Visit Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts to see what they've been reading, along with others who post their favorites. Your TBR lists will grow! Happy Reading!Share with the hashtag #IMWAYR
I hope all of you are doing well and doing the best you can during this time. I'm glad that I've had some books that help me learn and grow during this heartbreaking time of unrest. Because I've always read books by diverse authors, it has been helpful to know those books and authors. Now, I'm reading some of those same authors and books, and learning about others, too.
From "The Story of the World's First Racist" in Chapter One to "A Miracle and Still a Maybe" in Chapter Twenty-Eight, I re-learned some policies and laws I thought were good, and some of them were good, but they were turned around and interpreted in ways that harmed black people anyway. I learned that the presidents I thought did well, didn't help black people at all, but made their lives worse. I learned that there are many things I need to un-learn and other things I'll need to research further. I learned that it is all of our work to make changes for the better for people of color. The book did not go as far as President Obama's and now President Trump's administrations, but the explanations of laws and policies through our history in this book will help me to see more clearly what has happened (or sadly not happened) has led to the recent protests. Thanks to Ibram X. Kendi for the base and then to Jason Reynolds for the re-mix. I don't teach anymore, but I have friends and family, grandchildren, to share my learning with and I will! 
As I read Nikki Grimes' memoir, Ordinary Hazards, I kept imagining I had read it before. I knew I hadn't, yet it seemed so familiar. Then I realized that I had read its essence, in Nikki's past books, when I read Meet Danitra Brown, Words With Wings, Bronx Masquerade and so many others. Her story is in them, too. In this memoir, Nikki traces her life beginning with a fraught childhood, a mother with schizophrenia that causes a move to a foster home, then back to her mother with a new husband that makes life even more frightening. Throughout the years, Nikki discovers that writing helps her forget the tough days and because at a later time her mother throws all her notebooks away, in this book she recreates what she remembers in new writing, sometimes titled "Notebook". The work to remember as she admits that trauma has often denied the memories is a powerful tribute to her honest search for how she grew up into the person she is now, a survivor and magician with words, telling a real story of her, reflecting all those books we've read and loved from her before. We all know there are "ordinary hazards" to face in life, but when you discover Nikki's meaning, she is to be admired for the telling of a life of danger and heartbreak and her determination to find goodness in the arts that she loves and the beauty brought to all of us readers.