From the introduction:  The Difficult Miracle                                  This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America:  that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.                                                                                                 –June Jordan For over 250 years, African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms

As we work to combat racism and end racial injustice, we must continue to have conversations around race and bias. Penguin Random House has launched a new website to support families, educators, communities, organizations, and readers as they continue these important discussions.   Join the conversation here.

Written by Kimberly N. Parker, PhD. assistant director of the Shady Hill Teacher Training Center (MA), and Tricia Ebarvia, teacher and department chair at Conestoga High School (PA), and co-chair at the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy. Kim and Tricia are cofounders of #DisruptTexts (disrupttexts.org/)   Ongoing events have led many of us to

Rep. John Lewis, nonviolent political activist, key leader of the Civil Rights Movement, long-serving member of the House of Representatives, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor, and author of the best-selling March trilogy, died July 17th, 2020. In 2013, Lewis, along with Andrew Aydin, a longtime member of his congressional staff, and comics artist

Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Nickel Boys. This is his second Pulitzer Prize (his novel The Underground Railroad won in 2017) and he is only the fourth writer—alongside Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike—to win two Pulitzer Prizes each in the Fiction category. Winner, ALA Alex Award In

I wrote An African American and Latinx History of the United States because I believe that history has an indispensable role to play at a time when many of our leading politicians are again invoking anti-Latinx and anti-Black hatred in order to garner votes. I was born in 1964. I grew up in the 1970s, a