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Why do the Jews need a land of their own?
By Sholom Aleichem. 1984
C is for country
By Lil Nas X. 2021
Parents who play Grammy winner Lil Nas X's 12-times platinum single Old Town Road on repeat will want to take…
their kids and ride on over to this ABC picture book from the music mega-star! A is for adventure . Every day is a brand-new start! B is for boots — whether they're big or small, short or tall. And C is for country. Join superstar Lil Nas X—who boasts the longest-running #1 song in history—and Panini the pony on a joyous journey through the alphabet from sunup to sundown. Experience wide-open pastures, farm animals, guitar music, cowboy hats, and all things country in this debut picture book that's perfect for music lovers learning their ABCs and for anyone who loves Nas's signature genre-blending style. Featuring bold, bright art from Theodore Taylor III, with plenty of hidden surprises for Nas's biggest fans, C Is for Country is a celebration of song and the power inside us allLet's clap, jump, sing, & shout; dance, spin, and turn it out!: games, songs, and stories from an African American childhood
By Brian Pinkney, Pat McKissack, Patricia C. McKissack. 2017
Treasury of African American children's games, songs, poetry, stories, and jump-rope rhymes. Discusses the coded language in the songs of…
the Underground Railroad, and the superstitions and fables that served to keep children from harm. For grades K-3 and older readers. 2017Piano starts here: the young Art Tatum
By Robert Andrew Parker, Robert A. Parker. 2008
Drum dream girl: how one girl's courage changed music
By Margarita Engle, Rafael López. 2015
In Cuba in the 1930s, music filled the air. Millo had a dream playing drums of all kinds, but the…
country and her father only permitted boys to play drums. Millo finds a way to drum and practices in secret. Eventually her father relents and hires a music teacher for her. Millo's persistance means that she and her sisters become the first all-girl dance band in Cuba and play with and for famous people. (Story inspired by the childhood of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga.) For grades K-3Brundibar
By Maurice Sendak, Tony Kushner. 2002
Aninku and Pepicek need milk for their sick mother. Brundibar sings for money in the village square but won't let…
the brother and sister earn a few coins, too. It takes the collective effort of many people to overcome the bully and help the children. Adapted from a 1938 concentration-camp opera. For grades 4-7. 2003Trece sentidos: una memoria
By Victor Villaseñor, Victor Villasenor. 2001
Abriendo con las bodas de oro de Lupe y Salvador, la familia Villaseñor vive con la pobreza, volencia y perjuicios…
de la gran Depresión en el sur de California. La familia se sostiene con amor, humor y alegría de vivir. Sigue a Lluvia de Oro (RC 50714). Contiene descripciones de índole sexual, de violencia y lenguaje injuriosoMy hands sing the blues: Romare Bearden's childhood journey
By Jeanne Walker Harvey. 2011
As a young boy growing up in North Carolina, Romare Bearden listened to his great-grandmother's Cherokee stories and heard the…
whistle of the train that took his people to the North people who wanted to be free. When Romare and his family, faced with Jim Crow laws, boarded that same train, he watched out the window as the world whizzed by. Later he captured those scenes in a famous painting, Watching the Good Trains Go By. Using that painting as inspiration and creating a text influenced by the blues and jazz that Bearden loved, Jeanne Walker Harvey tells the story of Bearden's children by describing the patchwork of daily southern life that Romare saw out the train's window and the story of his arrival in shimmering New York City. Artists and critics today praise Bearden's collages for their visual metaphors honoring his past, African American culture, and the human experience. 2011. For grades K-3Drunken Angel
By Alan Kaufman. 2011
Alan Kaufman recounts with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink of death, the…
PTSD that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that brought him back. Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Kaufman was a drinker so mauled by his indulgences that it is a marvel that he hung on long enough to get into recovery. With his estranged daughter as inspiration, Kaufman cleaned himself up at age 40, taking full responsibility for nearly destroying himself, his work, and so many loved ones along the way. Kaufman minces no words as he looks back on a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing, and guilt. Reading Drunken Angel is like watching an accident to see if any of the victims crawl away barely alive. Kaufman did, and here he delivers a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed.Drunken Angel
By Alan Kaufman. 2011
Alan Kaufman recounts with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink of death, the…
PTSD that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that brought him back. Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Kaufman was a drinker so mauled by his indulgences that it is a marvel that he hung on long enough to get into recovery. With his estranged daughter as inspiration, Kaufman cleaned himself up at age 40, taking full responsibility for nearly destroying himself, his work, and so many loved ones along the way. Kaufman minces no words as he looks back on a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing, and guilt. Reading Drunken Angel is like watching an accident to see if any of the victims crawl away barely alive. Kaufman did, and here he delivers a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed.Sweet Liberia, Lessons from the Coal Pot
By Susan D. Peters. 2010
Sweet Liberia, Lessons from the Coal Pot is a delightful, painfully honest memoir that chronicles the thick slice of humanity…
