This is the dramatic, multilayered story of two legendary women warriors, Wu Mei, the "beautiful warrior", and her most famous pupil, Mingyi, set in the vibrant colors of China.

    The family were struggling Polish immigrants, and despite Keats’s obvious talent, his father worried that Ezra’s dream of being an artist was an unrealistic one. But Ezra was determined. By high school he was winning prizes and scholarships. Later, jobs followed with the WPA and Marvel comics. But it was many years before Keats’s greatest dream was realized and he had the opportunity to write and illustrate his own book.   For more than two decades, Ezra had kept pinned to his wall a series of photographs of an adorable African American child. In Keats’s hands, the boy morphed into Peter, a boy in a red snowsuit, out enjoying the pristine snow; the book became The Snowy Day, winner of the Caldecott Medal, the first mainstream book to feature an African American child. It was also the first of many books featuring Peter and the children of his — and Keats’s — neighborhood.   Andrea David Pinkney’s lyrical narrative tells the inspiring story of a boy who pursued a dream, and who, in turn, inspired generations of other dreamers.

    During a famine, when Nora's grandfather had to travel far to find work and bring food for the family, her father learned the valuable life lessons of patience, perseverance, and hope.

    Want to become an award-winning cartoonist and inventor? Follow your dreams, just like Rube Goldberg! From a young age, Rube Goldberg had a talent for art. But his father, a German immigrant, wanted Rube to have a secure job. So, Rube went to college and became an engineer.But Rube didn’t want to spend his life mapping sewer pipes. He wanted to follow his passion, so Rube got a low-level job at a newspaper, and from there, he worked his way up, creating cartoons that made people laugh and tickled the imagination. He became known for his fantastic Rube Goldberg machines—complicated contraptions with many parts that performed a simple task in an elaborate and farfetched way. Eventually, his cartoons earned him a Pulitzer Prize and his own adjective in the dictionary. This moving biography is sure to encourage young artists and inventors to pursue their passions.

    You can sample sushi. Build a burger. Eat an empanada! There's a food truck flavor to satisfy every appetite in this comically illustrated picture book with rhyming text. A fun and informative homage to tasty treats and transportation. Additional fun facts on food history and nutrition are also peppered throughout the book.

    What makes you thankful?A book? Weekends? Your family?How do you say thanks? With a flower? With a chocolate bar? With a surprise?In sixteen extraordinary poems that range in form from a haiku to a rebus to a riddle, Nikki Grimes reminds us how wonderful it is to feel thankful, and how powerful a simple "thank you" can be.

    Saturday mornings he walks with his sister, Lisa, to her dancing school on his way to the park for his weekly game. One morning Max is early, and Lisa's teacher invites him to join the class. Max stretches at the barre. He struggles for a split. And before he knows it, he's having fun! Young ballplayers and ballet dancers will share Max's delight when he discovers that dance class is a great way to warm up for a home run.

    Helen is excited, but anxious. How will she and her siblings, who know only English, communicate with Gong Gong, who speaks only Chinese?At first Gong Gong keeps to himself, reading the Chinese newspapers he brought with him. Then one day, as Helen sits outside watching for the train that runs behind her house, Gong Gong joins her. He starts counting the train cars in Chinese, and then teaches Helen the words. Helen reciprocates by teaching Gong Gong to count in English. Soon Helen and Gong Gong are teaching each other more words, and a special bond between them begins to develop and grow.A moving intergenerational story, Grandfather Counts highlights the universality of the love shared between grandparent and grandchild, a love that helps them cross the boundaries of language and culture.

    Hope’s father can’t stand the waiting a minute longer and decides to join the Union army to fight for freedom. He slips away one tearful night, leaving Hope, who knows she may never see her father again, with only a conch shell for comfort. Its sound, Papa says, echoes the promised song of freedom. It’s a long wait for freedom and on the nights when the cannons roar, Papa seems farther away than ever. But then Lincoln finally does it: on January 1, 1863, he issues the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves, and a joyful Hope finally spies the outline of a familiar man standing on the horizon.Affectingly written and gorgeously illustrated, Hope’s Gift captures a significant moment in American history with deep emotion and a lot of charm.

      Once there was a boy named Leonard who loved to sing and to act. His parents were immigrants who felt like aliens in America, and certainly didn’t understand Leonard’s drive to perform. “Learn to play the accordion,” his father told him. “Actors starve, but at least musicians can eke out a living.”   But Leonard reached for the stars . . . and caught them. He moved to Hollywood, where he took acting lessons, and drove a taxi and took every role he could get. He worked hard, learned his lines, showed up on time, and studied his craft. Until one day he was offered the role of an alien science officer on a new TV show called Star Trek. Leonard knew what it felt like to be an alien. But did he want the role?  Fascinating is the story of how one boy followed his dreams to become one of the most beloved figures of our time.

    and the 1963 March on Washington. But there's little on his legendary speech and how he came to write it. Find out more in this gripping book with illustrations by Caldecott Medalist Jerry Pinkney.Martin Luther King, Jr. was once asked if the hardest part of preaching was knowing where to begin. No, he said. The hardest part is knowing where to end. "It's terrible to be circling up there without a place to land."Finding this place to land was what Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled with, alongside advisors and fellow speech writers, in the Willard Hotel the night before the March on Washington, where he gave his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. But those famous words were never intended to be heard on that day, not even written down for that day, not even once.Barry Wittenstein teams up with legendary illustrator Jerry Pinkney to tell the story of how, against all odds, Martin found his place to land.

    But it has only been since the war in Vietnam and Laos, which displaced many Hmong, that the new, narrative form of 'story cloths' has emerged, a bridge between past and present.Dia Cha and her family experienced this displacement. Born in Laos, Dia fled with her family to Thailand as a child, spending four years in a refugee camp before arriving in the U.S. Her story is shared by many Hmong Americans.As told through the story cloth stitched by her aunt and uncle, the Hmong people's search for freedom began long ago in China. Dia's Story Cloth explores many aspects of the Hmong experience from peace and war in Asia to new beginnings in America. Through Dia's story, young children can see that the search for freedom transcends all cultures.This book includes a compendium of Hmong culture: their history, traditions, and stitchery techniques.

    Peering down from her treetop perch, a lonely lioness admires the noisily cheeping clan of Mother Ostrich and thinks, "I would be happy to have just one child." So she leaps down, gurum! and steals all four ostrich chicks. Accepting the lioness as their mother, the chicks follow right behind he. Mother Ostrich is frantic! As she chases after the lioness, she enlists the help of gazelle, hyena, jackal, and mongoose. But which one can help her to get her chicks back? With art by Yumi Heo that blends primitive, African, and folk styles, The Lonely Lioness and the Ostrich Chicks is a captivating picture book destined to be a classic.

    A picture book biography of scientist Wangari Maathai, the first African womanand first environmentalistto win a Nobel Peace Prize (in 2004), for her work planting trees in her native Kenya.