in-between space. I think [middle school] was also the worst years of my life, so it's rife with creative expression. The place where you struggled the most and felt the loneliest and out of place-I feel a lot of love for kids who are in the space.

What was the inspiration for Other Words for Home?

The first time I thought about writing a book about Syria and someone immigrating from Syria to the United States way back in the fall of 2013. My father is Jordanian and the Middle Eastern community in Cincinnati, where he lives, is pretty small. His best friend is Syrian, and we had all gone to this friend's house for dinner. At that dinner, there were several members of the friend's family who had just come over from Syria to live with them. I had had a general awareness of the unrest in Syria, but it wasn't at the level where it was in all the newspapers yet. What intrigued me the most wasn't the conflict, but the interaction I was watching between the cousins from Syria and the American kids in the family. [It made me start thinking of my Jordanian cousins and this idea of families separated by oceans. Their life experiences are so different, but they're still family, and this is an integral part of the American experience for lots of Americans.

Flash forward to the conflict in Syria getting worse and being covered in every Western newspaper. The response is mostly silence and apathy and, if not that, then actual contempt for these people fleeing a war zone. I don't think it's a coincidence that I'd also just become a mother-not that it's at all necessary to be a parent to feel for these people, especially parents, fleeing a war zone-but it hit me extra hard. I kept thinking that if Ohio, where I was living, was to turn into a war zone, I would do everything in my power to keep my daughter safe. It seemed like people in the U.S. were afraid of these mothers and children, which I found really upsetting, especially because of my familial ties to the people they were demonizing.

I started working on the book from there.

How did you ensure you were authentically portraying the experience of a young refugee? Did you conduct any research?

Jude is very lucky in that she has family in America. Unfortunately, now the book is even more fictional, because of the travel bans imposed by the current administration in the U.S. Jude's situation couldn't happen today, which is depressing given how hard her journey is already. I always knew that I was going to be writing her particular refugee story, not the ones that we see of these families getting into overcrowded boats and trying to flee through Turkey and Greece, then ending up in a camp. That's a whole separate story, I think. Jude's story was specifically of someone whose family had the means to pay for a plane ticket, which mirrored the experience of my family friends. So, I interviewed our friend and his Syrian and American born family. I also spoke with a lot of other people in Cincinnati's Syrian community.

I'm a Levant region Arab and, though the borders between Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon were drawn by Europeans-so they're fluid in terms of culture even years after having those borders-but certain words are pronounced differently. My Syrian friends who read the book early caught things like that.

I hope Other Words for Home is authentic. I tried to talk to a wide variety of people while also being aware that the scope of the story is narrow, and that Jude's experience is different than someone else's escape via a much less privileged route.

Did the news coverage and what was happening with refugees add a layer of pressure while writing this book?

I cried several times when writing this book. I felt a global heartbreak and selfish, personal heartbreak. I kept thinking about the possibility of conflict reaching Jordan and the fact that I wouldn't be able to bring my cousins over because, while Jordan wasn't named as one of the travel ban countries, I had a fear that it could one day be on the list. So yes, I felt lots of pressure.

There were also points where I felt that I needed to change the book because it was no longer factual, then I decided that I wouldn't be beholden to the news cycle and that I was going to write the story I set out to write.

I'd like to note that every person who immigrates to live here does in fact then live on land that was stolen from Indigenous people. I'm trying to be more purposeful about calling this out as it was mentioned to me earlier this year that the idea of perpetuating the U.S. as a country of immigrants without making that disclaimer is harmful to Native Americans.

Why did you choose to tell Jude's story in verse rather than prose?

Initially, the story was in prose. My editor and I kept going back and forth and the book was well into the editing process, but something still felt off. My editor [Alessandra Balzer] is really smart and always has great suggestions and had a lot of ideas about how to change the plot arc and pacing and all the things that are your normal go-to changes, but I kept feeling that the emotional heart of the novel was wrong. That's something your editor can't change for you, it's the writer's responsibility. I eventually realized that there was a distance between Jude and me, and narrative distance doesn't serve you well when you're writing in first person. I think it was because of the fear I had that I'd get her story wrong or that I wouldn't completely understand her as a character.

I went back and did more interviews and started thinking about how Arabic is a naturally poetic language. There are so many different words and ways to say things. Even the way you speak is more poetic than English phrases. I've always loved poetry and would always recommend prose writers read poetry to remember the beautiful things you can do with language. I was sitting in LAX terminal waiting to come home from my book trip to the Philippines and I was so sleepy and jet-lagged. I started hearing words and verses of the book in my head and it sounded so much better to me. It was more authentic and closer to the emotional core of the novel. So, in LAX, I wrote the first 15 pages in verse. The book was due in two weeks, but I sent my idea to my agent and editor, and both were on board with me completely scrapping and rewriting the book in verse.

What did that rewriting process look like?

I just rewrote the whole book. A verse novel is not made from just haphazardly putting line breaks into prose. Thankfully, I learned a lot about Jude and the other characters from the prose drafts, so it wasn't wasted time. I had a general plot arc in my mind, so I would have the prose version up, so I could refer to things if there was a line or character detail that I liked from the earlier drafts. You can't be afraid to rewrite your book. I'm telling myself that now as I'm working on my fourth book. Sometimes you can be too precious about revisions. I always think editing is going to be like painting rooms in a house, when really, it's rebuilding the whole house.

Does your writing process differ depending on whether you're writing verse or prose?

In prose, I like to think that I care about the aesthetics, too, that I like lines that flow well, but there's an economy of language in verse that made it important that every line and word was exactly right and had earned its place.

There's a lot left unsaid in a verse novel, whereas in prose, things are more fleshed out. In verse, words need to do more, so I was examining my writing with a different level of scrutiny. I don't think about rhythm as much with my prose books, either.

Does your process change when you're writing specifically for teens or middle graders?

Yes. Initially, after the first draft of this book, Alessandra said it wasn't a middle grade book. She was right. [laughs] I was frustrated and insisted that it was [middle grade] because the character was 12. She pointed out that the voice was clearly young adult. You can't just make a character 12 and call it a middle grade book. I was agitated and felt that we were underestimating 12-year-old kids, but she explained that it wasn't at all about underestimating kids, it was about the breadth of experience. A 16-year-old has lived so much life and has so much more experience to reference; it's not about how sophisticated the language is or the content. It's about being authentic to the way a 12-year-old will relate to those details.

I also read all the great middle grade books Alessandra recommended and tried to immerse myself in that world and think about how I saw the world at that age. I think that served the book well because it wasn't me trying to write a less sophisticated YA book, but me honoring what it feels like to be 11, 12, and 13 years old.

What do you hope readers gain from reading Other Words for Home?

I hope the readership for this is varied, but I specifically hope young readers of color will read the book and be inspired by Jude's dreams. She's such a big dreamer and has these high hopes for herself and the courage to go out and achieve those dreams. The book is obviously difficult, and Jude faces a lot of challenges, but the thing I most love about the book are the parts that are about brown joy instead of brown pain. I hope that resonates with the readers who need to see that; she has a lot of love for herself, for her culture. It's a gift that I was giving to my 12-year-old self, who didn't see that on the page.

In the wider realm, I hope that Jude's story provides an empathetic window for other readers to humanize these children that we sometimes become numb to because we read about them in masses. Those numbers become so staggering that it's hard to wrap our heads around them and imagine a 12-year-old girl who likes American rom-coms and wants to be an actress and has a fondness for Kit-Kats-all those things that round out a person. Which is why I think singular narratives can be so powerful. Obviously, it's not the story of every single person, but it lends a human touch to tragedies that can feel so inhuman because of how mindboggling they are in scope.

And, finally, I feel like we live in a world, and, specifically, a country, where art for art's sake is a luxury for those whose rights and freedoms aren't under attack. I used to be embarrassed that my books always included some sort of message or call to action, but recently I've decided to lean into this idea of writing as activism. I'm very mindful of the fact I've been given a platform that so many people of my cultural and religious heritage aren't given, and I intend to use my voice in the best way that I can. Of course, I want to write beautiful and compelling books, but I also feel a duty to write books that inspire young readers to choose kindness and empathy in the most radical of ways.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on another middle grade book. It's in prose, not in verse, but I hope to do another middle grade in verse someday. It's tentatively titled The Shape of Thunder and is about two girls dealing with the aftermath of a school shooting in Ohio. It's about gun violence and how terrifying it is to be a parent in this country and send your kids to school every day. I live across from an elementary school and was watching kindergarteners do a drill. I was thinking about how soon I would need to talk to my oldest about doing drills in school and what a world that we live in that we are expecting our kids to save us, as opposed to having the moral courage to do something about the issue. So, another book with a tough topic that I hope has those pockets of joy and hope.
Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, $16.99 May 28 ISBN 978-0-06-274780-8

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jasmine Warga has previously published two emotionally resonant novels for teens and, with her middle grade debut, now brings her skill at writing insightful, timely stories to a younger audience. Told in verse, Other Words for Home follows 12-year-old Syrian refugee Jude as she and her mother work to build a new home in Ohio while her father and brother are still in Syria.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About Kelly Yang KELLY YANG Ever since she was a little girl, Kelly Yang has LOVED telling stories. She tells all kinds of stories - stories about gutsy girls and bold boys, about motels, loan sharks, immigration, poverty, and race. The thing all her stories have in common is they are important, accessible, and filled...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teacher Resources Teacher Resources Classroom Discussion Guides Front Desk Educator's Guide from ADL Education: https://www.adl.org/media/12859/download Front Desk Parent/Family Discussion Guide from ADL Education: https://www.adl.org/media/12860/download Scholastic Discussion Guide FrontDesk Author's Note FrontDesk Writing Prompts Front Desk Classroom Ideas Games and Activities FRONT DESK Monopoly Game Videos Kelly reading from the first pages of FRONT DESK and answering questions...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
FRONT DESK Kelly Yang GRA19 Author Video Q&A Week 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hi, Kelly Yang! Thank you for visiting Watch. Connect. Read. to share Front Desk 's WONDERFUL cover and to finish my sentences. I great...

# data[].attributes.headline
​How My Librarians Saw Something in Me My Own Parents Didn’t by Kelly Yang

# data[].attributes.subject
​How My Librarians Saw Something in Me My Own Parents Didn’t by Kelly Yang

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Kelly Yang, Guest Blogger

When I was little, I had an enormous secret - my parents and I were first generation struggling immigrants from China, we lived in a motel, and life was very, very hard. Carrying around this secret was like carrying a gigantic backpack, one I could never put down, except when I was in the library.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I went to eight different schools for eight different grades. At some of these schools, the other kids would tease me about my weird looking clothes (bought second hand from a thrift shop) or my small eyes. I remember hiding in the library during lunch, crouching in between the aisles, hoping the librarian wouldn't see me because we weren't really supposed to be in the library at lunch. The librarian, of course, saw me. She came over, smiled at me - no judgment -- and handed me a book.

From then on, I went to the library every day. What started out as my sanctuary, the only place I truly felt completely safe, quickly became so much more. Immersed in the pages of a book, I could be anyone. I could run alongside Lucy in Narnia and swim the chocolate lake in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory! It didn't matter that my parents and I worked seven days a week or that the last vacation my family took was coming here to this country - I could travel the world, be anyone, do anything!

And after I read each book, the wonderful librarians in my school would sit down with me and chat with me about it. They would ask me questions that nobody ever asked me before, questions like "How did you feel after reading this book?" and "Did the ending make your heart sing?" I was so moved by their questions and their interest in me. It made me want to read more and I devoured book after book. I felt smart in the library, whereas in class, sometimes I felt a little dumb, particularly when we had to read out loud (which I wasn't very good at) or we were given a difficult award-winning book, which for some reason I just couldn't understand. On those days, I would shrink in my seat, wondering if I would ever make it out of the motels.

I did make it out of the motels. I went on to enter university at the age of 13 and graduate from UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. I owe it all to the heroic librarians of this country who looked at me and didn't see a poor motel girl with messy hair and tattered pants. They saw a girl with potential. A girl with promise in English, a language she wasn't born with but through their kind, patient guidance, picked up and embraced as her own. The librarians saw something in me my own parents did not see. That is the only reason I am where I am today.

I am living, walking proof in the power of libraries and librarians to change lives. And now, as an author, I am so proud to be giving back, writing accessible and important books with diverse characters so that all children can see themselves in books. I hope my books bring hope and comfort to children of all walks of life, just as the librarians in my school brought me.

Kelly Yang is the author of FRONT DESK (Arthur Levine/Scholastic), a debut middle grade novel about a 10 year old Chinese American immigrant girl who manages the front desk of a motel while her parents clean the rooms. FRONT DESK has earned four starred reviews, is an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and a Washington Post Best Book to Inspire Young Readers. Kelly immigrated to America when she was 6 years old without knowing a word of English and grew up in Southern California, where she and her parents worked in three different motels. She eventually left the motels and went to college at the age of 13. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. After law school, she gave up law to pursue her passion of writing and teaching children writing. She is the founder of The Kelly Yang Project, a writing and debating program for kids. In her 13 years teaching, Kelly has helped thousands of children find their voice and become better writers and more powerful speakers. Before turning to fiction, she was also a columnist for the South China Morning Post for many years. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
​How My Librarians Saw Something in Me My Own Parents Didn't by Kelly Yang

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Kelly Yang, Guest Blogger When I was little, I had an enormous secret - my parents and I were first generation struggling immigrants from China, we lived in a motel, and life was very, very hard. Carrying around this secret was like carrying a gigantic backpack, one I could never put down, except when I was in the library.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kelly Yang Taps Memories Of Her Immigrant Childhood

# data[].attributes.subject
Kelly Yang Taps Memories Of Her Immigrant Childhood

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kelly Yang came to the United States from China at the age of 6. From ages 8-12, she helped her parents manage motels, often by taking charge of the front desk.

She's now published the kids' book " Front Desk," which was inspired by her own experiences.

Here & Now's Femi Oke speaks with Yang (@kellyyanghk) about the book and her thoughts on the current immigration crisis.
by Kelly Yang
My parents told me that America would be this amazing place where we could live in a house with a dog, do whatever we want, and eat hamburgers till we were red in the face. So far, the only part of that we've achieved is the hamburger part, but I was still holding out hope. And the hamburgers here are pretty good.

The most incredible burger I've ever had was at the Houston space center last summer. We weren't planning on eating there - everybody knows museum food is fifty thousand times more expensive than outside food. But one whiff of the sizzling bacon as we passed by the café and my knees wobbled. My parents must have heard the howls of my stomach, because the next thing I knew, my mother was rummaging through her purse for coins.

We only had enough money for one hamburger, so we had to share. But, man, what a burger. It was a mile high with real bacon and mayonnaise and pickles!

My mom likes to tease that I devoured the whole thing in one gulp, leaving the two of them only a couple of crumbs. I'd like to think I gave them more than that.

The other thing that was great about that space center was the free air conditioning. We were living in our car that summer, which sounds like a lot of fun but actually wasn't, because our car's AC was busted. So after the burger, my dad parked himself in front of the vent and stayed there the entire rest of the time. It was like he was trying to turn his fingers into Popsicles.

My mom and I bounced from exhibit to exhibit instead. I could barely keep up with her. She was an engineer back in China, so she loves math and rockets. She oohed and aahed over this module and that module. I wished my cousin Shen could have been there. He loves rockets too.

When we got to the photo booth, my mother's face lit up. The booth took a picture of you and made it look like you were a real astronaut in space. I went first. I put my head where the cardboard cutout was and smiled when the guy said, " Cheese." When it was my mom's turn to take her photo, I thought it would be funny to jump into her shot. The result was a picture of her in an astronaut suit, hovering over Earth, and me standing right next to her in my flip-flops, doing bunny ears with my fingers.

My mother's face crumpled when she saw her picture. She pleaded with the guy to let her take another one, but he said, "No can do. One picture per person." For a second, I thought she was going to cry.

We still have the picture. Every time I look at it, I wish I could go back in time. If I could do it all over again, I would not photobomb my mom's picture. And I'd give her more of my burger. Not the whole thing but definitely some more bites.
...
At the end of that summer, my dad got a job as an assistant fryer at a Chinese restaurant in California. That meant we didn't have to live in our car anymore and we could move into a small one-bedroom apartment. It also meant my dad brought home fried rice from work every day. But sometimes, he'd also bring back big ol' blisters all up and down his arm. He said they were just allergies. But I didn't think so. I think he got them from frying food all day long in the sizzling wok.

My mom got a job in the front of the restaurant as a waitress. Everybody liked her, and she got great tips. She even managed to convince the boss to let me go with her to the restaurant after school, since there was nobody to look after me.

My mother's boss was a wrinkly white-haired Chinese man who reeked of garlic and didn't believe in wasting anything - not cooking oil, not toilet paper, and certainly not free labor.

"You think you can handle waitressing, kid?" he asked me.

"Yes, sir!" I said. Excitement pulsated in my ear. My first job! I was determined not to let him down.

There was just one problem - I was only nine then and needed two hands just to hold one dish steady. The other waitresses managed five plates at a time. Some didn't even need hands - they could balance a plate on their shoulder.

When the dinner rush came, I too loaded up my carrying tray with five dishes. Big mistake. As my small back gave in to the mountainous weight, all my dishes came crashing down. Hot soup splashed onto customers, and fried prawns went f lying across the restaurant.

I was fired on the spot and so was my mother. No amount of begging or promising to do the dishes for the next gazillion years would change the owner's mind. The whole way home, I fought tears in my eyes.

I thought of my three cousins back home. None of them had ever gotten fired before. Like me, they were only children as well. In China, every child is an only child, ever since the government decided all families are allowed only one. Since none of us had siblings, we were our siblings. Leaving them was the hardest part about leaving China.

I didn't want my mom to see me cry in the car, but eventually that night, she heard me. She came into my room and sat on my bed. "Hey, it's okay," she said in Chinese, hugging me tight. "It's not your fault."

She wiped a tear from my cheek. Through the thin walls, I could hear the sounds of husbands and wives bickering and babies wailing from the neighboring apartments, each one as cramped as ours.

"Mom," I asked her, "why did we come here? Why did we come to America?" I repeated.

My mother looked away and didn't say anything for a long time. A plane flew overhead, and the picture frames on the wall shook.

She looked in my eyes.

"Because it's freer here," she finally said, which didn't make any sense. Nothing was free in America. Everything was so expensive.

"But, Mom - "

"One day, you'll understand," she said, kissing the top of my head. "Now go to sleep."

