Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.6 - AR Pts: 15
Lexile measure
870L
Language
English
Description
This fourth autobiographical work by Maya Angelou tells of her entry into New York's circle of black artists and writers, her involvement in the civil rights movement, and changes in her personal life.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 18
Lexile measure
1140L
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...
5) Sula
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 8
Lexile measure
1050L
Language
English
Description
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in...
6) Kindred
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4 - AR Pts: 14
Lexile measure
580L
Language
English
Description
"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 across the years 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...
7) The help
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 23
Lexile measure
730L
Language
English
Description
Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who's always taken orders quietly, but lately she's unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She's full of ambition, but without a husband, she's considered a failure. Together, these seemingly different women join together to write...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 4
Lexile measure
840L
Language
English
Description
...this writing thing was some kind of magic trick I didn't yet understand... Nikki Grimes discovered the power of writing at the tender age of six, when, alone in her room, she poured her fears, anger, and tears onto a piece of paper - and felt sweet relief. Words and faith were her most enduring companions as life flung her headlong from one harrowing experience to the next through her childhood and teenage years. Words, spilled into notebook after...
10) Another Brooklyn
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 3
Language
English
Description
When August, an anthropologist who has studied the funeral traditions of different cultures, revisits her old neighborhood after her father's death, her reunion with a brother and a chance encounter with an old friend bring back a flood of childhood memories. Flashbacks depict the isolation she felt moving from rural Tennessee to New York and show how her later years were influenced by the black power movement, nearby street violence, her father's...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.7 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
1010L
Language
English
Description
The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
"Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 18
Language
English
Description
"Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada in this electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing. Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she's thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They've only...
14) Becoming
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 29
Lexile measure
1170L
Language
English
Description
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
Raised by a single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles, Patrisse Khan-Cullors experienced firsthand the prejudice and persecution Black Americans endure at the hands of law enforcement. For Patrisse, the most vulnerable people in the country are Black people. Deliberately and ruthlessly targeted by a criminal justice system serving a white privilege agenda, Black people are subjected to unjustifiable racial profiling and police...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 15
Lexile measure
840L
Language
English
Description
"Set in South Carolina during the summer of 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three racists in town, they escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily finds refuge...
17) The color purple
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4 - AR Pts: 9
Lexile measure
HL 670L
Language
English
Description
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book." A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.7 - AR Pts: 18
Lexile measure
1350L
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 3
Language
English
Description
"The luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning. Now in paperback...
20) Cane River
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 20
Lexile measure
970L
Language
English
Description
Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.
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