Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California, in the 1980s and 90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends, earned a PhD at Berkeley, and returned to his hometown to study how inner-city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men, who now face...

A fresh perspective of young men of color depicting thirteen views of everyday life: young boys dressed in their Sunday best, running to catch a bus, and growing up to be teachers, and much more. Each of Tony Medina's tanka is matched with a different artist including recent Caldecott and Coretta Scott King Award recipients.

At her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she's known before: Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer; Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and almost as quickly find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial artist. But Kenneth is losing his eyesight, and when...

In a small Southern town, a white man tries to prevent a lynching and finds himself branded by the mob -- and worse, finds himself sheltering the dead man's son. When the killers come around to finish the job, the two victims are forced to flee across the country in the hopes of escaping men with nothing but vengeance on their minds. Just one step behind the vigilantes a solitary lawman tracks the men as he wrestles with the choice to either turn...

Jaden Toussaint, 5 year-old scientist and all around cool dude, must save his school from a (possible) alien invasion. His only weapons are science, ninja dancing, and the super-powered brain power of his seriously awesome group of friends.

"In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J'Ouvert...

Elijah wants the perfect Easter outfit, but feels discouraged after a failed shopping trip until two community elders encourage him to create his own Easter masterpiece.

"In a small but turbulent Louisiana town, one boy's grief takes him beyond the bayous of his backyard, to learn that there is no right way to be yourself"--

"Gracetown, Florida. June 1950. Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie's journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort...

Hoping to become a famous animal explorer on television, Jaden, age five, plans to achieve fame through a school play after his parents forbid him to post his video online.