I drifted to sleep, thinking about my cousins and missing them and hoping they were missing me back.
...
After my mother got fired from the restaurant, she got very serious about job hunting. She called it getting back on her horse. It was 1993 and she bought every Chinese newspaper she could f ind. She pored over the jobs section with a magnifying glass like a scientist. That's when she came across an unusual listing.

A man named Michael Yao had put an ad out in the Chinese newspaper looking for an experienced motel manager. The ad said that he owned a little motel in Anaheim, California, and he was looking for someone to run the place. The job came with free boardng too! My mother jumped up and grabbed the phone - our rent then cost almost all my dad's salary. (And who said things in America were free?)

To her surprise, Mr. Yao was equally enthusiastic. He didn't seem to mind that my parents weren't experienced and really liked the fact that they were a couple.

"Two people for the price of one," he joked in his thick Taiwanese-accented Mandarin when we went over to his house the next day.

My parents smiled nervously while I tried to stay as still as I could and not screw it up for them, like I'd screwed up my mother's restaurant job. We were sitting in the living room of Mr. Yao's house, or rather, his mansion. I made myself look at the f loor and not stare at the top of Mr. Yao's head, which was all shiny under the light, like it had been painted in egg white.

The door opened, and a boy about my age walked in. He had on a T-shirt that said I don't give a, and underneath it, a picture of a rat and a donkey. I raised an eyebrow.

"Jason," Mr. Yao said to the boy. "Say hello." "Hi," Jason muttered.

My parents smiled at Jason.

"What grade are you in?" they asked him in Chinese.

Jason replied in English, "I'm going into fifth grade."

"Ah, same as Mia," my mom said. She smiled at Mr. Yao. "Your son's English is so good." She turned to me. "Hear that, Mia? No accent."

My cheeks burned. I felt my tongue in my mouth, like a limp lizard.

"Of course he speaks good English. He was born here," Mr. Yao said. "He speaks native English."

Native. I mouthed the word. I wondered if I worked really hard, would I also be able to speak native English one day? Or was that something completely off-limits for me? I looked over at my mom, who was shaking her head. Jason disappeared off to his room, and Mr. Yao asked my parents if they had any questions.

"Just to make sure, we can live at the motel for free?" my mom asked.

"Yes," Mr. Yao said.

"And . . . what about . . ." My mom struggled to get the words out. She shook her head, embarrassed to say it. "Will we get paid?"

"Oh, right, payment," Mr. Yao said, like it hadn't dawned on him at all. "How's five dollars a customer?"

I glanced at my mom. I could tell that she was doing math in her head because she always got this dreamy smile on her face.

"Thirty rooms at five dollars a room - that's a hundred and fifty dollars a night," my mom said, her eyes widening. She looked at my dad. "That's a lot of money!"

It was a humongous amount of money. We could buy hamburgers every day, one for each of us - we wouldn't even need to share!

"When can you start?" Mr. Yao asked.

"Tomorrow," my mom and dad blurted out at the exact same time.

Mr. Yao laughed.

As my parents got up to shake his hands, Mr. Yao muttered, "I have to warn you. It's not the nicest motel in the world."

My parents nodded. I could tell it made no difference to them what the motel looked like. It could look like the inside of a Greyhound bus toilet for all we cared; at $150 a day plus free rent, we were in.
Excerpted from the book FRONT DESK by Kelly Yang. Copyright © 2018 by Kelly Yang. Republished with permission of Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kelly Yang Taps Memories Of Her Immigrant Childhood For YA Novel 'Front Desk'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kelly Yang came to the United States from China at the age of 6. From ages 8-12, she helped her parents manage motels, often by taking charge of the front desk. She's now published the kids' book " Front Desk," which was inspired by her own experiences.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kelly Yang mines her experience as child immigrant in US for touching debut novel

# data[].attributes.subject
Kelly Yang mines her experience as child immigrant in US for touching debut novel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From poverty to college at 13: Chinese immigrant experience in US

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Front Desk, the debut novel of Harvard Law graduate and Hong Kong writing and debate coach Kelly Yang, recounts the highs and lows of a family-run motel as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old desk clerk - as she once was herself

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Episode Outline:

Listen to the episode here!
Intro
Hi everyone and welcome to Books Between - a podcast for educators, librarians, parents, and everyone who loves middle grade books! My goal is to help you connect kids between 8-12 with fantastic books and share inspiring conversations with the authors and educators who make that magic happen.

I'm your host, Corrina Allen - a mom of two girls, a 5th grade teacher, and I just discovered the COOLEST thing last week and I have to share it with you! There is this teacher named David Marsh and he makes stop motion LEGO Batman Book Talks. They are SO awesome! There's one for Enginerds and one for Serafina and the Black Cloak - and, my favorite - the one for The Frame-up! I'll drop a link to his YouTube Channel in the show notes. Do you yourself a favor and go watch them.

This is Episode #56 and today is all about Kelly Yang and her fabulous new novel, Front Desk.

Before we begin, I have two quick announcements! First is the Middle Grade at Heart Book Club update. This month's pick is Where the Watermelons Grow , and I am so close to finishing that book - it's so good and I can't want to have Cindy Baldwin on the show to chat with me about it. In September we are reading The House That Lou Built and in October is Three Rules of Everyday Magic . So grab those books and let me know if you have questions you think I should ask the authors when they come on the show.

And second quick reminder that Monday nights are the #MGBookChat Twitter chats with some really juicy topics coming up like building book access in book deserts, creating a classroom community through books, and ending gendered labels of books. It can be very easy to get into the hustle and bustle of your day and forget - so set a reminder on your phone for Mondays at 9pm EST and check out #MGBookChat on Twitter.

Kelly Yang - Interview Outline

Our special guest today is Kelly Yang. And as you will hear - she is one incredible and humble person. And since she's not going to talk herself up, I am. Kelly Yang is one of the youngest graduates of Harvard Law School - earning her degree at 17. She's a columnist for the South China Morning Post and her features have been published in The New York Times and the Washington Post. She's a commentator, a debater, and founder of The Kelly Yang Project - an award-winning writing and debate program for kids in Hong Kong. And that's really just scratching the surface of this WOW Woman! I was really honored that Kelly took the time out her family vacation to sit down with me and chat about so many things - how to reach English-language learners, racial profiling, the Simpsons, her writing journey, and her childhood helping her parents run motels which was the inspiration behind her debut middle grade novel, Front Desk .

Take a listen...
Front Desk
Your debut middle grade novel, , has been getting all kinds of love!! For our listeners who have not yet read the novel, can you tell us a bit about it?
Would you mind reading a favorite passage?
Aside from running the front desk of the motel, Mia is often translating for her family. Was this something you also had to do? If so - how did that impact you?

I adored Mia, but I really really came to love her parents! But... her mother could be carelessly cruel. Her pressure to be good at Math. And then when she tell Mia that the other kids are cars but that Mia is a bicycle - oh my GOD! I started to wonder if maybe Mrs. Tang was just really scared for her daughter?

One of the most powerful scenes is when a car was stolen from the motel and in the course of that investigation, Mr. Yao discovers that the Tangs have been renting to black people. And he says, "I thought I told you not to rent to bad people." That thread of discrimination and racial profiling (even by other marginalized people) was woven throughout the story at various points. Can you speak a little bit about your thought process behind those sections?

I love following you on Twitter and I loved your thread about the Simpsons and Apu controversy. Could you talk a little bit about your response to that and your relationship to that character?
**BONUS SPOILER SECTION: Kelly and I discuss the ending of the novel, and if you'd like to hear that conversation, I moved that part of the recording to after the end credits of today's episode at the : mark. Your Writing Life What was your journey from Harvard Law graduate to author? What are you working on now? Your Reading Life
One of the goals of this podcast is to help educators and librarians and parents inspire kids to read more and connect them with amazing books. Did you have a special teacher or librarian who helped foster your reading life as a child?
What were some of your most influential reads as a child? What have you been reading lately that you've liked? Links:
Kelly's website - http://kellyyang.edu.hk
Books & Authors We Chatted About: Closing
Alright, that wraps up our show this week!

If you have a question about how to connect kids between 8-12 to books they'll love or a suggestion about a topic we should cover, I would love to hear from you. You can email me at booksbetween@gmail.com or message me on Twitter/Instagram at the handle @Books_Between .

Books Between is a proud member of the Education Podcast Network. This network features podcasts for educators, created by educators. For more great content visit edupodcastnetwork.com

Thank you so much for joining me this week. You can get an outline of interviews and a full transcript of all the other parts of our show at MGBookVillage.org . And, if you are liking the show, please leave us some love on or so others can discover us as well.

Thanks and see you soon! Bye!

C orrina Allen is a 5th grade teacher in Central New York and mom of two energetic tween girls. She is passionate about helping kids discover who they are as readers.
Corrina is the host of Books Between - a podcast to help teachers, parents, and librarians connect children between 8 and 12 to books they'll love. Find her on Twitter at @corrinaaallen or Instagram at @Corrina_Allen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kelly Yang (Front Desk): Books Between, Episode 56

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Episode Outline: Listen to the episode here! Intro Hi everyone and welcome to Books Between - a podcast for educators, librarians, parents, and everyone who loves middle grade books! My goal is to help you connect kids between 8-12 with fantastic books and share inspiring conversations with the authors and educators who make that magic...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The fictional exploration of the social demotion caused by immigration is hardly new, but rarely has it been portrayed with such warmth and urgency as in Kelly Yang's middle-grade novel Front Desk.

It's 1993, and ten-year-old Mia Tang's parents have just been employed by Mr Yao to manage Calivista Motel in Southern California. The Tangs are excited and optimistic despite all the hardships they've faced since immigrating to America not that long ago. In China, Mia's parents were engineers; Mia took private piano lessons; an uncle was a doctor. In America, the Tangs are viewed primarily as poor non-white immigrants who don't speak good English. Mia loves English, but her mother thinks she ought to focus on math, because Mia will never surpass a native English speaker; she'll be a "bicycle among cars".

Front Desk is testament to how a great story can grab you by the heart and never quite let go.

Mia's parents labor endlessly cleaning rooms and managing guests, but never satisfy the "coal-hearted" owner Mr. Yao, who daily discovers creative reasons to shrink the family's paycheck. As newly-arrived immigrants with little English and no footholds in America, the Tangs are all too easily exploited. "We're immigrants [...] Our lives are never fair," sighs Mia's mother. Mia insists on helping her parents by taking over the motel's front desk. After all, how hard can it be to buzz customers in, assign a room, collect their payment, and hand over a key?

Adventure and misadventures ensue. Mia botches a wake-up call, inadvertently admits a belligerent drunk, forgets to collect keys from departing guests, and more... errors all gleefully deducted by Mr Yao. Mia's father believes they must accept their fate. But Mia's friend Lupe gives her the inside scoop about America: there are two roller coasters in the country, one for the rich and one for the poor. On the rich one,

people have money, so their kids get to go to great schools. Then they grow up and make a lot of money, so their kids get to go to great schools.

And round and round they go. But on the poor roller coaster,

our parents don't have money, so we can't go to good schools, and then we can't get good jobs. So then our kids can't go to good schools, they can't get good jobs, and so on.

If Tangs are to jump off the bad roller coaster and onto the good, Mia must figure out America.

Mia takes charge. She placates an irate guest with a free soda, for "in America, everything had to do with money", and cannily sets up a tip jar on the front desk. She makes customer service notes and feedback cards. When the washing machine and the cable both break down, she realizes

[Americans] could live with dirty towels for a day or two, but they needed their TV.

She witnesses racism when the cops harass an African-American motel guest, but also glimpses the American ideal of freedom that tempted her parents to leave China-an ideal that might provide the springboard to jumping coasters.

Mia's proudest achievement, however, is her new fluency in English (thanks to hard work and a thesaurus-dictionary). Mia writes thank you notes and an A+ essay, and then moves on to bigger things-a reference letter for an employee, and even a convincing lawyer's notice. She's a Bugatti, not a bicycle; what will she achieve next with her power?

There isn't a whiff of cliché, and Yang never tells us the obvious.

Front Desk provides (ultra-timely) social commentary on the immigrant life in America, but to me, it's primarily a great story, with adventure, suspense, humor, a wicked villain, and an endearing heroine. And what a heroine Mia is-clever, resourceful, courageous, helpful, and, most importantly, able to view mistakes as learning opportunities.

Mia is the poster child for Carol Dweck's growth mindset theory; given enough time, this ten-year-old could spin straw into gold. The writing itself is as strong as the characterization-there isn't a whiff of cliché, and Yang never tells us the obvious; every event is mined deep for true emotion and insight. This reviewer is an editor, and wouldn't delete a single line in the book.

Mia's story is based on Kelly Yang's own experiences running the front desk in her parents' motel. Yang went on to Berkeley and Harvard Law, and now runs a writing program for children; color me unsurprised that her career focuses on spreading the power of the written word. Front Desk is testament to how a great story can grab you by the heart and never quite let go: a classic of the genre.

Niranjana Iyer is a writer, editor, and college admissions essay consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She tweets @ninaiyer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The fictional exploration of the social demotion caused by immigration is hardly new, but rarely has it been portrayed with such warmth and urgency as in Kelly Yang's middle-grade novel Front Desk....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, and the New York Times Bestselling author of 28 books, including Rebound, the follow-up to his, Newbery medal-winning middle grade novel, The Crossover.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson in conversation with The Undefeated’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Merida

# data[].attributes.subject
Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson in conversation with The Undefeated’s editor-in-chief, Kevin Merida

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Inspired by a poem that author Kwame Alexander wrote and performed for The Undefeated, a new children's book called The Undefeated is introducing a new generation to the sacrifices and accomplishments of African Americans throughout history.

The Undefeated's editor-in-chief, Kevin Merida, joined Alexander and award-winning illustrator Kadir Nelson for a conversation in Washington, D.C., about the origins of the book and the impact they hope it creates.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'The Undefeated' highlights the heroes of African American history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inspired by a poem that author Kwame Alexander wrote and performed for The Undefeated, a new children's book called The Undefeated is introducing a new generation to the sacrifices and accomplishments of African Americans throughout history.

# data[].attributes.headline
'The Undefeated' Is A Love Letter To Black America

# data[].attributes.subject
'The Undefeated' Is A Love Letter To Black America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'The Undefeated' Is A Love Letter To Black America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kwame Alexander says his book is for the undiscovered, the unbelievable, the unbending, the underdogs and the uncertain.

# data[].attributes.headline
This Is For 'The Undefeated': A New Picture Book Celebrates Black Brilliance

# data[].attributes.subject
This Is For 'The Undefeated': A New Picture Book Celebrates Black Brilliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In The Undefeated, artist Kadir Nelson illustrates generations of black American heroes "emerging from the shadows."

"It begins with Jesse Owens literally jumping out of the darkness into the light ..." Nelson says. "By the time we get to toward the middle and end of the book those shadows have disappeared and the brilliance and excellence of the subjects have completely emerged into the bright light."

The text of the book is a poem Kwame Alexander wrote in 2008. Alexander's second daughter, Samayah had just been born, and Barack Obama had recently won election as the first African-American president of the United States. "This poem was my tribute to both," Alexander writes.

The poem inspired Nelson. "I thought it was very powerful ..." he says. "A beautiful poem that spoke to excellence, and perseverance, and triumph amidst adversity. It was an ode to the sung and unsung heroes in history."

Interview Highlights
On illustrating Alexander's poem
I don't necessarily have to illustrate other people's works ... I'll take on a book or project written by someone else when the words really speak to me ... [when] I can add something to it that is unique to the work that I do. This is one of those texts that really spoke to me; it was beautifully written and I felt it was a really great pairing of words and pictures of an author and an artist.

On how he came up with the illustration for "The ones who survived America by any means necessary"
I just really think about people in my family, people that I know, who are the unsung heroes. The people throughout history who we don't necessarily know - who we may never know - but all their contributions to the story of America are just as important.
On leaving one page blank for those who didn't survive
It's a moment of silence. It's a moment of pause to provoke thought about all of those who didn't make it ... and all of those voices who have been silenced, all those voices who we have not known, have not seen, have not heard. This is a spread that is really speaking to them.
On the way he depicted the transatlantic slave trade
The subject matter is very difficult. It's not pretty. So even though I'm an artist and I try to create images that are visually pleasing, it was important that this subject be portrayed in the way that I think it should be. It's striking, it's unsettling, and it also gives you pause. This really happened.

On finding a visual style that feels true to his subjects
Whether it's a book, whether it's a stamp, or an album cover, my approach is always the same: I want to be able to connect with the subject matter. I have to step in the shoes of whoever I'm portraying and create artwork that is reverent toward toward the subject.
On dedicating the book to his grandmother, and whether she's portrayed in it
We don't see her face, but at the same time, you know, I look at that family on the second spread ["the ones who survived America by any means necessary"] and I'm reminded of my grandmother. ...

My grandmother, she is from the Deep South and she married my grandfather who was a white American and they moved to the north and created a whole life for themselves. ... I come from a family of ancestors who were sharecroppers. ... I look at what she was able to do to push her family forward and create a life for the whole family ...

I see her face in all these faces - I see her face in that family, I see her face in Harriet Tubman or in Zora Neale Hurston. All of these heroes who have drawn upon something greater than themselves and created beauty out of something that was not beautiful.
Justine Kenin and Emily Kopp produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Is For 'The Undefeated': A New Picture Book Celebrates Black Brilliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In The Undefeated, artist Kadir Nelson illustrates generations of black American heroes "emerging from the shadows." "It begins with Jesse Owens literally jumping out of the darkness into the light ..." Nelson says. "By the time we get to toward the middle and end of the book those shadows have disappeared and the brilliance and excellence of the subjects have completely emerged into the bright light."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Undefeated
By Kwame Alexander
Illustrated by Kadir Nelson
Versify (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-1-328-78096-6
Ages 4 and up
On shelves April 2nd

Kids learn American history through a process of osmosis, long before they're taught the basics in elementary school. They pick up bits and pieces of it in a million different places, but never in any kind of a linear fashion. Thanks goodness WWI and WWII were consecutive, since otherwise my children would have no idea which happened when. Of course, when it comes to the history of race in America, the disjointed nature of what children learn is complicated incredibly by any number of factors. It is far from uncommon to have kids learn the name "Martin Luther King Jr." long before they're taught a word about systematic racism and oppression. What that means on the children's book publishing side is complicated. For mainstream publishers, there's no real obligation to lay down history in any kind of a systematic way for young readers. The result then is that you'll get a lot of collective biographies or picture books about a specific moment in time. But there's another way of tackling it, and that way is laid out in Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson's, The Undefeated. Here, the past is presented in service of placing young readers in the context of history. If there are heroes on display here, it is so that they provide a framework for what today's kids will accomplish tomorrow. By its very nature, a project like this could tip easily into pablum, boredom, or adult-centric meaningfulness. Instead, it's amazing. Just that. Amazing.

