See the below message from SideLight contributor, Edwin Rosales, on his incredible new initiative to promote allies educating ourselves while supporting Black-owned bookstores:
Welcome to Turn The Page: A Movement to Lift Up Black-Owned Bookstores all over the country!
TURN THE PAGE #1:
Month: June 2020 Bookstore: Source of Knowledge, Newark, NJ
Our FIRST partner Black owned bookstore in this movement is: Source of Knowledge, located in Newark, NJ, co-owned by Masani Barnwell and Patrice McKinney, longtime residents of Newark. Our reading list is below.
More than a month ago, Masani Barnwell and Patrice McKinney, co-owners of Source of Knowledge (one of two Black owned bookstores left in New Jersey) were interviewed by NPR because their business was beginning to see an end. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, this important staple in the Black community of Newark, NJ has struggled to believe that there might be a future for their 30 year old business. Their doors were closed, sales had plummeted, and their lack of a website made it difficult for them to sell books at the rate that they were used to. Masani and Patrice began a GoFundMe and yet it struggled to take off and is still in need of donations.
A week ago, I came up with an idea that I thought would help support bookstores like Masani’s and Patrice’s which were struggling to remain open during this challenging time. I was witnessing a pattern of people turning to Amazon or majority booksellers to purchase their anti-racist reading material, and wondered what would happen if we took our collective energy as an ally community and directed towards lifting up a Black owned business that was struggling. As I began to talk with friends, the idea began to take form, grow and Turn the Page was formed. I am now proud and grateful to focus the remainder of this email on the work we are doing tomorrow in order to lift Source of Knowledge. For me, right now, this is the most important thing on my mind and in my heart, and I am grateful to each and every person reading this for leaning into this idea and doing their work to gather this incredible following. I’m honored to be in this fight with you! And now let’s begin!
TURN THE PAGE
MONTHLY CALL TO ACTION:
As supporters of Turn the Page we are asking you to commit to the following for the month of June, and every month that follows:
Purchase at least one book on our booklist from that month's highlighted bookstore.
Promote the book you purchase and the bookstore online and within your social circles.
Read, reflect, and discuss what you've learned with others.
Seek out three new allies each month.
If you are unable to commit to purchasing one book a month due to financial difficulties, that’s okay! We ask that you promote the highlighted store each month and continue to seek out new allies who might have the means to purchase books in your honor.
SELECTING A BOOK AND FINDING ALLIES
Check out the reading list that Masani, Patrice and I have spent hours curating for you. We hope that any one of these books is a helpful first step or a step further for you in your commitment to learning how to become a more active anti-racist and knowledgable advocate to the Black community during the Black Lives Matter movement, and beyond. The texts on this list are intentionally not texts that are selling out all over the country or on bestseller lists, however we are confident that they will bring you as much joy as they will awareness in hope for a more educated and free world. Nearly every text on this list is from a Black voice speaking to the themes, ideologies, and historical analyses currently being studied and promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement in support of Black liberation.
I urge you to please take some time to find three other allies who will commit with you to purchase and read at least one of the books on this list from Source of Knowledge for your learning this June. I ask for those who can commit to finding more allies or purchasing more than one book to please, please, please do so! Each book that we purchase from Source of Knowledge is going to provide immediate relief to their business and support the longevity of their store.
I ask you to use one of the two methods below in purchasing a book from Source of Knowledge in order to help lift their business with your support.
ORDERING BY PHONE:
Please call one of these three numbers to place your order of at least one book from the below list in order to fulfill part of your monthly commitment to Turn The Page.
SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE STORE: 973-824-2556
MASANI BARNWELL: 973-580-5028
PATRICE MCKINNEY: 973-580-2843
ORDERING BY EMAIL:
A. Email: thesource867@gmail.com. Introduce yourself as a supporter of Turn The Page!
B. Indicate which books you would like to purchase, the quantity, and where to ship and who to address it to.
C. if you are only purchasing one book, and would like a backup option in case that book sells out, please indicate preferences in the email as such:
I would like to purchase ONE book, these are my preferences:
1. Assata
2. Sister Outsider
3. Brown Girl Dreaming
D. Source of Knowledge will email you back with a price total and a link to PayPal.
E. Once the order goes through, Source of Knowledge will email you a confirmation number and receipt.
F. Email the receipt to turnthepagemovement@gmail.com with the following subject line:
“RECEIPT: (LAST NAME, FIRST NAME)”
G. Source of Knowledge will email you once the book ships, between 1-10 days since order depending on availability/stock.
JUNE 7, 2020 CONTRIBUTION - A SPECIAL CAUSE:
We have a special way of giving back double today. Through the blessing of social media, I was put in touch with another grassroots organizer who is collecting the receipts of book purchases, as she has found a third-party anonymous donor who will match the cost of the book with a donation to a bail fund or Black anti-racist organization. In order to support her, we will be collecting receipts and compiling data for her today.
If you are not on our email list, please complete this form to join and become a part of this movement and ever growing community! We need you!
QUESTIONS?!
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via email below! We are thrilled and honored you are joining us in our launch, and hope to continue doing our part to lift up and be allies to the Black community in every which way we can.
Finally, I’d love to close out by sharing that Masani and Patrice and the Source of Knowledge are eager, excited, and blessed to be partnered with us as we are with them.
We believe we found each other for a reason, one we hope leads to a greater good.
With honor and pride in support of the Black Lives Matter movement,
Edwin Rosales
Founder, Turn The Page
Instagram: @turnthepagemovement
See the below reading list with a message from Edwin!:
Dear Turn The Page Readers,
The books below were carefully and intentionally picked through many conversations with Masani and Patrice, the co-owners of Source of Knowledge. We believe that these books are urgent resources in supporting your growth as active anti-racists in this country so that we work together to one day see a world where our Black community is liberated from the oppression of white supremacy. Yet we are confident that your learning will go beyond that intention: these books’ artistry, poeticism, historical and social analyses of our society will leave you shaken, moved, and hungry for more. This is the beginning in committing to the work of broadening our literary imagination and unlearning and fighting against the inherited racism and anti-Blackness that this country has ingrained in us. As you will soon see, we’ve included a blurb from the publisher and a quote from every author speaking to these themes related to racism, whiteness, and activism along with their writing process as a way of seeing if one particular voice or message speaks to you and inspires you to select that book for June.
All prices below include tax and shipping! Welcome to our movement in turning the page today so that we see a better tomorrow, and we thank you for your contribution in how you will support Source of Knowledge, an important Black owned bookstore in the Newark, NJ community. Happy learning! The Turn the Page Family FICTION Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979) PRICE: $21 Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin. “The reason for my writing this novel really was to try to make people feel the past as well as understand the facts of it to understand it (the slavery experience) in your skin, in your mind, in your emotions, to feel it." – Octavia Butler, SFGate.com Jazz by Toni Morrison PRICE: $20 In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life. “How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and the work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescues we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.” – Toni Morrison, from her essay “Peril” in The Source of Self Regard: Selected Speeches, Essays, and Meditations. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (2018) PRICE: $21 In Heads of the Colored People, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with Black identity and the contemporary middle class in compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. “I never saw Black characters like me, dealing with being the only one. I didn't even see a lot of Black nerds, which in a lot of ways is what this collection is about — just Black people who are into cosplay and into all kinds of stereotypically dorky things, and I wrote the stories I wished I could have been reading and seeing.” – Nafissa Thompson-Spires, NPR Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017) PRICE: $22 Sing, Unburied, Sing is a road novel turned on its head, and a family story with its feet to the fire. Lyric and devastating, Ward's unforgettable characters straddle past and present in this spellbinding Southern odyssey. Winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction “I love the place where I'm from, and I think in part it's because of my family. I think it's because of my community. I think it's because of the beauty of that place. But, you know, it's really frustrating to live in a place where you can see that, you know, the people in power do not care about your community. They don't care about your family. They don't care about people like you.” – Jesmyn Ward, NPR
POETRY The Black Collection: Volume 1 by Keith Nweze (2016) PRICE: $25 The Black Collection is a collection of poetry that examines the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of modern Black culture through the scope of Hip- Hop and current events. Self-Esteem, Self-Awareness, Commercialization, Racism, Brutality, Criminology, Origins, and Positive and Negative Relationships are the topics that draw parallels and shows the difference between the African and African American experience. “I hear the message of the strong, powerless people victimized by the greatest crime of history, to date. There's no greater crime to humanity then the Institutional Racism that brought the ghettos to be.” – Keith Nweze, a resident of Newark, NJ. ****Keith will be signing copies of his book ***** Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (2014) PRICE: $19 Winner of the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society. “Racism is complicated. White people feel personally responsible for racism when they should understand the problem as systemic. It is interfering as much with their lives as with the lives of people of colour. And racism can lodge in them. It isn’t them yet it can become them if they are not taking notice.” – Claudia Rankine, The Guardian Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (2017) PRICE: $21 Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood―and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Poems have helped me figure out a lot about queer sexuality – it is a big hill to climb. The ability to transform myself in poetry helps me imagine myself differently in the real world.” – Danez Smith, The Guardian
DRAMA
Dutchman & The Slave by Amiri Baraka (1964) PRICE: $19 Set in a New York City subway car, Clay, a young, middle-class Black man, is approached seductively by Lula, a white fellow passenger. Baraka writes a searing two-character confrontation that begins playfully but builds rapidly in suspense and symbolic resonance. “I’d say I’m a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys — the people — are going to win.” – Amiri Baraka, a resident of Newark, NJ, LA Times Appropriate & An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (2016) PRICE: $22 In Appropriate, strained familial dynamics collide with a tense undercurrent of socio-political realities when the Lafayettes gather at a former plantation home to sift through the belongings of their deceased patriarch. An Octoroon is an audacious investigation of theatre and identity, wherein an old play gives way to a startlingly original piece. “I’ve talked a lot about how the theatre is supposed to be a place to feel all range of emotions, so if discomfort is one of them – that’s great.” – Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, The Evening Standard Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury (2018) PRICE: $20 A hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors' community to face deep-seated prejudices. Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama “For Fairview, we were all interested in thinking about the history of Black people onstage—particularly as one group of characters starts speaking for another—how that plays with minstrelsy and blackface, and that whole painful history of Black performance.” – Jackie Sibblies Drury, Vogue
MEMOIRS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur (2001) PRICE: $24
On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” – Assata Shakur, page 181 of Shakur’s Autobiography
How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones (2019) PRICE: $30
Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves.
