Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 4
Formats
Description
"Rex Ogle's companion to Free Lunch and Punching Bag weaves humor, heartbreak, and hope into life-affirming poems that honor his grandmother's legacy. In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle's abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on-to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.5 - AR Pts: 5
Formats
Description
"Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. In free verse, Anderson shares reflections, rants, and...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 5
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 1
Description
The author reflects on her childhood in the 1950s and her development as an artist and young woman through fifty poems that consider such influences as the Civil Rights Movement, the "Red Scare" era, and the feminist movement.
Author
Pub. Date
[2021]
Appears on list
Description
Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life as the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate. In her second memoir, she invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, this book reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 4
Description
Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, poet Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night--and discovered the magic and impact of writing. In this memoir in verse that will resonate with young readers and adults alike, Nikki shows how...
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Description
"An intimate, autobiographical poetry collection from legendary artist and activist, Joan Baez. Joan Baez shares poems for or about her contemporaries (such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Jimi Hendrix), reflections from her childhood, personal thoughts,and cherished memories of her family, including pieces about her younger sister, singer-songwriter Mimi Fariña. Speaking to the people, places, and moments that have had the greatest impact on her...
10) Bone
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
"[A] collection of autobiographical poems about the heart, life, and the inner self"--
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Description
"The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses...
15) The in-between
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 6.7 - AR Pts: 5
Description
"In the early 2000s, thirteen-year-old Katie Van Heidrich has moved more times that she can count, for as long as she can remember. There were the slow moves where you see the whole thing coming. There were the fast ones where you grab what you can in seconds. When Katie and her family come back from an out-of-town funeral, they discover their landlord has unceremoniously evicted them, forcing them to pack lightly and move quickly. They make their...
Author
Pub. Date
[2022]
Description
"A true American epic in verse, Walking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young's ancestors, from the unnamed women the historical record has forgotten but Alora brings to life through imagination; to Amy, the first of her foremothers to arrive in Tennessee, buried in an unmarked grave unlike the white man who enslaved her and fathered her child; through Alora's great-grandmother Gentry, unhappily married at fourteen; to her own mother, the teenage...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Description
"In an intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships—his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Description
"This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
One of America's most celebrated poets looks inward in this powerful collection, a rumination on her life and the people who have shaped her.
The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice who has spoken out on the sensitive issues, including race and gender, that touch our national consciousness. As energetic...
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Description
"When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don't use their correct pronouns, and hordes of "well-meaning" but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online. But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from...