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"Transracial adoption is never oversimplified, airbrushed, or sentimentalized, but instead, it's portrayed with bracing honesty as the messy institution it is: rearranging families, blending cultural and biological DNA, loss and joy. An exceptionally accomplished debut."—Kirkus, starred review For as long as she can remember, sixteen-year-old Alex Kirtridge has known two things about herself: She's a stellar baseball player. She's adopted. Alex has had a comfortable childhood in Madison, Wisconsin. Despite some teasing, being a biracial girl in a wealthy white family hasn't been that big a deal. What mattered was that she was a star on the diamond, where her father, a former Major Leaguer,...
The heartbreaking story of five generations of young people from a single African-and-American family pursuing an elusive dream of freedom. "Gut wrenching and incredible.”— Sabaa Tahir #1 New York Times bestselling author of An Ember in the Ashes "This novel is a remarkable achievement."—Kelly Barnhill, New York Times bestselling author and Newbery medalist "Beautifully epic."—Ibi Zoboi, author American Street and National Book Award finalist Dream Country begins in suburban Minneapolis at the moment when seventeen-year-old Kollie Flomo begins to crack under the strain of his life as a Liberian refugee. He's exhausted by being at once too black and not black enough for his African Am...
In this provocative book, sixteen of Minnesota’s best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in one of the whitest states in the nation. They give readers a splendid gift: the gift of touching another human being’s inner reality, behind masks and veils and politeness. They bring us generously into experiences that we must understand if we are to come together in real relationships. Minnesota communities struggle with some of the nation’s worst racial disparities. As its authors confront and consider the realities that lie beneath the numbers, this book provides an important tool to those who want to be part of closing those gaps. With contributions by: Taiyon J. Coleman, Heid E. Erdrich, Venessa Fuentes, Shannon Gibney, David Grant, Carolyn Holbrook, IBé, Andrea Jenkins, Robert Karimi, JaeRan Kim, Sherry Quan Lee, David Mura, Bao Phi, Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria, Diane Wilson, Kao Kalia Yang
"Outstanding in all ways, this title deserves a place in most collections and adds a wonderful opportunity for upper elementary students (and higher!) to unpack our complicated histories."—starred, School Library Journal We come from stardust our bodies made of ancient elements. We come from single cells evolving over billions of years. We come from place, language, and spirit. And each of us comes from story. We all come from something. In this unique collaboration, four authors lyrically explore where they each come from—literally and metaphorically—as well as what unites all of us as humans. Weaving together their individual stories, they explore place, ancestors, movement, struggle, determination, and hope. Powerful poetic text and richly layered illustrations bring together past and present, creating an accessible and visually striking look at family, history, and identity.
“The ultimate (literary) tour guide to the neighborhoods and wild places, history and politics, culture and cuisine, music and myths of the Twin Cities” (Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding). In recent years, Minneapolis has become one of America’s literary powerhouses. With over fifty poems and essays, Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology collects some of the most exciting work being done in, or about, Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area. The narratives delve into the complexities of Minneapolis life—with threads that stretch back not just to Scandinavia, but across the world. This volume’s contributors include Marlon James, Shannon Gibney, Kelly Barnhill, James Wright, and many more. Collectively, they have won, or been shortlisted for, the Newbery Award, the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, the Caldecott Award, the National Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award, among other awards. The wide-ranging stories featured here include: A tour through Prince’s Minneapolis The story of the Metrodome’s demolition A story of a Somali immigrant’s journey to Eden Prairie Eating Halva on Lake Street
Confronting trauma behind the transnational adoption system—now back in print Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully explores this most intimate aspect of globalization through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. Moving beyond personal narrative, transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing the...
"Dancing Transnational Feminisms brings together reflections and critical responses about the embodied creative practices that have been part of the work of Ananya Dance Theatre (ADT), a Twin Cities-based dance company of women of color who work at the intersections of artistic excellence and social justice. Focusing on ADT's creative processes and organizational strategies, the book highlights how women and femme artists of color, working with a marginalized movement aesthetic, claim and transform the spaces of contemporary concert dance into sites of empowerment, resistance, and knowledge production. Blending essays with epistolary texts, interviews and poems, the collection's contributors offer up a multigenre exploration of how dance and other artistic undertakings can be intersectionally reimagined. Building on more than fifteen years of collaborative dance-making and sustained dialogues, Dancing Transnational Feminisms delves into timely questions surrounding race and performance, art and politics, global and local inequities and the responsibilities of artists towards the communities they come from"--
This book presents the authors’ attempts to interrogate the ways that white institutional, pedagogical, and curricular heteronormativity affects equity in writing instruction at Two Year Colleges. Written from a wide range of subject and identity positions, this volume explores issues that arise among students inside historically white-dominant classrooms, among faculty as curriculum and hiring decisions are made, and among colleagues when they attempt to engage the wider institution in equity work. Aiming to significantly change how urban Community College writing instruction is delivered in this country, the book operates on the principle that equity is essential to successful writing pedagogy, curricular development, and student success.
This edited collection applies kinship as an analytical concept to better understand the affective economies, discursive practices, and aesthetic dimensions through which cultural narratives of belonging establish a sense of intimacy and affiliation. In North American and European ethnic literatures, kinship has several social functions: negotiating diasporic belonging in and outside of the perimeters of bloodlines and genealogy; positioning queer-feminist interventions to counter ethno-nationalist narratives of belonging; challenging liberal sentimentalist narratives, such as those grafted onto the bodies of transnational adoptees; re-formulating cultural heterogeneity through interracial and interethnic kinship constellations outside either post-racial assumptions about colorblindness or celebrations of racial and ethnic pluralism. In all of these cases, kinship features as a common theme through which contemporary authors attend to challenges of conscribing individuals into inclusive, counter-hegemonic cultural narratives of belonging.