Black words on white backgrounds. On the first page, a tribute. "This is for the unforgettable. The swift and sweet ones who hurdled history and opened a world of possible." On the opposite page, Jesse Owens isn't looking at us. He's mid-leap, arms stretched, body suspended in the air, already moving out of the frame. The next page scales back. The people that squint in the bright sunlight are also framed against the white background, like they're posing for a family portrait. They're looking right at you and from their clothes you know they're from the past. Even the baby doesn't blink. The words read, "The ones who survived America by any means necessary." And from here you need to put aside what you think this book is going to do. It couples the regular people with the superstars. The inspirational figures are on display, but so are people that survived without history remembering their names. There are moments that acknowledge slavery, bombings, police brutality, but after those moments are the people who fought and fight against those systems. The last page is of Black kids today. "This is for the undefeated. This is for you. And you. And you. This is for us."

A librarian is, by its very nature, a resource for finding information. As such, a good librarian attempts to have at least a working knowledge on a variety of different subjects. Now I run a children's book list committee out of my library. Each year we choose 101 great books for kids published that year, and every year I struggle to find enough sports books to fill the list. I don't follow sports much myself but I know there are loads of kids that read and enjoy sports, so I try to find them great books. Now when I discovered this book I was perfectly willing to accept the explanation that it was just a poem that Mr. Alexander had wrote in 2008 for his second daughter and President Obama. But in the back of the book the Editor in Chief of ESPN's website The Undefeated ("the premier platform for exploring the intersections of race, sports and culture") writes, "We are proud that this poem has now become a book bearing our name." And, indeed, on their site you can find a video of Kwame Alexander reading the sports sections of this poem. It's a little tricky to piece together, but I think what we have here is a case where Kwame wrote the poem, the poem was given a title and recorded for ESPN, and then expanded and turned into a book for Kwame's new HMH imprint Versify. An intersection of history and Black pride and poetry and sports all coming together at once. And like a poem, this book started in a million different places at once.

I think there is a mistaken belief in some circles that adapting a poem to a picture book is a simple matter of figuring out where the page breaks go. I suppose that would be true of a bad book, but if you want your material to carry any weight then you have to consider a million little details. For example, one choice the book makes early on is to present its subjects without naming them. When you read this book, the words pair with the images and even if you don't have the ability to name the people on these pages, they're still interesting to you. If the verses retain your interest, the art solidifies it. The names of the famous people are systematically listed in a section called "Historical Figures and Events Featured in The Undefeated" in the backmatter, and I couldn't help but feel happy that that was where this information was kept. If this information had been worked into the art it would have left everything feeling cluttered. Even if it were just the names of the subjects, it would have distracted.

If you wanted to present this poem simply as a poem it would stand strong. But if you want it to be a picture book then you need just the right artist. Now, as a general rule, Kadir Nelson doesn't slot neatly into a nice little box like other illustrators of children's books. He's an Illustrator with a capital "I" firmly in place and an Artist with an even more prominent capital "A". Years ago when he wrote and illustrated his ode to the Negro Leagues in We Are the Ship I just figured the fact that he was a marvelous writer on top of being one of the best living artists of our times was a bit on the unfair side. Why should one man have that much talent? But Nelson hasn't ever been just a children's book illustrator. He's a portrait artist one day, a New Yorker cover artist another, and a painter first and foremost. The last time he illustrated a book for kids it was the art for Sarvinder Naberhaus's Blue Sky, White Stars, two years ago. It was a fine book but didn't really tap into what makes a Nelson a Nelson. With this book, Kwame has managed to stir something deep and abiding in Kadir Nelson's paintbrush. You're not just feeling his talent with this book. You get the distinct impression that this project means something to him.

If Nelson has a cinematic equivalent, it is director Barry Jenkins. Jenkins has a technique he likes to use in his films of focusing the camera squarely on the face of a character, allowing them to look you, the audience, dead in the eye. It was shocking when he first did it with Moonlight and still arresting in If Beale Street Could Talk. But Mr. Jenkins didn't invent the method and, quite frankly, sometimes it can feel like he's treading in the shadow of Kadir Nelson. Subjects staring at the viewer dead on without shame or blinking or turning away? The man practically built his books We Are the Ship and Heart and Soul on the method. Then there is the fact that Nelson is unafraid of dark skin. We could get into a BIG discussion about race, skin color, and how those colors are represented on the pages of children's picture books, but that's a talk for another day. It is enough to simply say that when Kadir Nelson paints skin, he embraces the deep shifting tones. And, once again, like Barry Jenkins, he knows how to present his subjects. A Kadir Nelson book feels like a work of cinema or photography in that it indulges in a fascination with light and shadow.

So how do you use this book? Where does this book go once it has been sold? A bunch of ideas come to mind. As I mentioned before, the art and the text make it sufficiently fascinating for a one-on-one lapsit read. I can imagine a kid pointing to the different faces asking who they are, while the parent answers and gives context. How about reading it to large groups? The nice thing about reading a book written by a poet aloud is that you're in safe hands when it comes to group settings. Not only will these images be visible from a distance, but the words will ring strong and true. What if you're a teacher? Well, after doing an initial read to a class (I am very opposed to picking this book apart before you do this initial read, since you must allow the kids to experience the book as it was meant to be experienced) you could show the pictures and identify the people in them. Or you could separate out the different sections (art, history, sports, musicians, etc.) and explain why each person shown was important. Oh! How about examining the language? Let's look at all the "un" words. Unforgettable, undeniable, unflappable, unafraid, unspeakable, unlimited, unbelievable. Think of what each one means and how he's used it here. And if you're truly creative you could do more, a lot more, with this book. Because if I've learned anything from teachers over the years it's that if they're passionate about a book, they'll find a way to teach it in class. The trick is finding a book worthy of that enthusiasm. This book? Check and mate.

If you are a librarian or a bookseller, this is not the first book you've seen offering praise to Black heroes of the past. It's just one of the best. Much of this has to do with the pitfalls it has adroitly avoided. This is not a rote accounting of names that mean little to child readers. If these people grace these pages it is because there is a larger meaning to their inclusion. Of course, I think the selection of Kadir Nelson was necessary to this book's publication. When that man illustrates someone he makes them beautiful. What's fascinating is that this beauty is produced as a kind of inner glow, as if the subject's soul is radiating out of their very skin. Kwame says that when he wrote this poem for his daughter (and, in a way, for President Obama) he did so to remind everyone to never give up. Kwame Alexander's words are grand. Kadir Nelson's art soars. But when you put those two things together, and they work in tandem, they bring out the best in one another. Unrelenting, undeniable, unavoidable. Fail to read this book at your peril. I hope it is only the beginning.

On shelves April 2nd.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.
Videos:
There is a note on the publication page of this book that reads, "This poem is an ode, as Kwame writes, to 'the doers and the dreamers.' Those who beat odds, stared down fear, made this nation better. We are proud that this poem has now become a book bearing our name, The Undefeated. To our children, and to others who have faced setbacks and disappointment, we say: Keep rising!" It is signed by Kevin Merida, Editor in Chief of ESPN's TheUndefeated.com. So I checked out the website and lo and behold found this video. Enjoy:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Review of the Day: Undefeated by Kwame Alexander, ill. Kadir Nelson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Undefeated By Kwame Alexander Illustrated by Kadir Nelson Versify (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) $17.99 ISBN: 978-1-328-78096-6 Ages 4 and up On shelves April 2nd Kids learn American history through a process of osmosis, long before they're taught the basics in elementary school.

# data[].attributes.headline
Author Kwame Alexander Wants to Help Young People Imagine a Better World

# data[].attributes.subject
Author Kwame Alexander Wants to Help Young People Imagine a Better World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Author Kwame Alexander Wants to Help Young People Imagine a Better World | The Takeaway | WNYC Studios

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kwame Alexander's new book, "The Undefeated," celebrates black Americans throughout history. The Takeaway spoke with Alexander about his unique approach to engaging young readers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yuyi Morales (The Children's Book Podcast #464)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DREAMERS Yuyi Morales (@yuyimorales) is the author illustrator of DREAMERS, a story recounting Yuyi's immigration to the United States with her son. It is a bo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View details about Dreamers including description, extras, reviews, and purchase links.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hi, Yuyi Morales! I cannot say enough WONDERFUL things about Dreamers/ Soñadores. I haven't stopped thinking and talking about it since ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shelf Awareness for Tuesday, July 10, 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the Web site for Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, the free e-mail newsletter dedicated to helping the people in stores, ...

# data[].attributes.headline
The Making of Dreamers: Yuyi Morales’ Photo Essay

# data[].attributes.subject
The Making of Dreamers: Yuyi Morales’ Photo Essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I'm not going to say much about the book today, because I will be writing about it soon for BookPage. (When I do so, I will link to that here from 7-Imp.) But today, I'm giving 7-Imp over to Yuyi, who is sharing a photo essay about the making of this book.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Martha referred to 2018 (back in this post) as a "year of blockbusters," and Yuyi Morales's Dreamers may be the biggest blockbuster of them all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Talks with Roger is a sponsored supplement to our free monthly e-newsletter, Notes from the Horn Book.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
THE DAY YOU BEGIN by Jacqueline Woodson | Official Book Trailer

# data[].attributes.headline
Yuyi Morales Has an Immigration Story to Tell, Her Own | SLJ Day of Dialog 2018

# data[].attributes.subject
Yuyi Morales Has an Immigration Story to Tell, Her Own | SLJ Day of Dialog 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yuyi Morales Has an Immigration Story to Tell, Her Own | SLJ Day of Dialog 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Yuyi Morales closed out School Library Journal's Day of Dialog with this keynote address.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"The Day You Begin" by Jacqueline Woodson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson and two-time Pura Belpre Illustrator Award winner Rafael Lopez have teamed up to create a poignant, yet heartening book about finding courage to connect, even when you feel scared and alone.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Day You Begin, Begins by Rafael López 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Day You Begin, Begins by Rafael López 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This morning over pancakes I tried to calm my son's butterflies and gather school supplies as a new school year begins. The end of a long summer and that approaching first day catches you by surprise. This coming week, I'm trying to stay busy as it is also the release for our new book The Day You Begin.

The spark for this book all began with an amazing writer, Jacqueline Woodson who by the way, can only write in her notebook sideways. This story is inspired by a poem in her powerful memoir Brown Girl Dreaming about her own great grandfather William Woodson, the only black child in an all-white school.

.

When I read Jacqueline's manuscript, words triggered memories. I couldn't help but see myself, my own child and many children in that story. In a flash, I was sure that kids who felt alone would find comfort in her reassuring words. She had crafted a story that children could both relate to and translate into their own voice and for me, this made all the difference. I was determined to do my part in this collaboration to bring visual voice to the encouraging message. That is where my own journey with our book began.

For me, sketching is thinking with my pencil. It's an ancient art form that goes back to drawing pictures on the walls of caves and I can assure you there is magic in the process of drawing.

No matter how long you've been drawing you just have to keep working at it, keep trying and if it doesn't feel quite right, trust that inner voice. Be ready to go through piles of tracing paper to conjure the spirit of a character like Angelina who instead of traveling and collecting souvenirs like fellow classmates, spent summer at home caring for and reading books to her little sister. With imagination and courage Angelina still manages to go places.

Through drawing, you put small pieces of your own experience into the marks you make on paper. When I was in grade school, I struggled with big blocks of text. I was labeled with mild dyslexia and called a reluctant reader. Growing up in Mexico City, I found solace at the public library taking the metro over and hour to spend an entire day in the aisles of books. I realized I was drawn to the pictures and maps of distant places, strange bugs from foreign lands and creatures so exotic that even my own vivid imagination couldn't dream them up. Opening books grew my confidence and I began to read more and draw pictures at the library. At home, I was fortunate to have a supportive mom who collected discarded rolls of paper from our uncle who worked at a paper mill.

Looking back, I was struggling as we all do, to find my place in this world.

There is a boy in The Day You Begin named Rigoberto from Venezuela who is teased for his accent. When my family moved to the border I became part of a Rotary exchange program. I traveled alone to live with a host family in the Midwest and attended school there to practice my English. Jacqueline begins this book with " There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you". I will never forget feeling so out of place, so different. I wish I had her comforting words when I was a kid. But I also remember one new friend who took the time to listen to my story and over time confided that she too felt different.

This story was like a familiar friend. It was time to begin.

With that as my starting point, I began searching for the right colors, textures and shapes, curious to give each plant, leaf and character personality.

Shape, color and texture are the language an artist uses to communicate the spirit of each scene. A way to speak to young readers without words.

My creative process includes peeling away tape to reveal forms and shapes that help me tell the story.

Characters slowly take shape on pieces of wooden board and watercolor paper. They help reveal what for a time is hidden, bringing humanity to the unfolding story.

Here's an example where supporting characters back up the action, revealing difficult truths in the narrative.

I wanted the illustrations to give voice to unspoken feelings and dreams. To spark hope as each child opens the cover and turns the pages to find themselves somewhere in the swirl of colors, pictures, and words.

I've hidden a visual metaphor that is repeated on several spreads of the book. I'm hoping to make kids curious and ask questions of themselves and others about what it might mean to them.

Then somehow it comes together. There's gratitude for the collective effort of the amazing team that collaborated guiding our book to the finish line. It all ends up on the studio wall to check for pacing, transitions, consistency and how it will connect to young readers.

For this book, I got the chance to craft handmade type for the cover. It meant a lot to me that our book is also going to be released at the same time in Spanish El Día En Que Descubres Quién Eres!

There is something surreal about the first day of school and the first day a new book begins. It's a moment charged with emotion. It's relief, joy, amazement and fear all rolled up in one. In the end, it all comes down to the librarians, teachers, parents, grandparents and friends who put books in the hands of children.

It's a big week for many of us. Stay strong.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This morning over pancakes I tried to calm my son's butterflies and gather school supplies as a new school year begins. The end of a long summer and that approaching first day catches you by surprise. This coming week, I'm trying to stay busy as it is also the release for our new book The Day You Begin.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
September 26th, 2018 by jules

IllustratorRafael López visits 7-Imp today for an art-filled discussion about his illustrations for Jacqueline Woodson's The Day You Begin (Nancy Paulsen Books, August 2018). I mentioned this book in a recent Kirkus column as being a wonderful back-to-school title, but it's a book to share with children any day of the year, this story of how our differences make us special. Centered in a school room, readers meet Angelina. "There will be times when you walk into a room," the book opens, "and no one there is quite like you." It's a story of making connections and finding one's voice, but it's more, as Rafael explains below. It's about accepting people as they are.

Let's get right to it, since Rafael shares so generously below. I thank him for sharing today. (If you want more of Rafael's art, his 2011 breakfast interview here at 7-Imp is one of my favorites.)

Jules : Hi, Rafael! What was your initial response to Jacqueline's text?

Rafael : Jackie had me at the first line, "There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you." The first time I read the manuscript, I was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee after dropping my son off at school. When reading, I instantly saw pictures. We all want to fit in and find our place. There was an authenticity to her words that stuck in my throat. It was all there - the self-doubt, struggle, tenderness, and triumph of personal discovery.

This story triggered memories. I couldn't help but see myself, my own child, and, for that matter, many children in her story. When my family moved to the border, I became part of a Rotary exchange program. I lived in the Midwest for a time and saw myself in [the character] Rigoberto, as I struggled to learn English and fit into a new country. All my life, I was always the last one picked for sports teams and so found comfort in music and art.

Jacqueline's powerful text lit a bright light. I was sure kids who felt alone would find warmth and comfort in her reassuring words. She had crafted a story that children could both relate to and translate into their own voice. For me, this made all the difference. I was determined to do my part in this collaboration to bring visual voice to her encouraging message.

Jules : A little bird told me you drew inspiration for one of the students in the book from your own experience watching your son acclimate to school. Can you talk more about that? Is it the beautiful "And all that stands beside you is your own brave self" spread?

"And all that stands beside you is your own brave self -
steady as steel and ready even though you don't yet know
what you're ready for."
(Click to enlarge spread)

Rafael : I have been waiting for that right moment, the right story, to speak in pictures about something very close to me. Our son, Santiago, has high-functioning autism.

Rafael: "A drawing of my son at 6 years old"

When he was small, he struggled to find his words, and with his drawings he tried to communicate that. Whenever our son drew people, animals, or suns he always wired their mouths shut. Eventually, after seeing this in so many of his drawings, it clicked. We reached out to discover what he was so clearly telling us with his art.

(Click to enlarge)

Santiago's clever drawings led to his autism diagnosis, and the sometimes painful yet remarkable journey of our family began. When our son knew we understood at last, all the wires on the fantastic creatures and humans in his drawings vanished and were replaced with smiles.

I encouraged him to play with others on the playground or in parks, and after a while I realized he was happier studying the details of flowers and insects or studying images in books. As Santiago found his words, he let us know that he sees things differently.

"And all that stands beside you is your own brave self..." was my chance to reveal the hope that springs from the spirit of young people who choose to share their stories - in their own way. The world needs unique perspectives, and history has shown that, given a chance to learn and grow, a different mindset can make a difference.

Now that The Day You Begin is out, I'm receiving mail from parents and grandparents letting me know that someone in their family has autism. They want me to know their child saw something familiar in that character. I decided to not show this character on the final page of the book but instead show his joy and inner strength in that reflection. Santiago has taught me there are many ways to connect to others by sharing our stories in our own way.

I'm hoping readers will ask questions and interpret the images from their perspective. There are many possible reasons why a classmate might choose to be alone or like it. Maybe they are shy, not athletic, or struggle with a disability or with issues like homelessness or language. Whatever the reasons, every child has a story to tell - and that story matters.

"There will be times when the world feels like a place
that you're standing all the way outside of ..."
(Click to enlarge spread, which is sans text)

Early sketch and final painting
(Click each to enlarge)

Jules : Tell me about the ruler-as-a-door in the first spread (and the ruler-as-table and tree that show up later).

