Day: June 23, 2015

By Sujei Lugo

 DESCRIPTION FROM THE BOOK JACKET: Girls cannot be drummers. Long ago on an island filled with music and rhythm, no one questioned that rule — until the drum dream girl. She longed to play tall congas and small bongós and silvery, moon-bright timbales. She had to practice in secret. But when at last her music was heard, everyone sang and danced and decided that boys and girls should be free to drum and dream.

Inspired by a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba’s traditional taboo against female drummers, Drum Dream Girl tells an inspiring true story for dreamers everywhere.

MY TWO CENTS: Inspired by the childhood of Chinese Afro Cuban drummer Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, Margarita Engle and Rafael López enchantingly encapsulate through poetic text and dreamy illustrations a girl’s dreams and her desires to play music. By focusing on our girl’s “dreaming” period and the stage when…

Another Octavia E. Butler birthday is upon us. Her writing has inspired many people, so why not celebrate by reading a few of the writers she has influenced?

Bloodchildren, a collection of stories by Octavia E. Butler Scholars, takes it name from Butler’s story collection Bloodchild and Other Stories.

The science fiction stories in Octavia’s Brood center around social justice movements and borrows it’s title from Butler’s series Lilith’s Brood.

Also, check out the Artists on Writers feature on Octavia Butler and feast your eyes on some of the amazing artwork, like the one above by Kimbot.

By Sofia Quintero

Almost immediately after finishing the last round of copyedits on Show and Provedid I find something that conjured my biggest fears about writing a novel set in the 1980s.

I discovered a blog post by a librarian expressing fatigue with the trend in young adult fiction about the 80s. She named a legitimate concern that haunted me throughout the writing of Show and Prove. Was setting the story in that decade integral to its telling or were the 80s just a hook driven by my personal nostalgia?

It’d be dishonest to deny that nostalgia had a role in my writing this novel. Maybe Show and Prove didn’t have to be set in the 80s to tell the stories of Smiles, Nike, Cookie and Sara.

But then I realized, so what?

With the overwhelming majority of young adult fiction set in the 80s centering on white, middle-class…

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”