Legendary author Walter Dean Myers was once a troublemaker and a truant. Just how bad was he? From instigating mischievous pranks at home to fighting in the classroom—especially when teased about his speech impediment—irrepressible Walter was more than a handful. Underneath it all, he had a...

This is the life story of Cudjo Lewis, as told by himself. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America to be enslaved, eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis was then the only person alive to tell the story of his capture and bondage—fifty years after the Atlantic human...

Gino Bartali pedaled across Italy for years, winning one cycling race after another, including the 1938 Tour de France. Gino became an international sports hero! But the next year, World War II began, and it changed everything. Soldiers marched into Italy. Tanks rolled down the cobbled streets of...

A slam-dunk picture book biography featuring the WNBA Rookie of the Year and one of the biggest names in basketball—Caitlin Clark! Caitlin's love for the game is evident every time she steps foot on a court, whether for a pickup game with her brothers as a kid, during college with the Iowa Hawkeyes,...

How do you tell a story? Before Toni Morrison was a Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Prize–winning author, she was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, a little girl in Ohio who was both the only Black child in her first-grade classroom and the only student who was able to read. This is the true story of how...

Before Marie Curie was the first woman in France to earn the highest degree in physics, before she discovered two new radioactive elements, and became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (and then the first person to win two!)—she was a little girl named Marie Sklodowska who dreamed of being a...

In this photographic picture book, the authors record and transcribe the words of displaced children, raising up their voices—who they are, where they came from, and the many different reasons that they had to leave their home countries. My parents told me we had to leave to stay safe. I was...

There was once a place in New York City that had a tennis club, movie theater, and art gallery—all in the same building! It also had a secret passageway, a huge library, and even a ski slope. This astounding building is Grand Central Terminal, and it was the work of one brilliant man: William J....

Clarence Tinker always knew that he wanted to do something extraordinary. Something adventurous. Something that made a difference in the world. But as a member of the Osage Nation at the turn of the twentieth century, there were a lot of obstacles that he had to face to achieve his dreams. When he...

Before he became a writer, James “Jimmy” Baldwin was a young boy from Harlem, New York, who loved stories. He found joy in the rhythm of music, family, and books. But Jimmy also found the blues, as a Black man living in America. When he discovered the written word, he discovered true power. Writing...

In 1944, the United States was facing a unique wartime crisis—too much mail! Millions of letters and packages, stacked from floor to ceiling, sat unsent in cold, dark warehouses, with no one to sort through the backlog and no way to deliver mail to the troops. Enter the 6888th Central Postal...

Before she became First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt was a girl trying to find her voice. As a young orphan, she was shy and made to feel like a failure. But every night, Eleanor would read her father’s letters, full of love and belief in her, and she used his words to help her face her fears. She took...