Orem Library

A picture-book biography of celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize
A 2021 Coretta Scott King Book Award Illustrator Honor Book
A 2021 Robert F. Sibert Informational Honor Book
A 2021 Association of Library Service to Children Notable Children's Book

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) is known for her poems about "real life." She wrote about love, loneliness,...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.

Dramatizes the events leading up to accusations of obscenity against Allen Ginsberg and his poem "Howl," and the subsequent trial where he had to defend his most famous work.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and was raised by his grandmother, who told him many stories of the Black American experience and taught him to be proud of his race from a young age. With her guidance, Langston became a talented writer in high school, creating dramatic plays, poetry, and articles for the school paper. His career as a writer would continue to blossom. Langston pioneered jazz poetry and published nearly twenty poetry books...

The author discusses how caring for her terminally ill mother ultimately strengthened the bond between the two, as well as fortified the author's family during the difficult time.

On May 26, 1863, Walt Whitman wrote to his mother: "O the sad, sad things I see--the noble young men with legs and arms taken off--the deaths--the sick weakness, sicker than death, that some endure, after amputations...just flickering alive, and O so deathly weak and sick." For nearly three years, Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experience with an immediacy and...

Poet Kim Barnes grew up in northern Idaho, in the isolated camps where her father worked as a logger and her mother made a modest but comfortable home for her husband and two children. Their lives were short on material wealth, but long on the riches of family and friendship, and the great sheltering power of the wilderness. But in the mid-1960's, as automation and a declining economy drove more and more loggers out of the wilderness and into despair,...

A biography of the American poet whose compassion led him to nurse soldiers during the Civil War, to give voice to the nation's grief at Lincoln's assassination, and to capture the true American spirit in verse.