sandwiched between Liberia's April 12, 1980 coup and the Civil War in 1989. Like many others who embraced Black Pride, Afros, African clothing and names in the 70's, Susan and thousands more took it one step further and immigrated to Mother Africa. This touching memoir is set against the author's personal growth, her cultural struggles, and her triumphs, and is an informative, personally revealing, and often-comical account of her family's eleven-year journey immersed in the rich culture of Liberia, West Africa. "Many have wondered what it would be like to pack up our things and move to a new country, but none of us have imagined having to flee our new homeland with our children and barely more than the clothes on our back. Yet, Susan Peters managed to do just that while maintaining her faith which would eventually help her rebuild her life and uplift her heart and soul. This book is a wonderful and eye-opening experience that shouldn't be missed!"---Naleighna Kai, National Best-selling author of Speak It into Existence.Drunken Angel: A Memoir
By Alan Kaufman. 2011
Alan Kaufman has been compared to Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby Jr., even Ernest Hemmingway--his life reads so much…
like a great movie that the world of cinema has just optioned his first memoir, Jew Boy, for a feature film. Drunken Angel, his new autobiographical work, drops like a sledgehammer. It is the most gripping, chilling and inspiring account ever written of a life-long battle with alcoholism and the struggle to write. Graphic in its grit, an education in pain, Drunken Angel is being hailed as "the Naked Lunch of memoirs." The book chronicles Kaufman's headlong plunge into the piratical life of a literary drunk, and takes us shamelessly through noirish alleyways of S&M sensuality, forbidden pleasures and pitfalls of adultery, the thrilling horrors of war, plus raging poetry nights, mental illness, homelessness, literary struggle and his strange, magnificent rise into a sobriety of personal triumph as crazily improbable as the famous and notorious figures he meets along the way. Drunken Angel contains revealing portraits of such literary figures as Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Barney Rosset, Anthony Burgess, Elie Wiesel, Ron Kolm, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jim Feast, Bernard Malamud, Hubert Selby Jr., Bob Holman, Sapphire, not to speak of the gutter dreamers, Nuyorican Poets, Unbearables, Babarians, Slammers, Black foot Indians, commandos, criminals, junkies, renegade cocktail waitresses, hoboes, painters, and a host of others who each in some way, big or small, play their part in peopling the wildly exilerating drama of Kaufman's passionate and exotic life. Whether the addiction be booze, women, violence, writing or fame, Kaufman honors us with an explicit honesty that only a writer of enormous power and artistic greatness can attain, and his life, as Drunken Angel poignantly shows, is a profoundly meaningful quest for truth and spiritual values.A Daughter of the Samurai
By Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto. 1966
A Daughter of the Samurai tells the true story of a samurai's daughter, brought up in the strict traditions of…
feudal Japan, who was sent to America to meet her future husband. An engrossing, haunting tale that gives us insight into an almost forgotten age.Madam Sugimoto was born in Japan, not in the sunny southern part of the country which has given it the name of "The Land of Flowers," but in the northern province of Echigo which is bleak and cold and so cut off from the rest of the country by mountains that in times past it had been considered fit only for political prisoners or exiles.Her father was a Samurai, with high ideals of what was expected of a Samurai's family. His hopes were concentrated in his son until the son refused to marry the girl for whom he was destined and ran off to America. After that all that was meant for him fell to the lot of the little wavy-haired Etsu who writes here so delightfully of the things that happened in their childhood days in far-away Japan.Rolling Fields
By David Trueba. 2020
WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN AWARD'Effortlessly readable and fizzing with energy, this novel is by turns quirky, funny and thoughtful'Mail…
on Sunday Dani Mosca is 40 and his father has just died. Fulfilling his father's last wishes, Dani embarks on a road trip back to his childhood village, a three-hour hearse journey from Madrid. Leaving behind the busy streets of the city for the deserted, archaic heart of Spain, Dani revisits the key junctions of his life: his conflicted relationship with a pragmatic and authoritarian father; the mystery of his birth; his school years in the repressed atmosphere of Catholic Spain; the origin of his band and its early successes; the emptiness left by a tragically lost friendship; his great loves. Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and featuring an unforgettable cast of characters - from Ecuadorian drivers to Spanish Bowie lookalikes - Rolling Fields is a novel full of the grace and messiness of life: brave, exciting and completely irresistible.Translated from Spanish by Rahul BeryRolling Fields
By David Trueba. 2020
WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN AWARD'Effortlessly readable and fizzing with energy, this novel is by turns quirky, funny and thoughtful'Mail…
on Sunday Dani Mosca is 40 and his father has just died. Fulfilling his father's last wishes, Dani embarks on a road trip back to his childhood village, a three-hour hearse journey from Madrid. Leaving behind the busy streets of the city for the deserted, archaic heart of Spain, Dani revisits the key junctions of his life: his conflicted relationship with a pragmatic and authoritarian father; the mystery of his birth; his school years in the repressed atmosphere of Catholic Spain; the origin of his band and its early successes; the emptiness left by a tragically lost friendship; his great loves. Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and featuring an unforgettable cast of characters - from Ecuadorian drivers to Spanish Bowie lookalikes - Rolling Fields is a novel full of the grace and messiness of life: brave, exciting and completely irresistible.Translated from Spanish by Rahul BeryDirty Bird Blues