Rafael : Growing up in Mexico City, I am no stranger to the magic of surrealism. If you know where to look, you'll find it beyond the doors of museums, on street corners and hidden everywhere you turn. Kids are curious, and in my books I like to use many metaphors. It's fun to embed visual clues and leave a trail for young readers to follow. As kids revisit the book, my hope is they will discover new things they missed the first time. Every time they open the pages, it's a new experience. I hope readers will ask questions - what does it mean and why it is there? - and then answer in their own voice, as they keep turning the pages.

"There will be times when you walk into a room
and no one there is quite like you."
(Click spread to enlarge)

Just as Jackie skillfully tackled challenging situations with her words, I tried to use expressions and gestures to address the fear, anxiety, and self-doubt of measuring up to others. It was also important to visually create that spark of hope to encourage young readers to find the strength in each of the characters of the story.

"Rigoberto. From Venezuela, your teacher says so soft and beautifully that your name and homeland sound like flowers blooming the first bright notes of a song."
(Click to enlarge spread, which is sans text)

Jules : There are many birds in this book. What do they symbolize to you?

Rafael : I keep birds close to my art, because they are part of both earth and sky. Birds have a creative role in this story, reinforcing connections that can be found throughout the book. As one example, for Rigoberto birds symbolize the sweetness of memories, the sounds, the smells and sights of his native country Venezuela. When Angelina recalls staying at home to care for her little sister in summer, flying birds outside her window represent different adventures, real and imagined.

"And as you stand in front of that room, you can only remember how the heat waved as it lifted off the curb and your days spent at home caring for your little sister,
who made you laugh out loud and hugged you hard ..."
(Click to enlarge and see text in its entirety)

When she finds the courage to open up and share her stories, birds soaring are a metaphor for the power of books to take you places. When Rigoberto and Angelina find common ground, a bird shows that initial spark of connection. On the final image with three friends playing in leaves, the birds represent us, the readers, contemplating the calm scene of joy.

Here is the evolution of that illustration ...

Rafael: "My son, laying on the leaves"

Background
(Click to enlarge)

Leaves and sketches
(Click to enlarge)

Working in the studio ...
(Click to enlarge)

Finished leaves
(Click to enlarge)

Developing the characters
(Click to enlarge)

Positioning the characters
(Click to enlarge)

Positioning Rigoberto and the leaves
(Click to enlarge)

Final illustration
(Click to enlarge)

Jules : Can you talk about the mixed media used to create the artwork?

: Each new book challenges me to try something new. I search for the right materials and techniques to express the spirit of the text. The Day You Begin is about our differences, sharing our stories and connection. I instinctually knew that I would need mixed media to convey the different emotions and experiences of diverse characters.

For Angelina, our heroine, I painted with acrylic on wood to bring texture to her face. Her blouse is a pattern I found in a vintage book, as I wanted to play up her uniqueness. To convey her introspective free spirit, I was inspired by my amazing architect mom, who grew up in the '60s. She loved wearing bandanas and still does, and it seemed to express Angelina's vibrant personality.

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

The hair involved a lot of experimentation with mixed media. The base of her hair was acrylic to get the tone, textured with graphite pencil on vellum with shadows added digitally. It's like meticulously making a sandwich as you bring it all together.

(Click to enlarge)

Original Angelina
(Click to enlarge)

While traveling to a conference, I took a few hours off to clear my mind before a presentation. I walked to the edge of a small lake in the middle of San Antonio and photographed reflections. I was thinking about the concept for the book at the time and was struck by the idea of seeing your future in a reflection. The character of the boy at the edge of the water is acrylic on wood, but I used watercolor to achieve that ethereal feeling. I whipped wet brushes on watercolor paper to create splatters and the translucency of a dream.

Acrylic on wood
(Click to enlarge)

watercolors
(Click to enlarge)

Through drawing, you put small pieces of your own experience into the marks you make on paper. Sketching is thinking with my pencil, and I love the graphic quality and confident line that comes from pen and ink. I cut black construction paper to build many of the shapes in stories I illustrate. I'm also drawn to the intuitive handmade textures of acrylic paint on wood boards, as they bring humanity to the page. Then I put things together in Photoshop, as it allows me to place textures and patterns into the art. Working in layers gives you the freedom to bring depth to the visual telling of the story.

Splatter technique
(Click to enlarge)

Vellum drawing
(Click to enlarge)

Construction paper with digital textures
(Click to enlarge)

Construction-paper castle (in-progress and final)
(Click each to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

I was given the opportunity to craft original type for the title (in both English and Spanish), because I wanted to bring a touch of the hand to the cover for our book.

Here's the evolution of the cover ...

Early cover concepts
(Click each to enlarge)

Final cover
(Click to enlarge)

Creating a book is a collaborative effort that requires lots of back and forth with sketches, concepts, and direction. [Below are] some images that didn't make the final cut to illuminate the process. Grateful for the opportunity to work with an incredible writer, editor, art director and team who guided this book to the hands of children.

Sketches that didn't make the final cut ...
(Click each to enlarge)

Jules again. Many thanks to Rafael for sharing. Here are some more images to close out the post. ...

Developing Characters
(click each image to enlarge):

Evolution of the Swings Spread
(click each image to enlarge):

Final art (sans text): "This is the day you begin to find the places inside
your laughter and your lunches, your books, your travel and your stories,
where every new friend has something a little like you - and something else
so fabulously not quite like you at all."
(Click image to enlarge)

THE DAY YOU BEGIN. Copyright © 2018 by Jacqueline Woodson. Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Rafael López. Published by Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All images here reproduced by permission of the publisher and Rafael López.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
September 26th, 2018 by jules IllustratorRafael López visits 7-Imp today for an art-filled discussion about his illustrations for Jacqueline Woodson's The Day You Begin (Nancy Paulsen Books, August 2018). I mentioned this book in a recent Kirkus column as being a wonderful back-to-school title, but it's a book to share with children any day of the year, this story of how our differences make us special.

# data[].attributes.headline
Jacqueline Woodson: 2018 National Book Festival

# data[].attributes.subject
Jacqueline Woodson: 2018 National Book Festival

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While the Library of Congress created most of the videos in this collection, they include copyrighted materials that the Library has permission from rightsholders to present. Rights assessment is your responsibility. The written permission of the copyright owners in materials not in the public domain is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions. There may also be content that is protected under the copyright or neighboring-rights laws of other nations. Permissions may additionally be required from holders of other rights (such as publicity and/or privacy rights). Whenever possible, we provide information that we have about copyright owners and related matters in the catalog records, finding aids and other texts that accompany collections. However, the information we have may not be accurate or complete.

More about Copyright and other Restrictions

For guidance about compiling full citations consult Citing Primary Sources.

Credit Line: Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jacqueline Woodson: 2018 National Book Festival

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While the Library of Congress created most of the videos in this collection, they include copyrighted materials that the Library has permission from rightsholders to present. Rights assessment is your responsibility. The written permission of the copyright owners in materials not in the public domain is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
My Newer Books:

The Day You Begin

There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you. So what are you going to do?

Where it takes place:

It takes place every single day all over the world.

Where I wrote it:

Right here in Brooklyn and while I was traveling around the country.

Why I wrote it:

It was inspired by this poem in Brown Girl Dreaming:

"A lovely, poetic book that soothes back-to-school concerns about not fitting in by encouraging children to tell their own stories."
- The New York Times, Editor's Choice for THE DAY YOU BEGIN.

"This book is a perfect way to build empathy. Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider...will be moved."
- Parents Magazine for THE DAY YOU BEGIN

"[T]his empathetic dive into childhood recognizes economic, social, racial and cultural diversity, celebrates similarities and differences, and promotes the goal of inclusion for all."
- The San Francisco Chronicle for THE DAY YOU BEGIN

6 kids who learn differently are sent to a different room every Friday. There, with no adults present, they begin to reveal things the others didn't know about their lives.

Where it takes place:

In the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn

Where I wrote it:

In Brooklyn and while I was traveling around the country.

Why I wrote it:

I have so many questions. Sometimes, writing is the only way I can answer them.

"Woodson celebrates all that is essential and good for humanity-compassion, understanding, security, and freedom-in this touching novel... Woodson's skills as poet and master storyteller shine brightly here as she economically uses language to express emotion and delve into the hearts of her characters. Showing how America's political and social issues affect children on a daily basis, this novel will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds."
-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Woodson delivers a powerful tale of community and mutual growth. The bond they develop is palpable...The characters ring true as they discuss issues both personal and global. This story, told with exquisite language and clarity of narrative, is both heartbreaking and hopeful. An extraordinary and timely piece of writing."
-Kirkus Reviews, starred review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you. So what are you going to do? Where it takes place: It takes place every single day all over the world. Where I wrote it: Right here in Brooklyn and while I was traveling around the country.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rafael López | Official site of Illustrator, Rafael López.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
THE LITTLE RED STROLLER by Joshua Furst , Katy Wu | Kirkus Reviews

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An inclusive picture book that celebrates sharing, connecting, variety, and community.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Little Red Stroller by Joshua Furst | Penguin Random House Canada

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One handy little stroller is passed from family to family in this uplifting picture book celebration of community, diversity, and sharing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Freelance Art Director, Designer, and Illustrator. katycwwu@gmail.com

# data[].attributes.headline
Immigrant and Refugee Children: A Guide for Educators and School Support Staff

# data[].attributes.subject
Immigrant and Refugee Children: A Guide for Educators and School Support Staff

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This guide was created for educators, school support staff and service providers who teach, mentor and help open the doors of opportunity for undocumented youth and unaccompanied and refugee children currently living in the United States. Educators, school support staff and service providers are often the first individuals a student and/or family comes out to as undocumented.

Moreover, they are often the first ones to witness the impact of increased enforcement measures on students and their families.

Schools should be safe havens that embrace all students and families, regardless of citizenship and national origin, and that includes unaccompanied and refugee children. The 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe ruled that undocumented children have a constitutional right to receive a free public K-12 education, which provides the means to becoming a "self-reliant and self-sufficient participant in society," the court wrote, and instills the "fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system." However, today's increased enforcement measures by the Department of Homeland Security and campaign promises made by the incoming administration threaten that right for thousands of undocumented youth and the 4.1 million U.S.-born children who live in mixed-status households with at least one parent or family member who is undocumented.

Facts About Undocumented Students

An undocumented student is an aspiring citizen who came to the United States without legal documentation or who has overstayed his or her visa. These students:

Often don't know they are undocumented until they begin the college application process;

Don't qualify for federal grants or loans, even if they are in financial need and their parents pay taxes;

Are racially and ethnically diverse, from all corners of the world, and are part of the 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Educator's FAQ About Immigration Raids

What impact do raids have on children and youth?

Research consistently shows that immigration enforcement actions have a harmful impact on the health, safety, academic performance and overall well-being of children, including U.S. citizen children living in mixed-status families. According to a 2010 report by the Urban Institute, children who witnessed parents or family members apprehended in a home raid were much more likely to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder than children whose parents were arrested in other settings, including greater changes in sleeping and eating patterns and much higher degrees of fear and anxiety. Several teachers in North Carolina also reported significant behavioral changes and increased absenteeism among students following a local community raid, including among U.S. citizen students.

Are there places where raids are prohibited?

Yes, with exceptions. According to a policy memorandum released by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2011, commonly referred to as the "sensitive locations memo," ICE officers and agents are to refrain from enforcement actions at least at the following locations and events:

schools (including preschools, primary schools, secondary schools, colleges and universities, and other institutions of learning, such as vocational and trade schools);

hospitals;

churches, synagogues, mosques and other institutions of worship, such as buildings rented for the purpose of religious services;

funerals, weddings and other public religious ceremonies; and

public demonstrations, such as a march, rally or parade.

Note: The sensitive locations policy memorandum may be reversed. School leaders should stay informed about possible changes.
Is there a federal law that prevents schools from sharing student information?

Yes. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), schools are prohibited, without parental consent, from providing information from a student's file to federal immigration agents if the information would potentially expose a student's immigration status. If ICE agents present a school with a removal warrant (deportation order), the school is still permitted to refrain from providing student information, as the warrant is administrative, not judicial. Under FERPA, schools may disclose directory information without consent, but they are required to allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them. Some schools [and the Southern Poverty Law Center] have also interpreted the Plyler decision as prohibiting them from requiring students to provide Social Security cards or birth certificates as a condition of enrollment, test taking or participation in school activities. For more on FERPA, see familypolicy.ed.gov.

What Educators, School Support Staff and Communities Can Do

Issue a statement-in English and in other languages spoken at the school-articulating that the school supports immigrant students/parents and affirming publically that it is a welcoming site.

Stress the importance of taking proactive steps to ensure the safety and well-being of children and entire communities.

Distribute "know your rights" materials to students, families and communities about what to do if a raid occurs or an individual is detained.

Identify a bilingual person at your school who can serve as the immigration resource advocate in your building or on your campus.

Work with parents to develop a family immigration raid emergency plan.

Provide a safe place for students to wait if a parent or sibling has been detained.

Provide counseling for students who have had a family member detained by ICE.

Work with your school board to pass a resolution affirming schools as welcoming places of learning for all students, distancing the schools from enforcement actions that separate families.

Strengthen relationships with local institutions of higher education and community-based organizations that can support the needs of unaccompanied children and students with interrupted formal education.

Maintain-in English and in other languages spoken at the school-a list of resources, such as the names of mental health providers, social workers, pro bono attorneys and local immigration advocates and organizations that can be shared with your students and their families.

Partner with a pro bono attorney, legal aid organization or immigrant rights organization to schedule a "know your rights" workshop on campus to inform students and families about their rights.

Find out if there is a local immigration raid rapid response team. These teams usually consist of attorneys, media personnel and community leaders who may be able to provide support.

Participate in National Educators Coming Out Day, held annually on November 12, and "come out" in support of undocumented students.

Participate in National Institutions Coming Out Day, held annually on April 7.

For additional tools and model resolutions to create safe, welcoming environments for all students, visit aft.org and see the toolkit for this story.

Taking Action Beyond The Classroom

Advocate to stop raids and halt deportation proceedings.

Unaccompanied children and youth should be in school, not in detention centers awaiting deportation. Educators can play an important role in protesting raids and halting deportation proceedings. For example, if a student has been detained by ICE, you can send a letter of inquiry to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, asking for prosecutorial discretion to be exercised or considered, or you can file a formal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

You can also distribute the United We Dream deportation defense guide, which was published to inform members of Congress and other elected officials about the role they can play in stopping the deportation of their constituents and other community members.

Elected officials have successfully advocated for individuals in removal proceedings for years and continue to employ this process to help immigrant communities even today. The guide is also a useful resource for community advocates and people in deportation proceedings seeking support from their elected officials. Download the guide here.

Adopt resolutions.

School districts are responsible for ensuring the safety and well-being of all their students while they are in school. One way to create a welcoming school environment and protect undocumented students while in class and on school grounds is to pass a resolution that restricts ICE agents' access to school property, similar to the one the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) passed in February 2016. The LAUSD resolution:

Forbids immigration enforcement agents from going on campus without approval from the superintendent and the LAUSD law office.

Forbids school staff from asking about a student's immigration status or that of family members.

Provides teachers, administrators and other staff with training on how to deal with immigration issues and how to notify families in multiple languages of issues.

Asks all schools to treat students equitably, including those receiving free and reduced price meals, transportation and other services.

Requires the superintendent to come up with a plan to provide assistance and information for students and families "if faced with fear and anxiety related to immigration enforcement efforts."

Such resolutions can also improve protections for students by affirming that the schoolhouse doors are open to all students, no matter their prior academic attainment or their language proficiency. For additional information about what actions cities and counties can take to protect immigrants and make communities welcoming places for all, visit Cities for Action.

Make public statements.

Educators, administrators, students and community allies can make public statements denouncing immigration enforcement raids to reassure students and families that their local school remains a safe haven.

Create an online petition to prevent a student's deportation.

Online petitions are powerful tools for building public awareness and community support. See the NotOneMoreDeportation.com petition for 19-year-old Kimberly Pineda Chavez, who was detained in the United States after escaping violence in Honduras.

Organize a rally or walkout opposing ICE raids and deportations.

In February 2016, educators and community allies in Durham, North Carolina, organized a rally in support of a high school student detained by ICE. Actions like this help to support individuals fighting their deportation cases. The student's teachers even mailed school assignments to his detention facility to help him stay on top of his work. "There is nothing that will hold me back from giving a kid his classwork and finish their education and graduate," teacher Ellen Holmes told a local news station.
Editor's note This content was originally published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its partners: United We Dream's Dream Educational Empowerment Program, the National Immigration Law Center and First Focus. This excerpt was adapted and reprinted with generous permission from the AFT.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Immigrant and Refugee Children: A Guide for Educators and School Support Staff

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This guide was created for educators, school support staff and service providers who teach, mentor and help open the doors of opportunity for undocumented youth and unaccompanied and refugee children currently living in the United States. Educators, school support staff and service providers are often the first individuals a student and/or family comes out to as undocumented.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Issues of identity and belonging are inseparable from the experience of immigration. Stories of immigrants, past and present, illuminate the human lives behind the ever-shifting global landscape we inhabit today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A five-step exercise on identity and belonging helps middle school students appreciate differences-in themselves and in their peers.

At a bare minimum, my job as a teacher is to create a learning environment where all kids feel valued, safe, and eager to learn from everyone in the room. Often, though, as teachers, we get too distracted with getting through curriculum or testing to give enough attention to our classroom culture.

But the importance of ensuring that all students feel they can be themselves at school cannot be underestimated. Every day, our students are inundated with messages that magnify and expose the levels of hatred and injustice in our society. For marginalized students in particular, these dehumanizing behaviors make them feel "othered" or like outcasts. A good teacher makes an authentic connection with every student who walks through the door and makes them feel they belong.

This school year, I've been very purposeful about making sure that all of my middle school students feel safe and welcomed in my classroom. I bought extra posters and stickers that recognized and supported marginalized identities, so that all students would feel recognized. Normally, I do the usual icebreaker games to get to know my students, but this year I felt I had to do something more substantial. I started the school year by taking some time to get to know each student personally. I asked how they were feeling about the upcoming year, the world, our society, and any positive experiences or joy they had found during the summer.

But still, this didn't seem enough. I felt I needed to dedicate sufficient classroom time to help my students explore their own identities and those of their classmates. So instead of doing my typical Introduction to Health lesson this year, I developed a new one that encouraged students to examine how identity affects our place in society and how society affects how we express our identity.

