Walter Dean Myers

Zander's play, Act Six, brings Da Vinci Academy into the spotlight, especially when LaShonda's costume designs win her an opportunity she can accept only if she is willing to leave her autistic brother and their group home behind.

Sixteen-year-old "Slam" Harris is counting on his noteworthy basketball talents to get him out of the inner city and give him a chance to succeed in life, but his coach sees things differently.

A collection of poems, accompanied by photographs, about African American children living around the turn of the century.

A frightened American soldier faces combat in the lush forests of Vietnam.

Teenager Biddy Owens' 1948 journal about working for the Birmingham Black Barons includes the games and the players, racism the team faces from New Orleans to Chicago, and his family's resistance to his becoming a professional baseball player. Includes a historical note about the evolution of the Negro Leagues.

In 1920s Harlem, sixteen-year-old Mark Purvis, an aspiring jazz saxophonist, gets a summer job as an errand boy for the publishers of the groundbreaking African American magazine, "The Crisis," but soon finds himself on the enemy list of mobster Dutch Shultz.

Relates events in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, childhood which sowed the seeds for his activism for equal rights for people, regardless of their color.

Biography of the African princess saved from execution and taken to England where Queen Victoria oversaw her upbringing and where she lived for a time before marrying an African missionary.

Traces the 1839 revolt of Africans against their Spanish captors aboard the slave ship Amistad, their landing in the United States and arrest for piracy and murder, and trials which ended in their acquittal by the Supreme Court.