Last school year, I was excited to introduce my seventh grade students to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Teaching at an all boys military academy, I had carefully selected texts that would give students a broad understanding of American society during different historical periods, while also giving them stories of young people whose lives or personalities they could relate to. I deliberately chose to balance the curriculum between male and female authors..

A young black man flees the south and moves to a big city in the North in the first half of the 1930s, where he becomes involved in a communist party or brotherhood. Yet, there is a striking difference between the story of the very real Wright and the main character in Invisible Man whose names the reader is never privy too - Wright sees what the white reader does not, whereas the modern white reader of the Invisible Man sees what the narrator does not.

An intricately beautiful and compelling novel, Obasan begins with the death of the narrator Naomi Nakane’s Uncle. As an adult, Naomi had tried hard to separate herself from her childhood experience in Canada during World War II which she lived through, but didn’t necessarily understand as a child. Drawn back to her old family home to help put her Uncle to rest, Naomi is pushed by her Aunt Emily towards a deeper understanding of her family’s and the country’s history. 

This series of Bluesky Poems reflects on teaching "Farewell to Manzanar."

A memoir immersed in his college years at UC Berkeley in twilight of the 1990s, Hua Hsu’s Stay True provides a time capsule back to my own youth as he explores the significance of his college friendships in this ode to his friend Ken who was killed in a carjacking in July 1998. While Hse dives into his own unique story as a son of Taiwanese immigrant parents, this true story of his college journey evokes a California culture that captures the angsty explorations of the Xennia

In Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Tayo's Laguna community seeks to help him heal from the PTSD that he, like many of his peers, has brought back with him from World War II. A story that echoes the familiar tales of alcohol abuse and struggles with racism and belonging encountered in Alexie's work, the overlap between the returned veterans' PTSD and the multi-generational trauma of reservation life and colonialism lays the cultural foundation for a plot that drew me in and l

SUMMARY Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee tells the journey of a young girl from India who as a grown woman finds herself in a small farming...

I just completed reading Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie and writing my blog post about why people might want to read or teach this...

Warning: Mild Spoilers Our names identify us, individualize us, and connect us. Yet, as Shakespeare writes in Romeo and Juliet , "A rose...