A Five-Step Lesson Plan

What Is Identity? We started with the basic definition of identity, which I classified as characteristics or identifiers that make us unique or known, or that we are grouped by. These could include race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, for example. We continued talking about how identity characteristics can be both visible and invisible, and repeated this quote aloud as a class twice: "Be proud of your personal identity, but always recognize and respect the personal identity characteristics of others." As a class, we discussed how we could live out the meaning of that quote. I shared, for example, that one of my identity characteristics is being a Christian but that I recognize and respect others with different religious or spiritual beliefs.

Probing Deeper: We then discussed the most common identity characteristics, including gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, birthplace, and spoken languages. I explained that these groupings can go deeper than surface level. We talked about the difference between race and ethnicity, for example, and that gender is not always binary. It was amazing to see kids' eyes light up when they felt free to comfortably engage in an all-class conversation.

What visible identity characteristics do we agree this person has?

What possible invisible characteristics do we agree this person has?

Why do we think these are this person's visible/invisible characteristics?

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Next, I decided to stretch their thinking. With the permission of several of my friends, I had students complete a "Stop, Collaborate, and Listen" exercise to determine the identity characteristics of other people. I placed pictures of six of my friends on the board and paired off students. Together, they had to come to an agreement on the identity characteristics of the adults in the pictures.

Similar to a Think, Pair, Share, the Stop, Collaborate, and Listen activity required kids to use eye contact and confidence to introduce themselves to their partners. Often, with a partner or in group activities, certain students monopolize speaking time, but with this method, each student is required to both share and listen.

After groups made their guesses, we debriefed as a class, and I informed students of my friends' true identity characteristics. We repeated this process six times-once for each friend-and then came back together. I proceeded to share my own personal identity characteristics to be authentic with my students.

How Is Identity Formed? As we continued the identity lesson, we worked on two major tasks: building a better understanding of how society affects identity and completing personal identity portraits. We used a graphic organizer I created to have kids better understand privilege and bias, and how society affects people with different identity characteristics.

Students explored how particular challenges such as access to clean drinking water or bullying have greater or lesser impacts on specific groups of people. The organizer also asked students, "How can you help fix, stay safe, or be an ally for this issue?"

Identity Portraits: After completing their graphic organizers, students started on their final project, an identity portrait of themselves. I asked them to draw a picture of their face. One half of the face was supposed to look like them, and the other half displayed the visible and invisible identity characteristics they were proud of and/or comfortable sharing. This could be sexual orientation, nonbinary gender, nationality, or ethnicity.

These portraits were powerful, and I was grateful to see the level of confidence that many of my students expressed in their drawings. We then created a "Who We Are" wall with the pictures so that my students all know who they are and that they are all valued and safe in my classroom.
Courtesy of Shana White
"Diversity is our strength" cannot really be true unless individuals with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences are earnestly valued, humanized, and respected. This lesson showed me that students are willing to empathize with others but sometimes need assistance from teachers to understand who they are, how they are unique, and how they can understand and support people who are different from themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creating a Learning Environment Where All Kids Feel Valued

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A five-step exercise on identity and belonging helps middle school students appreciate differences-in themselves and in their peers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Best-selling YA author Ahmed discusses the brutal realities of everyday racism and xenophobia, what it means to be an American, and how librarians and educators can step up and speak out on behalf of marginalized youth.

I was eight years old the first time a racist yelled at me to "Go Home!" As if I wasn't already home, as if America didn't belong to me, too. I've heard that same bigoted refrain all my life. It's a favorite amongst xenophobes and politicians.

"Go home!" Two syllables that imply that this nation of the people, by the people, for the people, is really only for some people. And those fortunate ones, they don't look like me. And now that America's public school population is majority-minority, that narrow definition of "home" excludes most of our kids, too.

I'm here to say that this nation built by enslaved people on stolen land must be a country where all our children have equal opportunity. Where the words "with liberty and justice for all" must not ring hollow but must be a clarion call for all of us to form a more perfect union. If our democracy is to survive, if the promise of America is to ever ring true, we must act to create schools and communities that are actively anti-racist (See Laurie Halse Anderson's excellent essay), where diversity, inclusion, equity are the foundation of the tomorrow we are building together.

I've been fortunate to meet readers all across the country, and so many times, I've been met by well-meaning folks who are shocked by the overt prejudice that seems to be trickling down and spilling into our streets. But here's the truth: for many of us, this is nothing new. As I wrote in my author's note for Internment, "Fascism isn't going to simply appear in America one day. It's here. But so are we." What is new is the growing sense that we must use our power and privilege for a purpose-to make this world better for all our children. It's a lofty goal, but our children deserve no less. I'm asking you to make a choice, to realize there is no room for moral equivalencies when we're faced with hatred that dictates policy. As Elie Wiesel rightly demanded of us, "We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim."

Another comment I've heard as I've toured for Internment is perfectly captured in the words of a young hijabi woman who approached me at the North Texas Teen Book Festival. "Thank you," she said. "You put my fears onto the page. But you also gave me hope."

GIVE THEM HOPE

So what can you do? In your libraries, schools, and communities you have the privilege of working with young people and the power to curate the books that they have access to, to create a space that is a home for all. It's a big task. Start by asking yourself tough questions and finding the answers. Some of these answers might make you uncomfortable. Live with the momentary discomfort because you're trying to topple the walls of hatred and build bridges-it's worth it.

My challenges to you:

CHALLENGE: Question the cultural hegemony.

Think about what is the default? The normative? If we really believe that America is the "Greatest Poem," as Walt Whitman said, then we need to build spaces where every child can contribute a verse. America's population is changing but our institutions are lagging behind. Consider that while we are still talking about building schools and libraries for tomorrow, those kids are in our classes today. Do your shelves reflect that?

CHALLENGE: Disrupt the exclusionary status quo.

When I was a high school teacher, I taught a unit called "What is an American." I used to start my American lit classes with a simple assignment-look in a magazine and bring in a photo of an American. Over 90 percent of my students in the diverse suburban and New York City public schools I taught at brought in photos of white models. When you imagine an American, what do you picture? Think about that as you not only build your collections but as you walk down the street.

Representation matters. Consider what it must be like for a child to be bombarded with Presidential tweets and popular culture where the people who look like them are labeled as terrorist, thug, cockroach, criminal, liar, un-American. EVERY CHILD DESERVES TO SEE THEMSELVES AS A HERO ON THE PAGE. You absolutely have the power to build your shelves accordingly.

CHALLENGE: Don't be a bystander, be an upstander.

A bystander is passive, someone who is silently complicit: a person who sees a child being bullied, othered, facing aggressions both micro and macro, and can't extend themselves, can't push past their fears to find the compassion that child needs at that moment. A bystander is someone who can't step out of their comfort zone to help that kid who is in a far worse position.

Be an UPSTANDER: Be informed. Be active. Be willing to be uncomfortable so you can use your privilege, so you can extend your privilege to dismantle the very system that thinks some individuals deserve that privilege because of the color of their skin. An upstander will help lift their student's voices, will help them read, write, think, and investigate critically so they can speak up against the system that is trying to hold them down.

I'm asking you to imagine for a moment what it must be like to be othered. To be the kid whose Americanness is questioned, who is bullied because they're fat or queer or brown, or whose parents are terrified they're going to be shot for walking in the wrong neighborhood.

I'm asking you to examine the role we adults play in creating such a brutally unfair world for our children and to do what you can to change it. It starts with a conversation. It starts with challenging yourself.

I'm asking you to live in the discomfort of realizing your privilege, of how you've benefited from various institutionalisms. I'm asking you to screw your courage to the sticking place, to live with the discomfort, so you can help our kids simply live. To be kids. To be known. To be loved.

Samira Ahmed is the New York Times bestselling author of Love, Hate, & Other Filters and Internment. She was born in Bombay, India, and has lived in New York, Chicago, and Kauai, where she spent a year searching for the perfect mango. She currently resides in the Midwest. Find her online at samiraahmed.com and on Twitter and Instagram @sam_aye_ahm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Samira Ahmed Challenges Librarians: "Use Your Power" | Writing and Reading in the Trump Era

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Best-selling YA author Ahmed discusses the brutal realities of everyday racism and xenophobia, what it means to be an American, and how librarians and educators can step up and speak out on behalf of marginalized youth. I was eight years old the first time a racist yelled at me to "Go Home!"

# data[].attributes.headline
Take a Stand Center (IL Holocaust Museum)

# data[].attributes.subject
Take a Stand Center (IL Holocaust Museum)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
TAKE A STAND CENTER

Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center's new Take a Stand Center, a breakthrough exhibition, will lead visitors from Knowledge to Inspiration to Action action, with the 4,000-square-foot Center comprised of three unique and interactive galleries: the Abe & Ida Cooper Survivor Stories Experience, Goodman Upstander Gallery, and Take a Stand Lab.
ABE & IDA COOPER SURVIVOR STORIES EXPERIENCE
This first in the world experience utilizes groundbreaking technology to enable a 'conversation' with 13 recorded Holocaust survivors via 3-D holography, preserving their stories for generations to come. The technology, developed by USC Shoah Foundation's New Dimensions in Testimony program, combines high-definition holographic interview recordings and voice recognition technology to enable Survivors to tell their deeply moving personal stories and then respond to questions from the audience, inviting one-on-one 'conversation.'
GOODMAN UPSTANDER GALLERY
This gallery extends the message beyond the Holocaust to showcase 40 courageous "Upstanders" throughout history and today, striving in the areas of civic, social, economic and environmental rights.

This action-oriented Lab puts the power of change in visitors' hands and provides hands-on tools for affecting change-and becoming an Upstander-including a toolkit for visitors to take home.
Click here to view activism styles and tools.

Grand Opening
Sunday, October 29, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Celebrate the opening of the new Take a Stand Center with a day of exploration and activities including the opportunity to hear from the Survivors filmed for the Survivor Stories Experience, musical performances, and spoken-word poetry.

Check back soon to reserve your spot.
PRINT/BLOG
Hadassah Magazine| Virtual Holocaust Education Interactive Exhibit
Read online>
TV
KCET| Holocaust Survivor Holograms Give History New Depth
Read online>
RADIO
For the Press

Click here to access downloadable photos, FAQs, bios, press releases, and more.

Learn More
To view full screen, click the bottom right corner of the box.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Take a Stand Center " Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Illinois Holocaust Museum tells the story of the Holocaust through interactive exhibitions that move and inspire. World-class special exhibitions explore broad themes related to the mission of the Museum which aim to foster the promotion of human rights and the elimination of genocide.

# data[].attributes.headline
What Reading Slowly Taught me about Writing - TEDTalk by Jacqueline Woodson 

# data[].attributes.subject
What Reading Slowly Taught me about Writing - TEDTalk by Jacqueline Woodson 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jacqueline Woodson: What reading slowly taught me about writing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reading slowly -- with her finger running beneath the words, even when she was taught not to -- has led Jacqueline Woodson to a life of writing books to be savored. In a lyrical talk, she invites us to slow down and appreciate stories that take us places we never thought we'd go and introduce us to people we never thought we'd meet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Historian Ed Baptist provides context on the creation and enforcement of a U.S. racial binary that endures today, as well as Black resistance as a force for political change. And Aisha White urges educators to ask themselves, "What did you learn about race when you were younger?" before they engage with children. She argues that self-reflection and ongoing education are vital tools to combat the fallacy of ignoring students' racialized experiences.

People from all corners of public life are telling teachers to stop discussions about race and racism in the classroom, but keeping the truth of the world from students simply doesn't work. English teacher Matthew Kay urges educators to create brave spaces instead. He provides examples of classroom strategies for engaging with students at the intersections of race, literature and lived experience. Hint: it involves vulnerability, accountability and quality affirmations.

This season, we're examining the century between the Civil War and the modern civil rights movement to understand how systemic racism and slavery persisted and evolved after emancipation-and how Black Americans still developed strong institutions during this time. Co-hosts Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Bethany Jay discuss how students need to grasp this history to understand injustices many of them face today, from voter suppression to mass incarceration.

In 2015, Coach Steve Bandura loaded the Anderson Monarchs, a Little League baseball team from Philadelphia, onto a 1947 Flxible Clipper Bus for a barnstorming tour back in time. Bandura and the players recount lessons learned while visiting historic civil rights sites, meeting veteran activists and playing baseball along the way. And historian Derrick E. White, co-host of The Black Athlete podcast, explores the intersection of sports and civil rights history.

The civil rights movement offers critical context for understanding the systemic police violence, voter suppression efforts, 'law and order' rhetoric and criminalization of activism we see today. It also helps us understand the strategies activists use to fight these injustices. Historians Shannon King and Nishani Frazier explain how they use 21st-century Black activism to teach the movement's history-and how they use the movement to help students better understand the contemporary Black freedom struggle.

The history of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense can help us understand the transition from civil rights to Black Power and contemporary issues like mass incarceration. From the Ten-Point Platform to survival programs, historian Robyn C. Spencer outlines key aspects of the party's revolutionary ideology, grassroots activism and community service. And historian Jakobi Williams joins to share valuable classroom insights.

Historian Clarence Lang joins us for a conversation about Malcolm X. We discuss his commitment to Black pride and self-determination and his rejection of the white gaze and the myth of American exceptionalism. Learn how teaching about the life and works of Malcolm X can illuminate the universe of possibilities of the civil rights movement-and the diversity of ideology, strategy and political thought within the Black freedom struggle.

In this episode, we talk with movement veteran Courtland Cox about lessons from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and his own development as a young organizer of the Emmett Till generation. We join Karlyn Forner and John B. Gartrell to tour the resources available through SNCC Digital Gateway. And we hear from student organizer Kaia Woodford about the lessons from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements that inform her activism today.

Oral histories, historic sites, archives and museums expand students' understanding of the past. They fill in gaps in our textbooks-complementing what's included and capturing what's not. This episode highlights online oral history collections including the Civil Rights History Project. It offers recommendations for students conducting their own oral histories. And it explores resources from the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Teaching civil rights history to young learners creates both opportunities and challenges. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and the subsequent Freedom Schools offer important lessons for helping elementary students to understand the civil rights movement. In this episode, we explore community-based strategies and activities for bringing the Black freedom struggle into your classroom.

If you're finding this podcast useful, please support us by taking our 10 question Listener Survey. And stay tuned! More episodes are on the way. In the meantime, if you're looking for ways to talk with students about the relationship between the hard history of white supremacy and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Learning for Justice resources can help you lead student-responsive, historically grounded discussions about the recent violence.

From the hard work of organizing to the reality of everyday life under Jim Crow, films and literature can bring historical context to life for students. In this episode, we recommend several "must use" films, books, poems and plays for teaching the civil rights movement. We also discuss strategies for incorporating these works across the curricula and for turning even problematic texts into grist for meaningful critical discussions.

Everyone thinks they know the story, but the real history of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott is even better. This episode details the events that set the stage for Ms. Parks' civil disobedience. You'll meet the leaders and organizations who transformed a moment of activism into a 13-month campaign. And you'll learn about the community that held fast in the face of legal and political attacks, economic coercion, intimidation and violence.

To fully understand the United States today, we have to comprehend the central role that slavery played in our nation's past. That legacy is also the foundation for understanding the civil rights movement and its place within the history of the Black freedom struggle. This episode is a special look back at our first season. It explores and expands on the 10 Key Concepts that ground Learning for Justice's K-12 frameworks for teaching the hard history of American slavery.

You cannot teach the civil rights movement without talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it's critical that students deconstruct the mythology surrounding the movement's most iconic figure to learn about the man, not just the hero. The real Dr. King held beliefs that evolved over time. A complex man, he was part of a much larger movement-one that shaped him as much as he shaped it.

The civil rights movement was never strictly a Southern phenomenon. To better understand the Jim Crow North, we explore discrimination and Black protest in places like Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland and New York. To examine the Black Freedom Movement beyond the South, we examine the Black-led fights to gain access to decent housing, secure quality education and end police brutality in these cities.

Armed resistance and nonviolent direct action co-existed throughout the civil rights era. In this episode, three historians confront some comfortable assumptions about nonviolence and self-defense. Wesley Hogan examines the evolution, value and limitations of nonviolence in the movement. Christopher Strain offers a three-part strategy for rethinking this false dichotomy in the classroom. And Akinyele Umoja offers insights about armed resistance from his research in Mississippi.

Alice Qannik Glenn is the host of Coffee and Quaq and assistant producer of The Forgotten Slavery of our Ancestors. This short, classroom-ready film offers an introduction to the history of Indigenous enslavement on land that is currently the United States. This new resource from Learning for Justice features an extensive group of experts, many of whom will be familiar to listeners from Season 2.

Jim Crow was more than signs and separation. It was a system of terror and violence created to control the labor and regulate the behavior of Black people. In this episode, historian Stephen Berrey unpacks the mechanics of racial oppression, the actions white people took-in and beyond the South-to maintain white supremacy, and the everyday ways Black people fought back. And the directors of the film An Outrage join ELA-teacher Ahmariah Jackson to discuss teaching the racial terror of lynching.

Music chronicles the history of the civil rights struggle: The events, tactics and emotions of the movement are documented in songs of the era. From The Freedom Singers to Sam Cooke, historian Charles L. Hughes explains how your students can use music for both historical insight and evidence in the classroom.

Students don't enter our classrooms as blank slates. When it comes to the civil rights movement, we often have to help our students unlearn what they think they know while we're teaching them what actually happened. The people were more complex, the strategies more complicated and the stakes more dangerous than we like to remember. In this episode, historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez demonstrate the value of teaching the movement from the grassroots up.

Teaching the civil rights movement accurately and effectively requires deconstructing the myths and misconceptions around it. Most people are familiar with a very specific version of the movement that exaggerates government support and denies the existence and persistence of racism outside the South. Julian Bond called this the "Master Narrative." It celebrates sanitized icons and downplays grassroots organizing. And it overhypes nonviolence while disparaging self-defense and Black Power. In this episode, we talk with historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez about how to separate fact from fiction in your civil rights teaching.

The systems that enabled and perpetuated African and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the U.S. have much in common, and their histories tell us a great deal about the present. Professors Bethany Jay and Steven Oliver join us to talk about connections between the first two seasons and how to teach them, and we preview what's to come in season three.

In this special call-in episode, listeners share their stories and questions from throughout season 2-including teaching remotely, working with families and stakeholders, and incorporating social justice into subjects like math and science. As educators, we're strongest when we support each other. And you'll hear great suggestions from fellow teachers, like these resources we discuss from Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia.

It's time for our first call-in show! We know things are chaotic for you and every other educator right now. We feel it too, so this seems like the perfect time to talk. Pick up the phone and dial 888-59-STORY (888-597-8679). Our lines are open until Sunday night, April 19. Teaching hard history is even harder right now, so let's talk about resources you can use if you're teaching virtually. Ask us your questions; tell us your stories. And let us know how you're doing.

