Dion Graham
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"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's...
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"Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory. It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney...
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""Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably-priced furniture, making a life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a...
4) Sooley
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After seventeen-year-old Samuel "Sooley" Sooleymon receives a college scholarship to play basketball for North Carolina Central, he moves to Durham from his native, war-torn South Sudan, enrolls in classes, joins the team, and prepares to sit out his freshman season, but Sooley has a fierce determination to succeed so he can bring his family to America, working tirelessly on his game until he dominates everyone in practice, and when Sooley is called...
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"Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: 'He has a nose,' people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows...
6) Chaos theory
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Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
Mental Health Awareness Month: YA Books
Summer Reading Committee's Recommended Reads
Mental Health Awareness Month: YA Books
Summer Reading Committee's Recommended Reads
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"Since Shelbi enrolled at Windward Academy as a senior and won't be there very long, she hasn't bothered making friends. What her classmates don't know about her can't be used to hurt her--you know, like it did at her last school. Andy Criddle is not okay. At all. He's had far too much to drink. Again. Which is bad. And things are about to get worse. When Shelbi sees Andy at his lowest, she can relate. So she doesn't resist reaching out. And there's...
7) Locomotion
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In a series of poems, eleven-year-old Lonnie writes about his life, after the death of his parents, separated from his younger sister, living in a foster home, and finding his poetic voice at school.
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"In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett...
9) Dear Justyce
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Incarcerated teen Quan Banks writes letters to Justyce McCallister, with whom he bonded years before over family issues, about his experiences in the American juvenile justice system.
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"Affairs of the heart can be lethal in New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey's latest sensual, thrilling novel. As a low-level enforcer in Los Angeles, Ken Swift knows danger, but nowhere does he feel it more than in his tangled romances. Divorced from one woman, in love with another, and wrestling with a strong desire to get to know a third, his life is far from perfect, and it becomes all the more complicated when his troubled daughter...
11) Another country
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"First there is a battlefield, a pressure-cooker, a time-bomb: the destructive potential that exists in racial bigotry, in color prejudice and in the tensions and sensitivities which such attitudes encourage. Woven into this pattern of violence, there is a theme that is gentle, wistful and poetic: this is Baldwin's apologia for homosexual love."
12) John Woman
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At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father's job at a silent film theater in New York's East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate. After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets...
13) Odd one out
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BEST BOOKS 2018
High School Project Lit Titles
Not your average high-school (book display)
Project Lit - Full List
High School Project Lit Titles
Not your average high-school (book display)
Project Lit - Full List
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High school juniors and best friends Courtney and Jupe, and new sophomore Rae, explore their sexuality and their budding attractions for one another.
14) Private Paris
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"When Jack Morgan stops by Private's Paris office, he envisions a quick hello during an otherwise relaxing trip filled with fine food and sightseeing. But Jack is quickly pressed into duty after a call from his client Sherman Wilkerson, asking Jack to track down his young granddaughter who is on the run from a brutal drug dealer. Before Jack can locate her, several members of France's cultural elite are found dead--murdered in stunning, symbolic fashion....
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"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...
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Twelve-year-old T'Challa is content spending his days learning how to one day rule his nation, Wakanda. But trouble in his homeland leads his father, the reigning Black Panther, to send him to Chicago where he must assimilate into American life alongside his best friend M'Baku. Hiding his true identity becomes increasingly difficult when strange things start happening at his middle school. And he'll have to step into his destiny as future superhero...
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"The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and...
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Leonid McGill's spent a lifetime building up his reputation in the New York investigative scene. His seemingly infallible instinct and inside knowledge of the crime world make him the ideal man to help when Phillip Worry comes knocking. Catfish is a ninety-four-year-old Mississippi blues-man who needs Leonid's help with a simple task: Deliver a letter revealing the black lineage of a wealthy heiress and her corrupt father. The opportunity to do a...
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"December 15, 1965, Alabama, the fateful night that triggers an avalanche of events that turn newly engaged couple Melvin and Bernadette into fugitives. A pitstop in the wrong part of town ends with blood on their hands. Suspecting that cops are already following them, Melvin realizes the only way they'll survive is if they flee the country. Bernadette, who's hiding a secret from her fiancé, reluctantly agrees. With a persistent FBI agent on their...
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"Professor Pi Suleman is a black man from Memphis and proud of it. Still, he has to endure a lot as an adjunct professor at the city's prestigious University Along the Nile, a hard-earned career that is crushing his spirit. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague's prejudice and microaggressions. At the same time, he's being blackmailed by a powerful UAN professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted...