Diverse Books

These titles for middle and high school readers celebrate joy in the lives of Black teens and tweens. The characters in these stories laugh honestly, love fiercely, and exist wholly.

How Karen Jensen and Kathryn King designed a DEI course for staff at the Fort Worth (TX) Public Library.

The new series will feature Black authors, musicians, and athletes reading children's books by Black authors.

Help students approach critical reading and character inferences in a way that doesn't center the reader's experiences and interpretations.

The year 2020 marks a century since women gained voting rights in the United States. While all of the books in this list tackle voting rights, they do so in myriad ways, from biographies of radical individuals like Frederick Douglass to novels about young activists to works of nonfiction that shed light on lesser-known narratives, such as the racism of the suffragists.

"But though I’ve been deeply indoctrinated by the white imagination, I don’t invest in it." Junauda Petrus, author of the Coretta Scott King Honor Book The Stars and the Blackness Between Them (Dutton; Gr 8 Up), discusses the power of speculative fiction, removing racist statues, and navigating whiteness.

The play about the Salem witch trials presents a moral dilemma, but it's another canonical work centering the white, Christian, male perspective. Here are suggestions for discussion and alternate works.

Debut novelists Kiku Hughes, Jordan Ifueko, Syed M. Masood, and Christina Hammonds Reed talk about constructing their books with food, folklore, and family stories.

Use these instructional suggestions while reading these titles by Native authors about tribal nations.