Indian Removal was a brutal and complicated effort that textbooks often simplify. It is also inseparably related to slavery. Enslavers seeking profit drove demand for Indigenous lands, displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. Some of these Indigenous people participated in chattel slavery. Focusing on the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, this episode pulls the lens back to show how Removal and enslavement must be taught together. This story must be told if we're going to understand the full hard history of American enslavement.

The Americas were built on the lands, labor and lives of Indigenous peoples. Despite being erased from history textbooks after the so-called first Thanksgiving, Indigenous peoples did not disappear. Colonial settlers relied on the cooperation, exploitation and forced labor of their Native neighbors to survive and thrive in what became North America. Focusing on New England, historian Margaret Newell introduces us to the Charter Generation of systematically enslaved people across this continent.

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers' Project collected stories from people who had been enslaved. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection at the Library of Congress is a valuable resource; these oral histories are also problematic. Interpreting these narratives within literary and historical context, students can develop primary source literacy. Historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly outlines unique insights these texts can add to your curriculum.

To better understand the United States' past and present, we need to better understand Indigenous identities-and classrooms play a huge role. This starts with examining what's missing from our social studies, history, civics and government curricula. Throughout this episode, we reference the K-5 Framework for Teaching Hard History as we shed light on key topics like sovereignty, land and erasure.

Educators can no longer ignore our country's history of Indigenous enslavement. Our students need a fuller understanding of the pivotal history of slavery to comprehend the present and develop a vision for our nation's future. In this mid-season recap, we highlight key lessons about this consequential part of American history-along with teaching strategies and resources-through the voices of leading scholars and educators featured so far.

Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the forced labor and bondage of Indigenous peoples was integral to the economic and political history of what became the Southwestern United States. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez outlines the significance of silver mining, Indigenous enslavement and resistance in the history of New Mexico and Latin America. We examine how, as white settlers moved west, so-called "free soil" states like California continued to institutionalize coerced labor.
Listen Now

A hundred years before the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, Europeans introduced the commercial practice of enslavement in "The New World." And for the next 400 years, millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas were enslaved through several forms of forced labor and bondage. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez calls this "The Other Slavery," and his work is changing our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade.
Listen Now

Andrés Reséndez is the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. His work has changed conventional wisdom about the institution of slavery in the Atlantic world. Over the next two episodes, host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Reséndez will discuss key turning points in this history-exploring how it expands our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and the lasting legacy of colonialism, which continues to reverberate in our communities. Be sure to join us.
Listen Now

Each autumn, Thanksgiving brings a disturbing amount of inaccurate information and troubling myths into classrooms across the United States. Most students don't learn much about the history of Native nations-and even less about Indigenous peoples today. Dr. Debbie Reese explains what to look for and what to avoid (or teach with a critical lens) when selecting children's books by and about Indigenous people. She also recommends specific books to counter common misconceptions in your classroom.
Listen Now

Children's books are often the primary way young students are exposed to the history of American slavery. But many books about slavery sugarcoat oppression. Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas examines what we should consider when it comes to how children's books portray African Americans and Indigenous people, their cultures and the effects of enslavement. She also explains why it's crucial to create "a balance of narratives" when selecting books about marginalized and underrepresented communities.
Listen Now

For elementary teachers approaching the topic of slavery, it can be tempting to focus only on heroes and avoid explaining oppression. But teachers' omissions speak as loudly as what they choose to include. And what children learn in the early grades has broad consequences for the rest of their education. Dr. Kate Shuster guides us through the new Teaching Hard History K-5 framework from Learning for Justice. We also learn how four elementary teachers are beginning to use it in their classrooms.
Listen Now

Understanding Indigenous enslavement expands our conception of slavery in what is now the United States. It spread across the entire continent and affected millions of people of different backgrounds. If we define slavery too narrowly, we can fail to see its persistence over time and even its modern-day permutations. Historian Christina Snyder examines the Civil War, Lincoln and emancipation with Indigenous people in mind.
Listen Now

Millions of Indigenous people lived in North America before European colonial powers invaded. Along with an insatiable desire for free labor, Europeans brought a system of slavery that significantly differed from the historical practices of enslavement among Native nations. Historian Christina Snyder tells the story of what happened when these worlds collided. European concepts of bondage transformed the way Native nations interacted with each other, resulted in the enslavement and death of millions of Indigenous people, and sparked widespread resistance by Native nations.
Listen Now

The Smithsonian's Eduardo Díaz and Renée Gokey discuss the importance of learning about Indigenous enslavement. And former Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello explains all of the program's classroom resources available for teaching this history, including a first-of-its-kind K-5 framework.
Listen Now

We're turning our attention to the enslavement of Indigenous people, spending more time with teachers in the classroom and adding support for K-5 educators. Tune in next week for more advice about teaching the history and long legacy of American slavery.
Listen Now

Download the transcript for all of season 1 here.

Historian Bethany Jay returns - answering questions from educators across the country. Host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and the co-editor of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery confront teacher anxieties and counter misconceptions in our season finale.
Listen Now

From elementary to high school, YA literature can introduce fundamental themes and information about slavery, especially when paired with primary sources. John H. Bickford shows how to capitalize on the strengths and weaknesses of trade books about slavery.
Listen Now

Using the present to explore the past. Tamara Spears and Jordan Lanfair suggest a Social Studies unit about Resistance & Kanye West, and a set of English Language Arts lessons examining holidays to understand the legacy of American slavery.
Listen Now

How it's done. Tamara Spears teaches middle school Social Studies in New York and Jordan Lanfair is a high school English Language Arts teacher in Chicago. Each has been developing additional lessons about slavery for years. They share their experiences.
Listen Now

Over the next few episodes, we're bringing Season One to a close. Tune in for stories from the classroom, guidance for elementary teachers and language arts classes. And answers to questions from listeners like you.
Listen Now

Enslavement didn't end with Emancipation. Historian James Brewer Stewart discusses modern-day slavery happening across the world-and right here in the U.S.-showing educators how to connect the past with the present.
Listen Now

A listener's question leads to a meaningful moment. And now we want more! Take a listen, then email us to tell us your story about teaching hard history for an upcoming, special episode.
Listen Now

At James Madison's Montpelier, the legacy of enslaved people isn't silenced-and their descendants have a voice. Christian Cotz, Price Thomas and Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes explain how that happened, and why it's important.
Listen Now

In the United States, justice was never blind. Historian Paul Finkelman goes beyond legal jargon to illustrate how slavery was entangled with the opinions of the Court-and encoded into the Constitution itself.
Listen Now

Constitutional historian Paul Finkelman explains the deeply racist bargains the founding fathers struck in order to unify the country under one document and discusses what students need to know about how slavery defined America after the Revolution.
Listen Now

Film historian Ron Briley returns with more documentary, feature film and miniseries suggestions for history and English instructors. From Ken Burns to Black Panther, this episode offers background and strategies for incorporating pop culture into classroom lessons.
Listen Now

Film has long shaped our nation's historical memory, for good and bad. Film historian Ron Briley offers ways to responsibly use films in the classroom to reframe the typical narrative of American slavery and Reconstruction.
Listen Now

Most students leave school thinking enslaved people lived like characters in Gone With the Wind. Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens reveals the remarkable diversity of lived experiences within slavery and explains the gap between what scholars and students know.
Listen Now

To see a more complete picture of the experience of enslaved people, you have to redefine resistance. Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers teachers a lens to help students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery.
Listen Now

Students learning about slavery often ask, "Why didn't enslaved people just run away or revolt?" Lindsay Anne Randall offers a lesson in "Process Drama"-a method teachers can use to answer this question, build empathy and offer perspective.
Listen Now

In many ways, the U.S. has fallen short of its ideals. How can we explain this to students-particularly in the context of discussing slavery? Professor Steven Thurston Oliver has this advice for teachers: Face your fears.
Listen Now

Follow the money. Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara explains why American slavery couldn't have existed without a national commercial infrastructure that supported and benefited from the labor of enslaved people.
Listen Now

Dr. Bethany Jay is back to talk about teaching the end of the Civil War, and how enslaved people's participation in the war helped subvert the institution of slavery.
Listen Now

What really caused the Civil War? In this episode, Salem State University Professor Bethany Jay offers tips for teaching lesser-known history that clarifies this question and cuts through our cloudy national understanding of the Confederacy.
Listen Now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What we don't know about American history hurts us all. Teaching Hard History begins with the long and brutal legacy of chattel slavery and reaches through the victories of and violent responses to the civil rights movement to the present day.

# data[].attributes.headline
Writing Myself a New Story, a guest post by Jasmine Warga

# data[].attributes.subject
Writing Myself a New Story, a guest post by Jasmine Warga

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I first met my uncle Abdalla when I was four-years-old. Up until the moment he got off the plane, walked straight toward me and picked me up off the ground with a twirl, whispering in rapid-fire Arabic to me, my uncle had only existed in stories that my father told me.
I didn't understand most of what my uncle was saying when he greeted me-I was only familiar with a couple of Arabic phrases-but I also felt like I understood every word. That's how it always was with Abdalla. I understood, and if I didn't, he made sure that I did.

My parents had asked him to come to America to take care of me during the birth of my baby brother and the subsequent hectic weeks that would follow. I think their hope was that I'd be too distracted by my new uncle to resent the fact that I was no longer the baby of the family. It worked. My uncle and I spent the weeks leading up to my brother's birth trading stories. He would tell me about Jordan-my great-aunt with a temper like a snake, my grandmother who believed deeply in otherworldly things, and a whole city made of a rose rock that he would show me when I visited. My uncle is the one who first taught me the true power of storytelling. He rendered Jordan so gorgeously and evocatively that I was desperate to visit.

I finally got the chance to visit when I was eight-years-old. My uncle greeted us at the airport, pulling me into a hug, and telling me, "Welcome home" in both Arabic and English. At first, Jordan didn't feel at all like home. Jordan was people eyeing me with curiosity, confused that my name was Yasmine Nazek, but I didn't speak smooth and confident Arabic. Jordan was hilly roads that made me slightly nauseous as we drove up and down them. Jordan was open windows at all times, and the sound of the call to prayer at dawn. It was pomegranates that exploded in my mouth. It was big family dinners of mansaf and crowded rooms filled with people I'd never met but who loved me and I loved them. It was playing soccer with local neighborhood children in an empty lot that would soon be filled with luxury condos.
One of the last nights of the trip, I sat with my uncle outside on his patio, and told him through tears that I was going to miss Jordan so much when I went home. That I didn't want to go home because this was home, could be home. My uncle took my face in his hands, and told me that I could come visit whenever I wanted because, "Jordan belonged to me." Jordan belonged to me. The thing about diaspora kids like me is that it is hard to believe that any place belongs to us.
Not our homes in America where we are othered, sidelined, and marginalized. And not the countries of our ethnic origin because how can you muster the audacity to lay to claim to a country-a culture-that still feels foreign to you, no matter how much you want it to be familiar.

I was always told how lucky I was to have two homes-and I know I am-but it's also deeply lonely to feel like a stranger in both worlds.

When I got back from that first trip to Jordan, I did a presentation for my third-grade class about it. My dad came in to help. We served the class hummus. This was before everyone in America knew what hummus was. Most of my classmates were excited to try the strange dip in front of them, but you can probably imagine the look on some of their faces-a puckering of the lips, declarations of "weird!" and "ew!"

I remember going from a feeling of surging pride-having just shared an incredible photo of Petra-to deep shame. This is one of my first childhood memories of really feeling different from my classmates and wanting not to be. I'm sure I'd had those moments before-I'd must have-but none stand out to me as clearly as this one. Sweating in my hand-embroidered thobe that moments ago I'd been so delighted to wear. Running to the school bathroom to pull it off; and making excuses about why I needed to change that instant.
I was eight years old then. I never talked about Jordan at school again until I was seventeen.

As more and more people begin to read Other Words for Home, I'm being asked if Jude is a stand-in for me when I was twelve. I always pause at this question. The differences are obvious to me. They are almost as wide and daunting as the ocean that Jude crosses in the book. The most glaring of which is, while we are both Arab, Jude is Syrian-born, and I am American-born.

It is not lost on me that the character in the story who I most identify with is the novel's main antagonist-Jude's American-born cousin, Sarah. Sarah is hurting on the inside-feeling lost and lonely in a way that she doesn't even have a vocabulary for-and so she lashes out at others.

I believe so much in positive representation. I used to parrot this idea that our job as writers was to write the world exactly as it is, exactly as we experience it-an academic idea I'd stolen from older white male authors who I'd seen talk about their books. I thought that repeating it would prove that I, too, was hip, educated, and literary. That I deserved my seat at the proverbial table.

But the older I get, the more I believe that books give birth to the world we live in. Media representation shapes actual perceptions, and so instead of writing sad, lonely brown girls, I decided to write a girl like Jude. A girl who has pride in her family, her culture. A girl who, of course, makes mistakes, but is sure of her heart. Growing up, I never saw a character like Jude. If I encountered a self-assured heroine, she was always white, and beautiful in a way that every media outlet had led me to believe was the only way to be beautiful-fair skin, light hair, a nose completely unlike mine.

Jude does not exist to help Sarah to grow. I want to make that very clear. She has her own story and agency. But one of my very favorite things about the book is the way in which Jude's confidence in her identity begins to influence the way Sarah sees herself. We can all learn from one another, and the way Sarah learns from Jude, and in turn, the way Jude learns from Sarah, are particularly meaningful to me.

When I was sixteen, and visiting my uncle in Jordan for the summer, I remember whining to him that I didn't want to be Arab or Muslim anymore. That everyone in the world hated Arabs and Muslims. When I told Abdalla this, memories from my childhood came flooding back to me-desperately wishing to look like my white American girl doll in fourth grade, lying and saying I was Italian instead of Arab in ninth grade, staying silent even though it turned my insides to acid when I heard ignorant things said about Islam. I also thought of the deep shame I felt about not posting a single picture from my visit on Facebook that showed one of my hijab-wearing relatives. Instead posting a series of photographs of the westernized cafes that had recently opened up in Amman.

My uncle didn't get upset or angry at my declaration. He simply smiled at me in a knowing way. He told me that I only thought that because of the story the American media was telling me. "But Yasmine My uncle Abdalla died before I finished the first draft of Meet Jasmine Warga

Photo credit: Braxton Black

Other Words for Home About Other Words for Home A gorgeously written, hopeful middle grade novel in verse about a young girl who must leave Syria to move to the United States, perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds and Aisha Saeed. . He never got to read it. But I still like to imagine that somewhere he's smiling, knowing that I did write myself another story. habibti, you're a writer, yes? Write another story." This lyrical, life-affirming story is about losing and finding home and, most importantly, finding yourself. ISBN-13: 9780062747808
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 05/28/2019
Jasmine Warga is the author of the middle grade novel Other Words for Home (Balzer + Bray; May 28, 2019), as well as several teen books: Here We Are Now, and My Heart and Other Black Holes, which has been translated into over twenty languages. She lives and writes in Chicago, IL. You can visit Jasmine online at www.jasminewarga.com.

Jude never thought she'd be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her hometown start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives.

At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud. The American movies that Jude has always loved haven't quite prepared her for starting school in the US-and her new label of "Middle Eastern," an identity she's never known before.

But this life also brings unexpected surprises-there are new friends, a whole new family, and a school musical that Jude might just try out for. Maybe America, too, is a place where Jude can be seen as she really is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Writing Myself a New Story, a guest post by Jasmine Warga

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I first met my uncle Abdalla when I was four-years-old. Up until the moment he got off the plane, walked straight toward me and picked me up off the ground with a twirl, whispering in rapid-fire Arabic to me, my uncle had only existed in stories that my father told me.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.

# data[].attributes.headline
'Where I'm From': A Crowdsourced Poem That Collects Your Memories Of Home

# data[].attributes.subject
'Where I'm From': A Crowdsourced Poem That Collects Your Memories Of Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
NPR asked for your poems inspired by memories of home. What we received was overwhelming: 1,400 submissions in just two days, with lines that draw on all five senses - in vivid detail and gauzy memories.

In our callout, NPR resident poet Kwame Alexander and Morning Edition host Rachel Martin looked to one poem in particular: "Where I'm From" by Appalachian poet George Ella Lyon. Lyon herself responded to our callout and left something in our submission inbox:

"I was amazed and delighted to hear you read part of 'Where I'm From' on Morning Edition Monday. My poem, written in 1993, was inspired by a poem of Jo Carson's. Her poem took off from something she heard somebody say," she said. "So 'Where I'm From' has been a pass-it-on-phenomenon from the get-go. Here's to the power of poetry and place, and to the voices in all of us that long to be heard."

As Kentucky's poet laureate in 2015, Lyon collected "Where I'm From" poems from people around the world. Here are some of yours:
Where I'm From: A Morning Edition Crowdsourced Poem of Remembering
I am from travelers and adventure
from "Be seen, not heard!"
from ritual and plainsong
from England and exile
from mint sauce and lamb.

I am from bed sheets
Draped over our dining room chairs.
from the trees Littering the backyard
The sweet taste of mulberries Staining my fingers red
I'm from big hats under rainbow umbrellas
Buckets of wet sand and unstable castles
I'm from orange and vanilla custard
with a pizza slice the size of your chest
From hot July days and cool summer nights
I am from Sunday night pizza and Monday Night Football

I am from marbles
From empanadas cooking in the street
I am from orchids and mango trees
I am from la torta tres leches and ruana
I am from happy and serious
From hard work and sweat

I am from diners and malls and accents that put an "aw" in coffee.
from silky lingerie and sweat socks, bruised knuckles and scars I gave myself
from longing to be someone, somewhere else.
I am from a mother who was still a girl;
whose beauty kept her shy
I am from dirt and fences
from strength and toughness

I am from a time when my mother went to the hospital and never came back;
when my toys were in a box by the curb as we drove away.
I am from singing in the darkness of night
Putting myself to sleep with the sound of my own voice.

I am from playing backyard baseball with tennis balls, Wiffle balls, even roundish gourds.
from weekend sleep-overs
from orange push-ups
from fallen leaves kicked up in swirls on walks to school,
from early morning radio announcements of a snow day - no school!

