Goodness gracious! I have so much to tell you about this book! Allow me to lay out some pre-reading, preparatory directions: First, go meet Sarah Kay through her 2011 TED debut. She is so expressive and impressive both, that watching her once will give you the magical ability to...
Please correct me if I'm wrong here: The Japanese American imprisonment has been the focus of many, many titles for audiences of all ages, via fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, plays, graphic titles, picture books, and more, but I believe Mariko Nagai's Dust of Eden...
Comprised of just 27 pages which hold 14 poems, this collection feels more like a pamphlet than an actual book. That said, the spare verses by J.C. Elkin, a Pushcart Prize-nominated ESL teacher at a Maryland community college, are not without complexity and depth, inspired by...
"For any serious artist, it is a terrible feeling of surrender when you realize there is no place in the world for your voice, when all that you express seems marginalized or in vain ...
Serafina, who lives in the outskirts of Haiti's Port-au-Prince, has never had the chance to go to school. With rarely enough to eat, her family has nothing left over to pay the school fees, much less buy the required uniform. While her father works at...
Awarded the 2008 Pura Belpré Medal, "presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth," Margarita Engle’s biography-in-verse introduces Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano to younger readers. Born into...
This might be a spoiler of sorts: The advance galley is printed with a March 12, 2013 pub date, but when I went searching for an image of the book's cover to load here, online bookstores list a May date. Hmmm ...
I'm compelled to start backwards with a number: 84. As children's writer (more than 25 times over) Maryann Macdonald explains in her ending "Author's Note," 84% of French children survived the horrors of World War II; in fact, "more children survived in France than in any other...
Absolute details surrounding the life of Dave the Potter are limited and uncertain. What remains of his life story almost two centuries later, is scattered with uncertain words, including 'sometime,' 'about,' 'believed to be,' 'might,' 'possibly,' and other such noncommittal qualifiers. The few surviving documents...
Ready to ring in the new year? Sing with me now – I'm pretty sure you know the words to this one: "O beautiful for spacious skies ...
Early this year, at almost 18 years old, Kaya Press flew the nest. Leaving behind the comfort and familiarity of New York's publishing world, the non-profit indie specializing in "books from the Asian diaspora," moved offices across the country to Los Angeles. Now comfortably ensconced...
For those of you who know me, this is no surprise: poetry is my literary Achilles' heel. But my contrary nature occasionally gets brave enough to try again, and the few times I eke out some level of comprehension, you'll read about it here. [Any...
Although spoken word artist Sarah Kay's TED debut was over a year-and-a-half-ago, her video seems to be in the midst of re-discovery. Via email, listservs, and (dreaded) Facebook, her poetry kept appearing in my daily life this last week, which (of course) prompted me to...
April is National Poetry Month. Every once in a long while, even a poetry-dullard like me has a poetic WOW!-moment. Certainly I'm not alone ...
"On a continent of many songs, in a country shaped like the arm of a guitarrista, the rain drummed down on the town of Temuco [Chile]," the invitingly dreamy Dreamer begins. Neftalí Reyes, the eponymous dreamer, is most content to live in a world of stories,...
From the power duo who created We Troubled the Waters comes another memorable volume detailing the African American experience – this time, re-imagining the death-defying, life-saving journey from slavery to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Combining powerful verse and richly textured paintings, Ntozake Shange and Rod...
Timing is everything: I'm convinced my just-got-back trip from Korea gave me an especially empathetic appreciation for poetry slam artist/writer/playwright Ed Bok Lee's latest collection. I just wandered some of those same streets! And I definitely had to read it at 38,000-feet cruising altitude between there...
Half-way through reading this debut autobiographical novel-in-verse, I had a lively conversation about the cover with a delightful new friend who happens to be a bonafide kiddie-book expert. We had just finished sharing our shock over the recent fiasco surrounding the one-too-many finalists for the 2011 National Book...
All around the wide world, once a month (or so), we all get a glimpse of the full moon as our earth makes its perpetual orbit. “So come along on a lunar journey,” poet Marilyn Singer (author of over 85 children’s books!) invites readers, “to...
Luis Alberto Urrea's "hymn to vatos who will never be in a poem" provides the lyrical frame onto which Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer José Galvez showcases the everyday challenges and celebrations of the Latino experience. This slightly sepia-ed homage to masculinity-on-the-fringe was a 2002 Quick Pick...