By Clarence Major. 1996
A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary…
edition of Dirty Bird BluesSet in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.Griot: A Chapbook by the Nia Centre for the Arts, Black Pen Writing Workshop
By Yvvana Yeboah Duku, Adeola Egbeyemi, Onyka Gairey, Saherla Osman, Kais Padamshi, Omi Rodney. 2022
Nia Centre for the Arts is a Toronto-based charity that supports, promotes, and showcases art from across the Afro-Diaspora. We…
build the creative capacity of our community and support the development of a healthy identity in young people through artistic development, mentorship and employment opportunities. We are a platform for the arts that is rooted in the diversity of Black-Canadian experiences. In 2021, we hand-selected six emerging writers to participate in the Black Pen writing intensive program. The writers in this program challenged themselves, honed into their craft, stepped into their greatness and dedicated themselves to their collective manuscript—GRIOT: Sojourn into the Dark. Follow the writers through a deep and authentic exploration of their literary voices as we &‘Sojourn into the Dark&’; a collection of fiction and nonfiction that crosses borders, from Nigeria to Jamaica, explores themes of loss and connection, and embraces tradition while pushing the art of storytelling forward.The Choir Director
By Carl Weber. 2011
New York Times bestselling author Carl Weber takes readers back to church, where preaching isn't always enough, nothing goes better…
with the Word than a song--and it's time for some hard-earned lessons in love, brotherhood, and betrayal. Bishop T. K. Wilson has done all he can to make First Jamaica Ministries a success. But with his last choir director getting caught in a scandal, attendance and cash flow are down. To fill the pews and collection plates, Bishop is counting on a new choir director, the charismatic Aaron Mackie, to revive the church. Aaron has been waiting his entire life to prove he has what it takes to be a big-time choir director. But his ways around women, past and present, could cost him more than his job. Simone Wilcox is smart, sexy--and a highly respected church trustee. She's got her eye on the new choir director, with the intention of having a lot more on him, and no one is getting in her way. First Lady Monique Wilson does and says what she wants, regardless of church politics. Despite her shortcomings and a past rumored to include a long list of men, she'll do just about anything to protect the Bishop. You'd think the Bishop was being tested enough, with choir in-fighting, romantic jealousies, and personal vendettas. But a final piece of the puzzle has yet to be revealed: Someone has been robbing the church blind. Someone whose connection to the Bishop is far too close for comfort. . . . Praise For The Church SeriesUp To No GoodThis page-turning drama keeps readers in suspense until the very last page. --Upscale MagazineThe First LadyWeber gives us a front-row pew seat to all the action going down. . . --Essence®So You Call Yourself A ManA delightful and entertaining book. --Black Issues Book ReviewThe Preacher's SonWeber spins a lively, revelation-packed tale deepened by genuine emotion, convincing detail and smart dialogue. --Publishers WeeklyNovelist, diplomat, statesman, representative of both the First Nations and the Crown in Canada, James Bartleman always writes from his…
incredible personal experience. Presented here are three extraordinary books, each touching on a different aspect of his life, whether a candid tell-all about the halls of power, or his unique novels in which the names and details have been changed to protect the innocent. Guaranteed to captivate readers of all stripes. Includes: Seasons of Hope Traces James Bartleman's life from an impoverished Native childhood to being appointed ambassador for Canada and lieutenant governor for Ontario, and how as his career advanced, he mobilized public support for Native education. This story traces the whole amazing story. Exceptional Circumstances When Luc Cadotte, diplomat and spy, returns home from Latin America during the FLQ Crisis, he becomes entangled in political machinations and a story of espionage, betrayal, and love gone wrong. Facing an unprecedented wave of domestic terrorism, Cadotte must weigh his ethics against public safety, with lives on the line. The Redemption of Oscar Wolf A saga of mid-20th-century Native life in Canada and abroad, and a novel of resonating ideas and unforgettable characters, whose fascinating, anti-hero protagonist sets out on a quest for redemption after a terrible incident kills his grandfather and a young maid.Jayylen's Juneteenth Surprise (Little Golden Book)
By Lavaille Lavette. 2023
Created in partnership with Ebony Jr., this inspiring Little Golden Book tells the story of one young boy's first experience…
celebrating Juneteenth.When Jayylen's grandfather, Paw Paw Jimmy, begins preparing for a big Juneteenth celebration, Jayylen has a lot of questions. Most importantly, what is Juneteenth? His mother and Paw Paw Jimmy explain that the holiday marks the anniversary of when enslaved African Americans found out that they were free. Paw Paw Jimmy plays some zydeco for him, which is the type of music they will dance to at the celebration. Jayylen practices every day so that he will be able to play the frottoir (a percussion instrument similar to a washboard) for everyone. But will he be able to pull off an even bigger surprise for the day?Since 1945, Ebony magazine has shined a spotlight on the worlds of Black people in America and worldwide, telling their stories. Ebony Jr! was created in 1973 to give Black children a magazine that was all their own. The magazine included stories, comics, puzzles, and cartoons centering Black children. Its mission was to ignite a love of reading and a love of self in Black kids, and we&’re continuing that with our LGB program.