I am from the South and the North.
from immigrant grandparents and Civil War soldiers.
I am from the red dirt clay of Virginia
From the sounds of the fiddle to the beauty of a choir
From the jig and the reel
to the cloggers and the dancers.
From collard greens and fat back,
chitterlings and white bread
I'm from hymns learned on Sundays,
hypocrisy displayed on Mondays.

I am from James Brown and Santana.
from Groovin' on a Sunday Afternoon
and Crystal Blue Persuasion.

I am from endless steps,
from California and Texas, and Durango, Colorado.
From unknown ancestors of the ancient Southwest,
cliff-dwellers and puebloans.
I am from the earth --

from from cityscapes and sleepy suburbs
from cicada clicks and firefly sparks
from the call of books and breathing through struggles.
I am from you

and you are from me
We are love

We are home
We are from this day forward.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Where I'm From': A Crowdsourced Poem That Collects Your Memories Of Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Morning Edition's resident poet Kwame Alexander compiled your poems inspired by memories of home, and the final crowdsourced poem is full of rich details of where you're from.

# data[].attributes.headline
Other Words for Home: Starting a New Life 

# data[].attributes.subject
Other Words for Home: Starting a New Life 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I search every day for a clue about why I deserve
to be here in Aunt Michelle's kitchen,
safe
and fed.
When so many others
just like me are not.
Lucky. I am learning how to say it
over and over again in English.
I am learning how it tastes-
sweet with promise
and bitter with responsibility."

Jasmine Warga's timely new young adult novel explores the current refugee crisis from the perspective of a child whose life is uprooted as a result of war and violence.

Jude is only a little girl when she's faced with the tough life experience of leaving her current home to start a new one in a foreign country. Any adult would struggle to make such a drastic change in their life, but it's just as hard, if not harder, for children when they become refugees because they're tasked with the hurdle of finding a new home, while building their sense of self in a world that is volatile and unpredictable.

In such a setting, we find Jude, the Muslim Girl representation we've all been waiting for.

In Other Words for Home, Jude comes from an idyllic Syrian town that had managed to avoid the violence and danger, but once peace close to home is disrupted, there's no choice but to leave if she and her mother are to have a safe chance at life.

Thus, Jude shifts her life from a small Syrian town to Cincinnati in America, a country that considers itself the centre of the world, where everything looks new and shiny, and everyone seems to be living in a comfortable, cocooned existence.

As a young Syrian refugee, Jude has faced the hard truths of life, and it is with this lens of awareness that she navigates her new home in America.

"It is so strange to feel lucky," remarks the young narrator Jude, "for something that is making my heart feel so sad."

After landing in America, once Jude and her mother's documents are verified by immigration, Jude realises that she's one of the lucky ones to receive a second chance to build a life. But being a refugee means this opportunity comes with the heartbreak of leaving behind the only home Jude knows, and along with it her father and older brother who cannot join her in America.

The idea of being 'lucky' is something Jude revisits a few times in the story, especially while trying to figure out what makes her who she is and how much of our circumstances are outside our control.

Layla, an Arab-American girl whose parents are from Lebanon and who was born in America, tells Jude that she's lucky she's been to the Middle East and it's also lucky that she's here now, in America, away from the violence. Through simple exchanges like these, Warga offers deeper insights into the terrain of diaspora identity that Jude is now part of.

The interactions between Jude and the people in her new community builds an important narrative that recognises the legitimacy and acceptability of being someone who grew up in an Arabic-speaking country.

Being from the Middle East is a matter of pride, especially if your roots first grew there. Living in the Arab world or visiting the native land is something to be desired, an experience that makes one lucky in the eyes of those who haven't been so fortunate.

War in the Middle East, which is often the result of Western intervention, has caused tensions that are making people flee places that were perfectly acceptable homes, creating rifts and alienating whole generations from their culture and identity.

Warga depicts the various experiences of growing up in diaspora through the characters of Sarah and Layla, Jude's friend who is an Arab-American who grew up in America but speaks Arabic fluently.

While Jude grew up speaking Arabic, her native language, her cousin Sarah did not have the same experience with language growing up in America. Sarah, who is mostly indifferent to Jude's presence, admits to her that she longs to speak Arabic, perhaps because she feels some connection to her Syrian roots that never took hold alongside her American identity.

Jude's uncle, Mazin, is a man who left Syria a while ago and embraced the American way of life, yet the longing to revisit is clear in him. And so, Sarah is out of touch with her Arab identity, as a result of growing up in an assimilated comfort zone.

Other Words for Home is a must-read novel because Warga weaves a deceptively simple narrative from the perspective of a young Muslim girl who is going through change in almost every facet of her life.

Jude is in a foreign country, learning to be educated in a foreign language, adjusting to a home with a new set of family (her uncle, his wife and their daughter Sarah who is Jude's age), and while she is trying to understand American cultural norms and expectations, Jude is also navigating her identity and the process of becoming a young adult.

Being Muslim gives Jude a specific set of principles to live by, and she's steadfast in her faith and identity. It's refreshing to read the story of a Muslim character who is not conflicted by her religious identity, rather embraces it and relies on it for strength and hope.

Warga's young narrator is a confident and mature voice whose story is made even more compelling because of the strength of her convictions.

When it's time for her to start wearing her hijab, Jude does so with a quiet determination and enthusiasm, eager to meet her new self. She's proud of this development in her life. She embraces who she is and continues to nourish her Muslim identity, regardless of the Islamophobia in a post-9/11 America.

Jude notes that there are differing reactions to her hijab; Layla's mother embraces her and kisses her cheeks, "greeting me like I am a brand-new person," meanwhile her American aunt, Michelle, is suspicious that Jude is being forced to wear the hijab. Jude also observes that "there are people on the street who never used to notice me before.....but now (they) stop and turn their heads, their eyes watching me like I am a ticking time bomb."

These reactions to her hijab make Jude long for the kind of celebration that would have taken place at home, something similar to the way Layla's mother greets her, "like a celebration, a blessing."

The simple addition to her attire changes the way strangers perceive Jude but she wants people to know that it is her choice, "I want women like Aunt Michelle to understand that it is not only women who look like them who are free who think and care about other women."

The anti-Islamic rhetoric is also subtly explored through Jude's experiences in school, and while others see the hijab as a challenging roadblock in Jude's path, she wraps it firmly and pursues her dreams with conviction. Jude truly is an icon of intersectional feminism.

Another aspect of the novel that was presented really well is the subversion of the gaze: When Jude feels the gaze of Americans on her - a Muslim from the Middle East who wears hijab and speaks with an accent - she is looking right back at them.

Peppered throughout the story are instances where Jude observes American culture and language, and comments on it through the lens of her own sensibilities as a young Syrian girl.

Noticing the enthusiastic use of labels, Jude remarks, "Americans love labels. They help them know what to expect. Sometimes, though, I think labels stop them from thinking."

In her ESL - English as Second Language - class, she meets a small group of students all of whom "were from somewhere else, but are here now."

It is in this group of students that Jude finds comfort and a sense of belonging. Together they navigate the newness of American English and its many oddities, like slang words, and the words and phrases that are new to them. It is one of the few spaces where she feels comfortable about being someone who doesn't fully belong yet.

It is important to me, as a reader, that while Jude embraces her new life and grows into a new identity, she holds on to her native language and culture. This is particularly noticed when Jude frequently reaches for Arabic sayings and proverbs to make sense of her new life. One of my favourite examples is when she says, "There is an Arabic proverb that says: She makes you feel like a loaf of freshly baked bread. It is said about the nicest kindest people. The type of people who help you rise."

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga is written in verse, a style through which the author juxtaposes simple, straightforward language with deeper meaning.

The novel's form makes it a narrative that is easily accessible for readers who are young, while preserving a sophistication in thought to capture older audiences. Other Words for Home is an important and necessary young adult novel that has generously offered a gateway for readers, especially in the West, to understand the lived experiences of young refugees.

Jude's story is one of hope, new beginnings and finding the self in the most trying times. In Jude we see an important representation for Muslim girls, one that challenges stereotypes and oppression narratives that need to be demolished.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Other Words for Home features the strong Muslim girl we've been looking for

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I search every day for a clue about why I deserve to be here in Aunt Michelle's kitchen, safe and fed. When so many others just like me are not. Lucky. I am learning how to say it over and over again in English.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the last few years, the 6th grade in my school has been studying a unit on the Japanese Internment using the short story "The Bracelet" and an excerpt from Journey to Topaz. They study Executive Order 9066, examine propaganda of the time, and even delve into music and photos. So I have been looking forward to the publication of this graphic novel for a very long time. It did not disappoint in the least bit.

They Called Us Enemy
By George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott. Art by Harmony Becker
July 2019, Top Shelf, $19.99

Young people might not be familiar with the famed George Takei by name, but they might know of his famous role on Star Trek. It's doubtful that they even know that the early formative years of this famed actor were spent behind barbed wire fences in a prison sanctioned by the American government.

Takei, along with his co-writers, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, eloquently tell the story of his family's imprisonment. Like the famed trilogy March by Congressman John Lewis and his co-creators Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell, They Called Us Enemy tells its story as a flashback. It juxtaposes Takei's TED talk and a visit to FDR's historic home in Hyde Park, New York, where he tells audiences his story.

It's a startling, jarring, horrifying story of innocent people rounded up at gunpoint, herded into camps, and held against their will. Some were American citizens. Some were legal immigrants. Most were hard-working people who were just trying to build a life and capture the American dream. But Executive Order 9066 robbed them of this opportunity.

Takei was five years old, when he was woken up in the middle of the night by his father and the family was taken out of their home at gunpoint. For the most part, Takei describes the initial experience as an adventure. His parents worked hard to shield him from the truth. Even sleeping in a horse stall seemed exciting at first. But as the years went on, and the injustices grew, Takei became more aware and the images and memories became more painful: How citizens were tricked into giving up their citizenship, and how when they protested, the Army's force rained down on them. The book ends with Takei and his parents' return to Los Angeles to readjust and rebuild their lives after the internment ended. Takei reveals how he got a start in Hollywood. By the end, a full story is told with robust storytelling that leaves readers with lingering feelings and lingering thoughts.

The black and white artwork is vibrant despite the lack of color. Becker conveys a strong sense of emotion, with facial expressions (just look at the cover image-a young Takei looking lost and confused) that come alive. Young readers will surely connect to this story.

I know that in our eighth grade curriculum, the social studies teachers only spent one day on the Japanese internment (and a mere two days on the Holocaust). Though there is literature about the Japanese internment, there aren't many graphic novels. Kevin Pyle's 2012 graphic novel Take What You Can Carry is out of print. They Called Us Enemy will add to a growing collection of nonfiction graphic stories that will help today's younger generation understand our history and why we must say #neveragain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the last few years, the 6th grade in my school has been studying a unit on the Japanese Internment using the short story "The Bracelet" and an excerpt from Journey to Topaz. They study Executive Order 9066, examine propaganda of the time, and even delve into music and photos.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Broad and High
Clip: Season 5 Episode 9 | 4m 56s

Sara Abou Rashed was born and raised in Damascus, Syria. She immigrated to Ohio with her family in 2013 knowing no English, but quickly started writing poetry in her new language. She recently delivered her poem "I Am America" at the Community Arts Partnership Awards luncheon held in October at the Columbus Convention Center and sponsored by the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

Aired: 12/14/17

Rating: NR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"I Am America" by Sara Abou Rashed | Season 5 Episode 9 | Broad and High

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Broad and High Clip: Season 5 Episode 9 | 4m 56s Sara Abou Rashed was born and raised in Damascus, Syria. She immigrated to Ohio with her family in 2013 knowing no English, but quickly started writing poetry in her new language.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hidden Treasures of a Refugee’s Journey | Sara Abou Rashed | TEDxColumbus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sara Abou Rashed and her family fled war-torn Syria when she was 13, eventually finding their way to Columbus. Now a student at Denison University, she is sharing her experience of war, immigration, language and home in a one-hour, one-woman play. Under the direction of Larry Smith, Rashed explores the relationship between place, identity and everything in between.

# data[].attributes.headline
Pages Matam, Elizabeth Acevedo & G. Yamazawa - "Unforgettable"

# data[].attributes.subject
Pages Matam, Elizabeth Acevedo & G. Yamazawa - "Unforgettable"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pages Matam, Elizabeth Acevedo & G. Yamazawa - Unforgettable

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Storytelling is at the core of who we are as humans. It is how we learn, identify ourselves, and connect to others in the past, the present and the future. The intention of this exhibition is to record the diverse stories and life experiences of Muslim people living in Chicago in order to build connections in our communities through listening and understanding.

By sharing these stories, we aim to exhibit the vibrant Muslim communities in the city and suburbs, honor individual experiences and ensure that these personal stories will be preserved for future generations.

This exhibition draws from more than 100 interviews conducted with Muslim Chicagoans sharing their stories of faith, identity, and personal journeys. Dozens of objects from local individuals and organizations, such as garments, artwork, and photographs, as well as videos and interactive experiences expand on how and why Chicago is known as the American Medina.
Exhibition will open to the public October 21, 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Medina Stories of Muslim Chicago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Storytelling is at the core of who we are as humans. It is how we learn, identify ourselves, and connect to others in the past, the present and the future. The intention of this exhibition is to record the diverse stories and life experiences of Muslim people living in Chicago in order to build connections in our communities through listening and understanding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Proclamation: We are tired of hearing the picture book is in trouble, and tired of pretending it is not." - Mac Barnett, "A Picture Book Manifesto"
Story & Pictures By is a feature-length documentary from Emmy®-nominated director Joanna Rudnick exploring the power and reach of children's picture books through the lens of three of today's most original authors/illustrators: Mac Barnett, Christian Robinson, and Yuyi Morales.

Uniquely created for children and reflective of the social and historical time through their eyes, picture books are in the midst of a second Golden Age, eschewing traditionally "kid-friendly" narratives and pushing for more diverse perspectives; yet there is still a long way to go-of the characters represented in children's picture books in 2018, only 10% were African American, 7% Asian, 5% Latinx, and 1% American Indian, according to statistics from the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC).

Our society is increasingly polarized, and children are exposed to frightening news stories about everything from the climate crisis to mass shootings. They need tools to make sense of these realities. Picture books are one of those tools and they are also addressing an overwhelming need for the creation of empathy and for the exposure to a multitude of creators, viewpoints, cultures, and experiences.

Research continues to show that one of the most important determining factors in the trajectory of a child's life is whether or not literacy is established at a young age. A 2015 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that students who do not read proficiently by 3rd grade are four times more likely to drop out of school.

Picture books are the stories that put our kids to bed at night. They instill a love of storytelling; they teach visual, auditory, written, and emotional literacy; and they provide space and agency for children to better understand themselves and the world.

Story & Pictures By explores the raw power of children's picture books to foster literacy and spark creativity, and to foment a more empathetic and diverse portrait of the world and our society in the minds of the next generation of its citizens.

The documentary is about halfway through production and is seeking $40,000 in funds to continue production in Fall 2019 and Winter 2020.

MEET CHRISTIAN, MAC, AND YUYI

Christian Robinson creates worlds made of collage and paint, where children of every skin color, faith, and ability co-exist, whether they are in a big city or in a make-believe world. When Christian grew up, he didn't see many children like him-African-American, raised by his grandmother in a crowded apartment-in children's picture books or popular media targeted to children. His work is among those driving a more diverse collection of children's narratives that aren't as much about the biopic as they are about universal themes of belonging, comfort, friendship, connection, and identity. Through his work, Christian is also beginning to share his personal experience of growing up with a mother addicted to crack, who was in and out of jail, and his struggle to read and discover a sense of self. He is on a journey to overcome his past and integrate into his work so that children not only recognize their physical selves, but their experiences of growing up in worlds that have never been fodder for children's books. Until now.

Mac Barnett is a New York Times best-selling author. He is a master of narrative, and a champion of mischief, pranks, humor, and experimentation in children's literature. Following in the footsteps of authors from the first Golden Age, like Maurice Sendak and Margaret Wise Brown, he rejects the notion of moralistic, preachy stories, tidy endings, and talking down to children. "If they are not less than adults," he says, "why should their art form be less than adult literature?" Mac explores what it means to expel the adult perspective of what childhood is or should be, and to instead write purely for children.

Yuyi Morales fell in love with picture books after immigrating to the United States in her twenties. She crossed the bridge in Juarez carrying her newborn son. The library was a refuge for her isolation-the place where she and her son learned a new language and where she found her voice and a sense of purpose. In direct response to the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the 2016 election, Yuyi created the children's book Dreamers to share her personal immigrant story as well as to celebrate the culture that immigrants both leave behind and bring with them when they migrate across borders. Yuyi's new book will take place along the U.S./Mexico border (more on this below).

A Reading of Mac Barnett's Picture Book Manifesto

As a filmmaker, a human, and a parent of two children, it's hard not to feel at times that childhood is under siege. When I see my kids come home from active shooter drills or hear the rhetoric they pick up on the playground, I am reminded of the importance of art to help us make sense of a world that can feel beyond our grasp and out of control.

The team behind Story & Pictures By believes that children's books, and especially picture books, are foundational in a child's development and understanding of themselves and the world. We all read picture books at some point in our lives and have a treasured few that still evoke a sense of familiarity and nostalgia, yet we have little understanding of their unique role and impact.

Living in a society inundated by digital screens and the 24-hour news cycle, picture books offer safe spaces for children and adults to come together, have a digital time-out, ask questions, have difficult conversations, and perform the theater of reading together.

As we enter another Golden Age of picture books, where we are truly creating a more diverse canon, we want to be there to tell the stories of the authors and illustrators who are behind it while it is actually happening. Our children and our society need it!

We have had a wonderful community around us supporting the film with encouragement and ideas since its inception. It's a film that people immediately get and want to be a part of because of a shared love and appreciation for picture books. They are treasured, timeless, and they are impacting the lives of children.

We need our community more than ever at this moment. We are past the halfway point of production, but we cannot move forward with production without additional funds, and so we are making our first ask for financial support. Raising funding for films is a lengthy process and while we are doing that through more traditional channels as well, we need to find a way to raise funds more immediately so we do not miss critical events that won't wait for us. This brings us to Kickstarter and to you.

Here is what YOU can make possible when you help us reach our goal of $40,000!

We are looking for funds to support the continuation of production in the fall of 2019 and winter of 2020. We don't want to miss out on capturing the evolving stories of Yuyi, Christian, and Mac. This includes following Yuyi as she creates her next book about the wildlife living along the U.S./Mexico border, Christian as he works on his most personal book to date, and Mac as he travels the country meeting with authors/illustrators from previous eras and releases new books.

