Shadra Strickland

Celebrates a community coming together through their love of double Dutch.

Strickland wraps up the class with a tutorial on creating and submitting a dummy for a publisher, including tips on how to create a dummy for self-publishing or personal gifts. You'll leave the class wanting to run straight for the drawing board in pursuit of your next story!

What qualities bring a character to life? Strickland guides you through everything you need to know, from how to identify with your character through various ways to develop compelling stories and meaningful imagery.

Learn how to infuse emotion into your illustrations with realistic expressions, postures and composition ideas that will continue to breathe life into the characters on the page.

Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Viriginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.

Bird, an artistic young African American boy, expresses himself through drawing as he struggles to understand his older brother's drug addiction and death, while a family friend, Uncle Son, provides guidance and understanding.

"Shaking Things Up introduces fourteen revolutionary young women--each paired with a noteworthy female artist--to the next generation of activists, trail-blazers, and rabble-rousers. From the award-winning author of Ada's Violin, Susan Hood, this is a poetic and visual celebration of persistent women throughout history. In this book, you will find Mary Anning, who was just thirteen when she unearthed a prehistoric fossil. You'll meet Ruby Bridges,...

Told in alternating voices, four friends from the same New Orleans neighborhood describe what happens to them and their community when they are separated, then reunited, as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

It is 1854 in Alexandria, Virginia. Eleven-year-old Eliza's mother has been sold and Eliza is left as a slave on a Virginia farm. Eliza has only the quilt her mother left her and the memory of the stories her mother told. One day Eliza gathers a bit of food, the quilt her mother gave her, and her journal, then escapes into the night.

It is 1962 somewhere in the Deep South, and a young boy must sit in the back of the bus and drink from the "Colored" water fountain. Michael drinks the brackish water and imagines how good the "White" water must taste. Thus begins a journey of self-discovery that is based on a childhood experience of co-author Michael Bandy. When the boy finally discovers that the "white water" comes from the same rusty, gritty pipe as the "colored water", he confronts...