Book picks similar to
Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming: Stories and Poems by American Indian Teens and Young Adults by Simon J. Ortiz
poetry
young-adult
native-american
short-stories
Nona & Me
Clare Atkins - 2014
Yapas.They are also best friends. It doesn’t matter that Rosie is white and Nona is Aboriginal: their family connections tie them together for life.Born just five days apart in a remote corner of the Northern Territory, the girls are inseperable, until Nona moves away at the age of nine. By the time she returns, they’re in Year 10 and things have changed. Rosie has lost interest in the community, preferring to hang out in the nearby mining town, where she goes to school with the glamorous Selena, and Selena’s gorgeous older brother Nick.When a political announcement highlights divisions between the Aboriginal community and the mining town, Rosie is put in a difficult position: will she be forced to choose between her first love and her oldest friend?
Love and Leftovers
Sarah Tregay - 2011
Dragged to New Hampshire for the summer, Marcie soon realizes that her mom has no plans for them to return to Marcie's father in Idaho. As Marcie starts at a new school, without her ragtag group of friends called the Leftovers, a new romance heats up, but she struggles to understand what love really means.Perfect for fans of romances like Anna and the French Kiss and those by Sarah Dessen as well as readers of poetry, Love and Leftovers is a beautiful and fresh take on love.
Where the Dead Sit Talking
Brandon Hobson - 2018
With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family.Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.
This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness
Joyce Sidman - 2007
Merz asks her sixth grade class to write poems of apology, they end up liking their poems so much that they decide to put them together into a book. Not only that, but they get the people to whom they apologized to write poems back.In haiku, pantoums, two-part poems, snippets, and rhymes, Mrs. Merz’s class writes of crushes, overbearing parents, loving and losing pets, and more. Some poets are deeply sorry; some not at all. Some are forgiven; some are not. In each pair of poems a relationship, a connection, is revealed.
The Best and Hardest Thing
Pat Brisson - 2010
And she's sick of herself. So when she spots mysterious bad boy Grady Dillon, she devises a plan to make herself over into someone new, someone who will attract Grady's attention. She succeeds but a little too well. When Molly discovers she's pregnant, she's forced to make the hardest choice of her life. This addictive readable portrayal of Molly's struggle to accept her pregnancy and the fact that her life will never be the same is told entirely in poetry, from sonnets to haiku.
Emmy's Journey (Two Feather's Legacy Book 2)
Lila M Beckham - 2015
Determined to do exactly what she sets her mind to, she explores the mountains and valleys around her home with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a keen eye that misses nothing. When her mother dies, Emmaline, Emmy for short, is thrust into the mystical, spiritual world of her mother’s native peoples, the Tsalagi, better known as the Cherokee. Given the power of observation and shape shifting by her immortal g-great-grandfather Two Feathers, who is the keeper of the Sacred Fire’s Ashes, Emmy is told that she must carry on her mother’s duties and is charged with the task of becoming the family “Ka no he ha Ka no Ge sdi,” the Storyteller. She is supposed to remember and pass down her family’s history and tell about their ancestors. As Emmy grows older and matures, her explorations become more advanced. She discovers a hidden path that takes her beyond an ancient willow tree to a layer of the world that at first seems much like her own, but she soon discovers that it is quite different… When she stays longer than allowed a mortal, she discovers that her grandfather can travel between space and time and communicate with all peoples between the layers of her world. Emmy’s Journey is a voyage through time and into the mysterious spiritual and mystical realms of the Cherokees and a world that most never knows exists.
Speaking Our Truth: A Journey of Reconciliation
Monique Gray Smith - 2017
Healing and repairing that relationship requires education, awareness and increased understanding of the legacy and the impacts still being felt by survivors and their families. Guided by acclaimed Indigenous author Monique Gray Smith, readers will learn about the lives of Survivors and listen to allies who are putting the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into action.