Specifically, your production support would cover:

Travel and transportation

Crew (cinematographer and audio recordist)

Equipment Rental

Interested in learning more about what we're up to next? Your support will allow us to film the following:

Yuyi is working against a Fall 2019 deadline to complete her new picture book, which takes place in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, and tells the story of the wildlife that lives there. Yuyi will travel to the border region where she will meet with local wildlife scientists and conservationists who are studying the impact of the border wall on the local ecosystem, and activists who are supporting migrants and border communities. We aim to be alongside her as she illustrates and releases this timely new book.

We will follow Christian as he releases his second authored picture book You Matter, which takes the audience on a journey from the smallest creatures to the largest universe (think Eames' Powers of Ten) and leaves us feeling that no matter how small or alone we feel, at the end of the day, we all matter. Christian will also be embarking on illustrating his next collaboration with Matt de la Peña, which addresses a topic that makes this one of his most personal books to date. We want to be there when Christian makes the first sketches!

In the winter of 2020, we hope to travel with Mac as he visits some of the pioneers of children's literature to capture conversations with the likes of John Scieszka (who inspired Mac to be a children's book author) and many more, and to learn the evolution of the picture book from first-hand accounts.

Joanna Rudnick, Director & Producer

Joanna Rudnick is an Emmy®-nominated director and producer. In her directorial debut In the Family (POV|PBS), produced by Kartemquin Films, she told her personal story about coming to terms with learning that she had the BRCA1 gene that greatly increases a woman's risk for breast and ovarian cancer. The film was the first to cover the world of predictive genetic testing via a vérité treatment, and was screened as part of the successful effort to pass the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA) as well as challenge gene patenting, a case that went to the Supreme Court. Her producing credits include: Kartemquin Films' Bill T. Jones: A Good Man (American Masters|PBS); Crossfire Hurricane, a documentary about the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones(HBO); and Robert Capa in Love and War (PBS, BBC) which premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was the presenting film for the 2003 Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series among others.

Robin Mortarotti, Director of Photography

Robin Mortarotti is an award-winning filmmaker with over thirty-five years experience as producer and director of photography on feature, documentary, commercial, and promotional films. He has produced numerous international shoots and has earned a C.I.N.E. Golden Eagle, a local Daytime Emmy, and many other awards.

A Death in the Family won Columbia/duPont and Sigma Delta Chi awards for its examination of the effects of television on society and aired as a segment of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. Enrique's Story, produced for the California State Library Literacy Services and narrated by James Earl Jones, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Eli Olson is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and storyteller. Most recently, Eli had four films she edited selected for 2018's Mill Valley Film Festival: From Baghdad to the Bay, Time for Ilhan, I Am Maris, and Who Killed Lt. Van Dorn? Lt. Van Dorn won the Active Cinema Audience Award at MVFF; Baghdad to the Bay won Best Documentary at Cinequest 2018, and Time for Ilhan was an official selection for the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Eli won an Emmy for her work on My Flesh and Blood for HBO films, which also took Best Documentary honors as well as the Audience Award and Best Director prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. She also edited and co-directed Stories from Tohuku, which took the Jury Prize at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and later aired on PBS. Other projects include: Heaven Adores You (2014 SF International Film Festival); 3 Still Standing (2014 Mill Valley Film Festival selection); and Sam Cooke: Crossing Over (2010, PBS' American Masters), among others.

Emma Hsu Jackson, Associate Producer

Emma Hsu Jackson is a producer, assistant editor, and documentary filmmaker. She has experience producing and editing story-driven content for documentaries, podcasts, non-profit organizations, and political campaigns. Additionally, she produced, shot, and edited a short film for the temporary exhibition Camilla's Purse at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Story & Pictures By is being produced in association with Kartemquin Films.

We have many exciting rewards to offer! In addition to exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes photos and clips, and a link to stream the film, we have autographed books, posters, prints, original artworks, and more! Check below for further details.

The Joanna Super Fan Package includes links to Joanna's past directed films, In the Family and On Beauty, and the forthcoming Story & Pictures By! Please note that our current documentary is still in progress, so backers will receive the links to past films sooner than Story & Pictures By.

This original artwork by Christian Robinson is an early exploration piece he created for his book, Another. Acrylic paint and paper cut-out/collage. Approximately 8 x 5 inches in size.

MORE WAYS TO CONNECT WITH US & SPREAD THE WORD:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Proclamation: We are tired of hearing the picture book is in trouble, and tired of pretending it is not." - Mac Barnett, "A Picture Book Manifesto" Story & Pictures By is a feature-length documentary from Emmy®-nominated director Joanna Rudnick exploring the power and reach of children's picture books through the lens of three of today's most original authors/illustrators: Mac Barnett, Christian Robinson, and Yuyi Morales.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For Chris Dier, the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project -a holistic examination of slavery from its origins to the present day through a collection of essays, poems, and works of fiction-came at exactly the right time. Dier, a world history and AP human geography teacher at Chalmette High School in St. Bernard Parish, LA, was about to start a unit on slavery when the magazine was released in August.

"My students are aware of the basics," says Dier, who himself was captivated by the project. "But with 1619, a lot of it goes deeper into the analysis. In my class, we connect everything back to how it impacts them in the present, and this mentions New Orleans several times. My students were pretty taken aback; they loved it."

Dier is among the educators around the country moved by the depth of the project, from its exploration into the impact slavery had on the U.S. economy and how that factors into present-day capitalism to the racist policies that led to the American health care crisis of today. These lessons have been taught over the years by some historians and talked about mainly in African American circles. But the 1619 Project, conceived by Times Magazine staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones and timed to mark 400 years since some 20 to 30 enslaved Africans were brought by ship to Point Comfort in Hampton, VA, has reignited conversations on how American history is taught in the classroom.

"Now we've provided a foundation that the entire society can engage a body of knowledge that's really grown up over the last century," says Walter Greason, honors dean emeritus at Monmouth University in New Jersey. "A hundred years ago, this conversation would have been beyond impossible. It was inconceivable."

1619 curriculum

To underscore the importance of the work and to facilitate engagement, the New York Times Magazine partnered with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting-a nonprofit news organization that supports in-depth reporting on issues to educate the public and improve lives-to produce a free, downloadable 1619 curriculum for educators. It includes everything from a reading guide to questions to consider before and after exploring the project to lesson plans and activities. According to the center's website, more than 1,000 teachers have reached out to say they plan to use the curriculum in their classes.

Dier didn't use the Pulitzer curriculum at Chalmette High School, however. Instead, he devised his own plan. He divided his students into small groups, and they picked an article to present to the class. In addition to analyzing the text, students were asked to explain how it connects to today. After finishing one report, they picked another article and repeated the exercise.

It was a truly enlightening experience for the class, he says. Many of the essays resonated with the teens-a mix of white, black, and Latinx students-because they live in the shadows of Louisiana's sugar cane industry, the economic engine that funded slavery there. In fact, many of their parents work at Domino Sugar in Arabi, LA, which was featured in an essay in the 1619 Project by Harvard professor and historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

"I thought it was a fascinating, yet scary, set of articles which enlightened me to the struggles of African Americans that have not been covered in school previously," wrote one of Dier's students when asked to react to the project. "It showed me the idea of complete equality is far from real in America and that much more must be done to achieve it."

Beyond the educational value of the lessons, Dier hopes he's developing a new generation of critical thinkers.

"It made a direct connection between the history and something that's real and tangible in their lives," says Dier, who was named the 2020 Louisiana State Teacher of the Year. "I think it was beneficial for my white students to be provided with that historical context. That way, when they hear certain things in the future that are purely partisan or biased, we can get them to think differently of another group or race or ethnicity. They can remember what they've learned and the experiences they had in class."

A new foundation

Lori Jackson also used the project to make comparisons between historical events and the present. An adjunct professor at Wayne County Community College District in Detroit, Jackson used the 1619 podcast as a primer on the American economy. One episode explored the parallel relationship of the federal government's prop-up of the cotton industry to the banking industry bailout. The students in her Intro to Business class also discussed how plantation owners were enriched on the backs of their slaves.

"Looking at the disparity between the wealth these people were making. I actually had one white young lady speak up and say, 'It's just like what's going on with GM,' " Jackson says, of the General Motors strike.

Jackson says the themes covered in the project are multi-genre, because slavery's roots are deep and its impact systemic, making it perfect for a business course. A lot of white Americans today don't consider themselves the beneficiaries of slavery because their ancestors didn't own slaves, she says. That point prompted a class discussion on the economic injustices that were a result of the transatlantic slave trade, such as land theft, lack of affordable housing, and denial of G.I. Bill benefits.

Jackson says it took some time to get students on board with the lessons. "A lot of these are students that haven't had a great foundation in terms of education up to this point. So getting them to engage at first was difficult."

Reframing the way American history is presented is indeed the goal of the 1619 Project, according to its editors. For some educators, like Katie Lapham, it also presents an opportunity to expose some of our youngest learners to the topic early on.

Lapham-an English as a New Language teacher at P.S. 58 The Carroll School in Brooklyn, NY, which serves K-5 students-is hoping to receive federal Title 3 grant funding to create an after-school enrichment program based on the project.

"Often the way slavery is taught is very superficial and limited to key figures like Harriet Tubman," she says. "And we've failed to make connections to appreciate and consider the legacy of slavery in this country and the legacy of oppression."

Lapham wants to explore African Americans' struggle for full citizenship in her program, posing the question, "Who gets to be American?" on the bulletin board outside her office. She's already received administrative support and positive parental feedback.

While she awaits approval, students, staff, and parents can engage with the images, articles, quotes, questions, and facts she posted on her bulletin board (pictured above and left) highlighting some of the key themes explored in the project, such as music.

"Black music is American music. It is the ultimate expression in the belief of American freedom," New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris wrote about the relationship between slavery and music, and how black sound has been co-opted since the early days.

Reaching those who need it most

Lapham says she wants her program to complement the social justice work already done in her school by some of her colleagues, including a Black Lives Matter Week of Action.

"There are just pockets of events; it's not across the board," she admits. She hopes one day there will be widespread efforts, especially because her school is 75 percent white.

Greason applauds the effort and is curious to see which districts embrace and support educators who want to build upon some of the project's themes. He says he'd expect educators in larger cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, to integrate it into their lesson plans. But it's critical for rural small towns and homogenous suburbs to also decide it's important enough to have meaningful discussions about the wide-ranging effects of slavery in America.

"So much of my life has been about bringing that content to school districts and states that are hostile to it," says Greason, whose digital humanities projects include "The Wakanda Syllabus" and "The Racial Violence Syllabus." "If the curriculum can penetrate those communities-and become serious starting points for conversations and transform the way residents of those communities look at the discourse around racism in this country-then I think we are at the beginning of a transformative moment."
Christina Joseph is an editor, writer, and content strategist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"1619 Project" Poised to Reframe Teaching of Slavery. Here's How Educators Are Using the Information, Curriculum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For Chris Dier, the New York Times Magazine's 1619 ­Project -a holistic examination of slavery from its origins to the present day through a collection of essays, poems, and works of fiction-came at exactly the right time. Dier, a world history and AP human geography teacher at Chalmette High School in St.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While Alexander's verse alone is extraordinarily powerful, when paired with two-time Caldecott-honored illustrator Kadir Nelson's art, it becomes epic. Using oils on panel, Nelson renders a hero's journey that has many heroes, all gazing larger-than-life from the pages with piercing eyes that command you to peer into them. There are no downtrodden, beaten-down expressions here: Every person, every face, every posture is meant to overwhelm the reader with beauty and awe.

"This is for the unforgettable / The swift and sweet ones / who hurdled history / and opened a world / of possible." From the opening lines of Kwame Alexander's poem, readers are invited on a journey. It is a journey through a people's story - through the sorrows, triumphs, and resilience of the Black experience in America. In The Undefeated, Alexander pens an ode to the ancestors, foremothers and forefathers, barrier-breakers and martyrs, named and nameless, known and unknown. Solemn remembrance is not the sole theme here. There is pride. There is admiration. There is awe. There is gratitude. There is hope. The words soar and fall as the undulating rhythm lifts and carries the reader through time and space with the undefeated as our traveling companions.

While Alexander's verse alone is extraordinarily powerful, when paired with two-time Caldecott-honored illustrator Kadir Nelson's art, it becomes epic. Using oils on panel, Nelson renders a hero's journey that has many heroes, all gazing larger-than-life from the pages with piercing eyes that command you to peer into them. There are no downtrodden, beaten-down expressions here: Every person, every face, every posture is meant to overwhelm the reader with beauty and awe. Nelson's art elevates this poem to an exquisite love letter, as the spaces left by Alexander's words are filled in by Nelson's paintings. From the opening picture of Jesse Owens running, arms skyward, legs outstretched, muscles straining toward an unseen finish line; to a somber family portrait with beautiful, ebony faces emitting an almost angelic glow; to the picture of the hold of a slave ship that spans across the entire fold of the book, giving our eyes nowhere to look away from the horror; to the joy-filled rainbow of Black children on the final pages, Nelson communicates the inherent humanity of Black people. His imagery invites the reader into the story through realistic portraits that feel close enough to reach out and touch, while also giving them almost superhero status through the mere scale of the art.
[Read the Horn Book Magazine review of The Undefeated]
Nelson's artwork is also important in that the way he portrays his subjects is in direct opposition to how Black people have been historically portrayed. He does not shy away from the unambiguously Black features, deep skin tones, and tight-textured hair that are generally not embraced by American cultural and beauty standards. Here, the people are unapologetically Black. The faces and bodies depicted are almost hyper-realistic, communicating a need to re-paint a picture that has been historically distorted and inhumanely drawn - a reflection of a history that has been buried and often untold. This art bestows the Black face, the Black body, with something that has been and often still is withheld: dignity. Every mouth is not curled into a smile. All eyes are not happy. However, every face radiates humanity.

This is high art in every sense, but with a purposeful and unstuffy intent. Two masters - Kwame Alexander with the deft stroke of a pen, and Kadir Nelson with the deft stroke of a paintbrush - have created an achingly, gorgeous book with a singular message: You are beautiful. You are unstoppable. You matter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While Alexander's verse alone is extraordinarily powerful, when paired with two-time Caldecott-honoredillustrator Kadir Nelson's art, it becomes epic. Using oils on panel, Nelson renders a hero's journey that hasmany heroes, all gazing larger-than-life from the pages with piercing eyes that command you to peer into them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Coming to America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New Kid by Jerry Craft (HarperCollins)
Middle school is hard enough without being the new kid.
.

Award Details
Nomination Deadline: October 15
The NCTE Charlotte Huck Award® for Outstanding Fiction for Children commemorates the work of educator Charlotte Huck, who led children's-literature studies at Ohio State University from the mid-1950s to 1986, championing the classroom use of storybooks to teach reading and language arts. She was the author of five editions of the textbook Children's Literature in the Classroom. Huck died in 2005.

Members of the Charlotte Huck Award Committee select the award recipient and up to five honor books annually. Although only one title is singled out for the award each year, up to five honor books are also recognized. Eight additional recommended books can be named.

Learn more about the Committee and apply to be a member.

Books must have been published and/or distributed in the United States during the calendar year. Nominations of individual books may come from publishers, NCTE membership, and from the educational community at large. The books can be picture books, novels, graphic novels-any type of fiction-and they should have exemplary literary quality of text and illustrations. In addition, the books should connect children to their own humanity and offer them a rich experience with the power to influence their lives and stretch their thinking, feelings, and imagination.

The award shall be given to Fiction for children that has the potential to transform children's lives.

* Fiction that invites compassion, imagination, and wonder.
* Fiction that connects children to their own humanity and offers them a rich experience with the power to influence their lives.
* Fiction that stretches children's thinking, feelings, and imagination.
* Fiction that exhibits literary quality of text and illustrations.
* Fiction that is published in the United States during the previous calendar year.
* Fiction for whom the primary audience for the book is children, preschool to age 12.

The award is presented annually by the chair of the Charlotte Huck Award Committee at the Children's Book Awards Luncheon during the NCTE Annual Convention.

The award-winning author and/or illustrator receive a plaque and are the featured speaker(s) at the luncheon.

The honor book author(s) and/or illustrator(s) are recognized, receive a certificate, and are invited to present at a session following the luncheon.

Nominations must be submitted to the Award Committee by October 15. One copy of each book nominated should be sent to the committee members for examination. Advanced copies or galley proofs are acceptable and encouraged, especially for books published after October 15.

Contact bookawards@ncte.org for award committee member information to nominate a book.

Charlotte Huck Award seals are available to accompany winning books and their future printings. The seals serve to endorse the excellence of the books and distinguish them from among the thousands of books published each year. Seals are $.25 each and available in gold for winning books, silver for honor books, and bronze for recommended books.

To place an order, please call our customer service department toll-free at 1-877-369-6283.

2019 NCTE Charlotte Huck Awards

2019 Winner

Sweep: the Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier
(Amulet)

Honor Books

Can I Touch Your Hair?: Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship by Irene Latham, Charles Waters, Sean Qualls, Selina Alko (Carolrhoda Books)

Everything Else in the Universe by Tracy Holczer (G.P. Putnam)

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown and Company)

Merci Suárez Changes Gear by Meg Medina (Candlewick Press)

The Day War Came by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb (Candlewick Press)

Recommended Books

Alma and How She Got Her Name by Juana Martinez-Neal (Candlewick Press)

Drawn Together by Minh Lê, illustrated by Dan Santat (Disney-Hyperion)

Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake (Little, Brown and Company)

I Walk with Vanessa: A Story About a Simple Act of Kindness by Kerascoët (Schwartz & Wade Books)

Lifeboat 12 by Susan Hood (Simon & Schuster)

The Cardboard Kingdom by Chad Sell (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Rafael López (Nancy Paulsen Books)

The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld (Dial Books)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Charlotte Huck Award (fiction for children) - NCTE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Middle school is hard enough without being the new kid. . Nomination Deadline: October 15 The NCTE Charlotte Huck Award® for Outstanding Fiction for Children commemorates the work of educator Charlotte Huck, who led children's-literature studies at Ohio State University from the mid-1950s to 1986, championing the classroom use of storybooks to teach reading and language arts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
children's books are telling more immigration stories - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How border crossings and ICE arrests are popping up on the pages of children's books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inspired by the political moment and their own experiences, a growing number of authors are writing children's books about immigration.

# data[].attributes.headline
Coming Together Story Sharing Resources 

# data[].attributes.subject
Coming Together Story Sharing Resources 