"I want you to experience what's going on in my book and think about it in relation to your own life, whether that's because you're like, 'Oh this is totally different!' Or because you're like, 'Hmm. This is really familiar.' I think that's a useful way of thinking about memoir." – Saeed Jones, NPR The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (2019) PRICE: $30 This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction “Myths are sustained too by those who love the city. There are people I know, for instance, who love New Orleans but will not engage seriously with my critiques and ideas as a New Orleanian. They don’t want their narrative challenged. They love the place, I think, much more than the people who come from the place.” – Sarah M. Broom, The Cut Zami: A New Spelling of my Name – a Biomythography by Audre Lorde** (1982) PRICE: $22 “ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs “I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.” – Audre Lorde Political Prisoner by Sharpe James (2013) PRICE: $25 Paper/$35 Hardcover Sharpe James was elected mayor of his adopted city, Newark, New Jersey in 1986. He served for an unprecedented twenty years. As Mayor, Sharpe helped to move his beloved city from "urban blight to urban bright." After retiring in 2006, Sharpe was accused of crimes against his beloved city that he did not commit. He was indicted, arrested and convicted of these crimes receiving a sentence of twenty-seven months in a federal prison. While incarcerated, Sharpe wrote his memoir. Political Prisoner is a poignant story of a poor boy from Florida who rose to become a prominent politician in the state of New Jersey, only to be brought down by the unscrupulous tactics of an aspiring governor. ****Sharpe, a Newark, NJ resident, will be signing copies of his book.*****
ANTI-RACISM AND WHITENESS Policing The Black Man edited by Angela Davis** (2017) PRICE: $21 A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. “There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.” – Angela Davis, The Guardian Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria: And Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum** (1997) PRICE: $24 Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America. “In 1997 my goal in writing my book was to help others move beyond fear, anger, and denial to a new understanding of what racism is, how it impacts all of us, and ultimately what we can do about it. … I still have that goal, but in 1997 we were a nation at peace and the economy was expanding. Today we are a nation at war, suffering from economic anxiety and the combination of “post-racial” rhetoric, simmering racial resentments, and an increasing 140-character culture of communication that has made productive conversation more difficult to have.” – Beverly Daniel Tatum, The Atlantic Police Brutality: An Anthology edited by Jill Nelson** (2000) PRICE: $27 Ignited by the infamous shooting of Amadou Diallo, unarmed and innocent, at the hands of New York City police officers, journalist Jill Nelson was moved to assemble this landmark anthology on the topic of police violence and brutality: an indispensable collection of twelve essays by a range of contributors--among them academics, historians, social critics, a congressman, and an ex-New York City police detective. “It has always been in America, open season on people of color. And we see COVID-19 and the stress in the nation being used as a cover for that same thing. And Arbery, to me, if people had not — if his mother and his family had not kept up complaining and demanding action, if people had not immediately come out and began demonstrating and resisting, this would never have happened.” – Jill Nelson, Democracy Now Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts (1997) PRICE: $22 In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. “The aspect of reproductive freedom that propelled me into this field was not the right to abortion; it was the brutal regulation of Black women who were pregnant and wanted to have children, the denial of their right to bear children, and the control that Black women had experienced historically as well as in the present day of their decisions about their reproductive lives and their bodies.” – Dorothy Roberts, American Progress White Guilt by Shelby Steele** (2006) PRICE: $20 In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a Black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt—and neither has been good for African Americans. “So white guilt is not a guilt of conscience; it's not something that you get up in the morning and say, my God, I feel guilty about what happened to Black Americans. Rather it is the fact that in relation to Black Americans you lack moral authority. You are, in fact, stigmatized as a racist, because, after all, you have now acknowledged that your nation practiced racism explicitly for four centuries. And, now, since the '60s, white Americans have been grappling with the stigma, trying prove that they are not racist, to prove the negative.” – Shelby Steele, NPR ESSAYS & SPEECHES Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde** (1984) PRICE: $22 Sister Outsider is a collection of essays focusing on race/racism, gender/sexism, sexual identity, and social class as these are enacted in a white-supremist, heterosexist, capitalist patriarchy (i.e. the United States). “Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” – Audre Lorde, from “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison** (1992) PRICE: $20
Toni Morrison’s brilliant discussions of the “Africanist” presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a Black population that was manifestly unfree–and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
YOUNG ADULT AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix by Jason Reynolds (2020) PRICE: $41
A reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, Reynolds delves into the history of racist ideas in America. By shedding light on the construction of racism, Reynolds shows us how we can deconstruct and disempower racism everyday of our lives.
“History books are written with the idea of a student in mind, but not the idea of an actual young person, just the person themselves. School is for a few hours a day. But, like, there aren't history books written for that kid when school is over, when the bell has rung. And so that's sort of what I'm thinking about this particular book: 'Can I make this something cool?' Because there's currency in cool. There always has been, there always will be. It matters to them. It mattered to me. It still matters to me, right? If it ain't cool I'm probably not gonna rock with it. This is how I am. I'm still that person. So I wanted to try to figure out how to make this really complex thing that has all this information that he gave the world, how do I take it and make it feel like a fresh pair of Jordans.”