Shi-shi-etko
Nicola I. Campbell - 2005
Finalist for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award and the Ruth Schwartz AwardIn just four days young Shi-shi-etko will have to leave her family and all that she knows to attend residential school.She spends her last days at home treasuring the beauty of her world -- the dancing sunlight, the tall grass, each shiny rock, the tadpoles in the creek, her grandfather's paddle song. Her mother, father and grandmother, each in turn, share valuable teachings that they want her to remember. And so Shi-shi-etko carefully gathers her memories for safekeeping.Richly hued illustrations complement this gently moving and poetic account of a child who finds solace all around her, even though she is on the verge of great loss -- a loss that native people have endured for generations because of the residential schools system.
Psyche in a Dress
Francesca Lia Block - 2006
Yet he is fleeting and fragile, lost to her too quickly. Punished by self-doubt, Psyche yearns to be transformed, like the beautiful and brutal figures in the myths her lover once spoke of. Attempting to uncover beauty in the darkness, she is challenged, tested, and changed by the gods and demons who tempt her. Her faith must be found again, for if she is to love, she must never look back.
The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories
Simon Rich - 2013
In Magical Mr. Goat, a young girl's imaginary friend yearns to become "more than friends." In Unprotected, an unused prophylactic recalls his years spent trapped inside a teen boy's wallet. The stories in Simon Rich's new book are bizarre, funny, and yet...relatable. Rich explores love's many complications-losing it, finding it, breaking it, and making it-and turns the ordinary into the absurd. With razor-sharp humor and illustrations, and just in time for Valentine's Day, Rich takes readers for an exhilarating, hilarious ride on the rollercoaster of love.
Rewind
Jan Page - 2004
Some people believe it only moves in one direction— forward.But others think time moves forward and backward simultaneously. Of course, no one really knows the answer.No one, that is, until Liam is killed by a falling speaker at a Battle of the Bands contest. Suddenly Liam travels back in time and soon finds himself in the middle of his teenaged parents' band rehearsal, and an unseen observer of a love triangle between bandmates.Would his mother be happier ending up with the drummer instead of his father? Would that choice save the drummer from a fatal accident that is about to end his life? And if Liam helps them along, will he be canceling out his own existence? If only he can figure out how to use time to his own advantage.
Watch With Me
Wendell Berry - 1994
Rich with humor and wisdom, this collection describes the depth of affection and tolerance for eccentricity that these neighbors bear toward one another, and highlights the comic and often poignant ways they cope with the intrusions of the 20th century into their idyllic, agrarian world.
We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire
Joy McCullough - 2021
A jury eventually found the rapist guilty on all counts–a remarkable verdict that Em felt more than a little responsible for, since she was her sister’s strongest advocate on social media during the trial. Her passion and outspokenness helped dissuade the DA from settling for a plea deal. Em’s family would have real justice. But the victory is short-lived. In a matter of minutes, justice vanishes as the judge turns the Morales family’s world upside down again by sentencing the rapist to no prison time. While her family is stunned, Em is literally sick with rage and guilt. To make matters worse, a news clip of her saying that the sentence “makes me want to use a fucking sword” goes viral.From this low point, Em must find a new reason to go on and help her family heal, and she finds it in the unlikely form of the story of a 15th-century French noblewoman, Marguerite de Bressieux, who is legendary as an avenging knight for rape victims.We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is a searing and nuanced portrait of a young woman torn between a persistent desire for revenge and a burning need for hope.
Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora
Saraciea J. FennellIbi Zoboi - 2021
These 15 original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories and superheroes, to memories in the kitchen and travels around the world, to addiction and grief, to identity and anti-Blackness, to finding love and speaking your truth.Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed features bestselling and award-winning authors as well as new, up-and-coming voices, including:Elizabeth AcevedoCristina ArreolaIngrid Rojas ContrerasNaima CosterNatasha DiazKahlil HaywoodZakiya JamalJanel MartinezJasminne MendezMeg MedinaMark OshiroJulian RandallLilliam RiveraIbi ZoboiFull of both sorrow and joy, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed is an essential celebration of this rich and diverse community.
Immigrants in Our Own Land Selected Early Poems
Jimmy Santiago Baca - 1979
A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."