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Lena and Campbell, two high school girls with different styles and social circles are thrown together when a massive fight at a football game leads to a riot as racial tension heats up. The two form an unlikely friendship and both learn about different points of view from living in different parts of the same city.
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Maverick feels strongly about family ties, making choices he feels necessary to help support his mom while his King father serves time, and leave him literally holding his son in a doctor's waiting room after he gets paternity test results back and his babymomma ghosts. Now the child he's raising is impacting the lives of his family and his girlfriend, and the gang life he led to support them all financially could leave them all bearing his responsibilities...
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11th-12th Grade Reading
ALA Youth Media Award Winners 2023
Nashville Reads 2024 | The Works of Jason Reynolds
ALA Youth Media Award Winners 2023
Nashville Reads 2024 | The Works of Jason Reynolds
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"A smash up of art and text that viscerally captures what it is to be Black. In America. Right Now"--
4) Dear Justyce
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Incarcerated teen Quan Banks writes letters to Justyce McCallister, with whom he bonded years before over family issues, about his experiences in the American juvenile justice system.
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Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
Formidable Females in YA
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Formidable Females in YA
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Sixteen-year-old Bri hopes to become a great rapper, and after her first song goes viral for all the wrong reasons, she must decide whether to sell out or face eviction with her widowed mother.
6) Dear Martin
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Project Lit - Full List
Short YA Fiction
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"Justyce McAllister is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend--but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. Despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can't escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates. Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out. Then...
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9th-10th Grade Reading
Anti-Racist Non-fiction: YA
High School Battle of the Books - 2022-23
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Anti-Racist Non-fiction: YA
High School Battle of the Books - 2022-23
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"In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial...
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BIPOC YA Mental Health Awareness Month
Minority Mental Health Month (July)
YA Books for Juneteenth
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Minority Mental Health Month (July)
YA Books for Juneteenth
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It is the 2008 presidential election and seventeen-year-old African American Morgan lives in a mostly white, conservative suburb and attends a Christian high school. She suffers from the isolation that brings as a person of color. When she seeks help for her depression after a suicide attempt, she begins to find her own identity and educate others on being black in America.
10) The hate u give
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English
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Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
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Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
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High School Project Lit Titles
Nashville Reads 2023: Celebrating Our Freedom to Read!
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Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...
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7th-8th Grade Reading List
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YA Books for Juneteenth
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YA Books for Juneteenth
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"High school junior Del Rainey unwittingly joins a Purity Pledge class at church, hoping to get closer to his long-term crush, Kiera"--Provided by publisher.
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English
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Nashville Reads 2024 | The Works of Jason Reynolds
Project Lit - Full List
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Nashville Reads 2024 | The Works of Jason Reynolds
Project Lit - Full List
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When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend. Told through Rashad and Quinn's alternating viewpoints.
13) Dread nation
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English
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11th-12th Grade Reading
Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
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Project Lit - Full List
Awesome YA Books by Black Authors
High School Project Lit Titles
Project Lit - Full List
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"Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania--derailingthe War Between the States and changing the nation forever. In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of afew, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities--and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained...
14) Light it up
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Told from multiple viewpoints, Shae Tatum, an unarmed, thirteen-year-old black girl, is shot by a white police officer, throwing their community into upheaval and making it a target of demonstrators.
A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: a police officer has shot and...
15) Monster
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While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.
16) Legendborn
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Sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or her home in rural North Carolina after her mother dies. The residential program for high schoolers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is the perfect escape, until Bree sees a demon attack the night before school starts. A teenage mage who calls himself a "Merlin" tries to wipe her memory of the attack, but fails and Bree manages to stumble upon a society of...
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A black teenager named Echo believes she is a wizard and uses her magical abilities to cope and rise up out of her crime-infested and poverty-stricken east Cleveland neighborhood, and reach beyond her dysfunctional family's drug addiction. She meets wise female wizards along the way who teach her to use magic and uses a portal that transports her to a rich, mostly white school on the west side of town where she meets Elena, a Muslim teen whom she...
18) Why we fly
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English
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Told from alternating points of view, Chanel and Eleanor's rocky start to senior year gets more complex when the cheerleading team kneels for the national anthem and each girl grapples with the consequences.
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English
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9th-10th Grade Reading
High School Project Lit Titles
Not your average high-school (book display)
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High School Project Lit Titles
Not your average high-school (book display)
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Description
Liz Lighty has always done her best to avoid the spotlight in her small, wealthy, and prom-obsessed midwestern high school, after all, her family is black and rather poor, especially since her mother died; instead she has concentrated on her grades and her musical ability in the hopes that it will win her a scholarship to elite Pennington College and their famous orchestra where she plans to study medicine--but when that scholarship falls through...