– Jason Reynolds, NPR
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jaqueline Woodson** (2014) PRICE: $15
A collection of poems built on Woodson’s memories of growing up in South Carolina during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. Written with young readers in mind, Woodson writes each poem from the point of view of her younger self, and she particularly shows us her journey to becoming a writer even though she struggled with reading.
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
“Brown Girl Dreaming tells the story of my childhood, in verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, I always felt halfway home in each place. In these poems, I share what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and my growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. It also reflects the joy of finding my voice through writing stories, despite the fact that I struggled with reading as a child. My love of stories inspired and stayed with me, creating the first sparks of the writer I was to become....” – Jaqueline Woodson, Woodson’s website
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (2018) PRICE: $18
In this debut novel of renowned slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo, a young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother’s religion and her own relationship to the world.
Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
“For a long time, there was this [notion] that depictions of characters of color would not sell the book. And I’m so happy to see more black girls, more brown girls, more black boys—their faces on books and reshaping what we think will make readers ‘afraid’ to buy a book versus how compelling it can be to see yourself,” she said. “But also to see someone different than yourself as a hero. Imagine how much would be undone if we saw depictions of heroes who were black.” – Elizabeth Acevedo, The Atlantic
Answering the Cry to Freedom: Stories of African Americans and the American Revolution by Gretchen Woelfle, with illustrations by R. Gregory Christie** (2016) PRICE: $25
Even as American Patriots fought for independence from British rule during the Revolutionary War, oppressive conditions remained in place for the thousands of enslaved and free African Americans living in this country. But African Americans took up their own fight for freedom by joining the British and American armies; preaching, speaking out, and writing about the evils of slavery; and establishing settlements in Nova Scotia and Africa. The thirteen stories featured in this collection spotlight charismatic individuals who answered the cry for freedom, focusing on the choices they made and how they changed America both then and now.
“It’s a shame how the accomplishments of people with pigment often fall through the cracks. In my opinion a "dream deferred" type of thing where the curriculum and value for 'brown books" are unbalanced against "non brown books". This seems to be remnants from the past, we are smarter than that now, I know it!” – R. Gregory Christie, Summer Edward
Nina: Jazz Legend and Civil Rights Activist Nina Simone by Alice Briere-Hacquet with illustrations by Bruno Liance**. (2017) PRICE: $22
With evocative black-and-white illustrations and moving prose, readers are introduced to Nina Simone, jazz-music legend and civil-rights activist. Shared as a lullaby to her daughter, a soulful song recounts Simone's career, the trials she faced as an African American woman, and the stand she took during the Civil Rights Movement. This poignant picture book offers a melodic tale that is both a historic account of an iconic figure and an extraordinary look at how far we've come and how far we still need to go for social justice and equality. A timeless and timely message aptly appropriate for today's social and political climates.
A note from Masani and Patrice on the inclusion of Nina on this list:
“We recognize that this text is not written or illustrated by a Black author. However, we welcome its place on this list as way of honoring the excellent work the artists do in putting together Nina Simone’s story in a way we have never encountered before, and for children, too. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”
PLEASE NOTE! ALL TEXTS WITH AN ** ARE RECOMMENDED BY SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE AND READY TO SHIP THIS WEEK! OTHERS TEXTS MAY TAKE LONGER TO ARRIVE FROM WAREHOUSE AND WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND YOUR PATIENCE
TURN THE PAGE CONTACT: SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE CONTACT:
Edwin Rosales Masani Barnwell and Patrice McKinney
PHONE : (203) 979-8919
PHONE #1: 973-580-5028
PHONE #2: 973-580-2843
INSTAGRAM: @turnthepagemovement
EMAIL: sourceofknowledge867@yahoo.com
INSTAGRAM : @sourceofknowledge