Walter Dean Myers

Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.

If Harlem high school senior Drew Lawson is going to realize his dream of playing college, then professional, basketball, he will have to improve at being coached and being a team player, especially after a new--white--student threatens to take the scouts' attention away from him.

17-year-old Greg "Slam" Harris tells of the year in which he transfers to a magnet school for the arts, a more academically challenging, mostly white school. After being the hot shot star of his Harlem high school team, he has to learn to fit in and be a team player at his new school. He may not be able to do anything about the rest of his life--his relationships with his family and friends, his grandmother's illness, his scholastic difficulties,...

The summer after his absentee father is killed in a random shooting, Paul volunteers at a Harlem soup kitchen where he listens to lessons about "the social contract" from an elderly African American man, and mentors a seventeen-year-old unwed mother who wants to make it to college on a basketball scholarship.

In 1863, fifteen-year-old Claire, the daughter of an Irish mother and a black father, faces ugly truths and great danger when Irish immigrants, enraged by the Civil War and a federal draft, lash out against blacks and wealthy "swells" of New York City.

Thirteen-year-old Darnell's twin sister and the other members of the Corner Crew have doubts about his work on the school newspaper, but the article he writes about a homeless man changes his attitude about school.

Frederick Douglass was a self-educated slave in the South who grew up to become an icon. He was a leader of the abolitionist movement, a celebrated writer, an esteemed speaker, and a social reformer, proving that, as he said, "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

What is it to be an American? In lyrical, soul-searching free verse and seamless, evocative paintings, the father-son team who presented Jazz, delivers a heartfelt and thought-provoking homage to this country. Reflective and non-judgmental, stretching across a tumultuous history, following dreams of and struggles for freedom, this is a masterful and stunning presentation of patriotism through poetry, quotations and depictions of myriad Americans-from...

After reluctantly taking on the leadership of the Harlem gang, the Scorpions, Jamal finds that his enemies treat him with respect when he acquires a gun--until a tragedy occurs.

"Two best friends, a writer and a runner, deal with bullies, family issues, social pressures, and their quest for success coming out of Harlem"--