Phillip Hoose and Claudette Colvin | Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice
Long before Rosa Parks made national headlines, Claudette Colvin, a teenager living in the Jim Crow South, refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman. Considered unfit by civil rights leaders to head a movement, Colvin continued to fight for her right to sit just as white people did: she took part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and a year later served as a key plaintiff in Browder vs. Gayle, the court case that ended segregation on public buses in Montgomery. In Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice—winner of the 2009 National Book Award—author Phillip Hoose tells Colvin’s little-known story. Colvin will be appearing for this event along with author Hoose, whose award-winning nonfiction books include We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History and The Race to Save the Lord God Bird.

Hannah Tinti | The Good Thief
Hannah Tinti’s debut novel, The Good Thief, appeared on many best of 2008 book lists and won both the 2009 American Library Association Alex Award and the 2008 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Set in 19th-century New England, The Good Thief tells the story of Ren, a one-handed orphan drawn into the world of grave-robbing with Benjamin Nab, a scam artist who claims to be his brother. This gothic adventure has earned rave reviews and comparisons to the novels of J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson. A New York Times reviewer found it to be “the kind of ¬story that might have kept you reading all day when you were home sick from school.”.

Sonia Sanchez | Morning Haiku
“One concern [Sanchez] always comes back to is the real education of black children,” remarks William Pitt Root in Poetry magazine. An acclaimed poet, activist, and scholar, Sonia Sanchez is the former Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University. She has written more than a dozen books of poetry, including the American Book Award winner Homegirls and Handgrenades, and works aimed specifically at young people such as It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Bruthas and Sistuhs. Using black dialect as a poetic medium, Sanchez writes elegantly on topics like bigotry, poverty, and drug abuse. Her new book of poems is a collection of haiku that celebrates the lives and mourns the deaths of revered African-American leaders.

Billy Collins | Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Billy Collins served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2001 to 2003, and was selected as the New York State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. His recent collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry, and his readings are usually standing room only. His audience—enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio—includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. A master at capturing everyday life in all of its absurdity and sadness, Collins uses witty and intelligent prose to draw readers “from the familiar to quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound.” (New York Times)

Allison Whittenberg | Hollywood and Maine
Philadelphian Allison Whittenberg is a writer, poet, playwright, and professor. She is the author of the novels Sweet Thang, a New York Library Best Book for the Teen Age and a CCBC Choices Book, and Life is Fine. Her new book, Hollywood and Maine, is a sequel to Sweet Thang that “captures life in the late 70s from the point of view of a black teenager who lives in a close community and finds herself negotiating with the larger themes in the world—such as redemption, doubt, and acceptance” (Alan Review). Sweet Thang and Hollywood and Maine are loosely based on the author’s own experiences growing up in West Philadelphia and the Philadelphia suburbs during the 1970s.

Rita Ross | Running From Home: A Memoir
As a young child Rita Ross, along with her mother and brother, fled to Poland from their Vienna home when Nazis invaded Austria in 1938. The family spent the war years hiding their Jewish identity, enduring life in the Krakow ghetto and imprisonment by the Gestapo before immigrating to America in 1945. Ms. Ross taught first grade in the Perelman Jewish Day School for 27 years, and is now retired and a frequent lecturer on her Holocaust experiences and the need for tolerance. Her memoir, Running from Home, relates her years of fear and flight from a child’s perspective, and the sense of bewilderment, loss, and privation create an indelible mark.