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She was born free in New York City during slavery and turmoil in the United States and went on to graduate from an all-white high school. Maritcha Lyon’s story is drawn from her memoir, augmented by primary source material to bring a girl and the time in which she lived into focus for contemporary readers.

In this graphic novel, Spiegelman writes of his father’s struggle as a Jew in Poland during World War II. In comic book form, the Jews are depicted as mice, the Nazis as cats, and those who side with the Nazis are pigs. Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for this work.

This is a collection of drawings and poems that were done by children who grew up in the Terezin Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia between 1942 and 1944. The terror, the pleas for rescue, and the reflections of beliefs and values of these children who lived during World War II are vividly captured.

This short autobiographical novel is Wiesel’s rendering of his terrifying experiences as a teenager at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Nazi death camps. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel graphically describes his witnessing the death of his father, his innocence, and his God.

Not So Different offers a humorous, relatable, and refreshingly honest glimpse into Shane Burcaw’s life. Shane tackles many of the mundane and quirky questions that he’s often asked about living with a disability, and shows readers that he’s just as approachable, friendly, and funny as anyone else.

Shane Burcaw was born with a rare disease called spinal muscular atrophy, which hinders his muscles’ growth. As a result, his body hasn’t grown bigger and stronger as he’s gotten older ― it’s gotten smaller and weaker instead. This hasn’t stopped him from doing the things he enjoys (like eating pizza and playing sports and video games) with the people he loves, but it does mean that he routinely relies on his friends and family for help with everything from brushing his teeth to rolling over in bed.

When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn,” he proved that an entire story can be told using a half-dozen words. In this book, a variety of writers try to sum up their life in six simple words. Clever and fun, this book is a perfect starting point for a similar writing lesson.

By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Kwame Onwuachi had opened — and closed — one of the most talked about restaurants in America. He had sold drugs in New York and been shipped off to rural Nigeria to “learn respect.” He had launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars made from selling candy on the subway and starred on Top Chef. Through it all, Onwuachi’s love of food and cooking remained a constant, even when, as a young chef, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the food world can be for people of color. In this memoir about the intersection of race, fame, and food, he shares the remarkable story of his culinary coming-of-age.

The mission seemed jinxed from the start and nothing could have prepared the team for the challenge of being stranded in earth’s orbit after the destruction of the shuttle Columbia and its crew. Finding a way home was a herculean feat of teamwork on and off the planet.

This inspiring memoir for young readers tells the story of Sylvia Acevedo, a Latina rocket scientist whose early life was transformed by joining the Girl Scouts and who currently serves as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. A meningitis outbreak in their underprivileged neighborhood left Sylvia’s family forever altered. As she struggled in the aftermath of loss, her life transformed when she joined the Brownies. The Girl Scouts taught her how to take control of her world and nourished her love of numbers and science.

Persepolis is an autobiography by Marjane Satrapi that depicts her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. 

A winner of the Caldecott Award for Illustrators, Anita Lobel writes her memoir growing up in Krakow, Poland, during the Holocaust. She was only five when the Nazis invaded, and she is sent to live with their Catholic nanny in the country. Anita and her brother are eventually discovered and deported to a concentration camp where they live until the liberation. Art and books become her saving grace when she finally comes to America as a teenager.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea is a black-and-white graphic novel by the Canadian Québécois author Guy Delisle. The novel details the months Delisle spent in Pyongyang while working for a French animation company.

In this powerful memoir told in free verse, Anderson delves into her past and issues a call to action for social justice.

Your authenticity is your superpower. That’s the motto that professional skateboarder Leo Baker lives by and champions. But like any hero’s journey, learning about their power didn’t come easy. In this installment of the Pocket Change Collective, Baker takes the reader on a complicated, powerful journey through the world of skate and competitive sport as a non-binary athlete.

The extraordinary memoir of an orphan who danced her way from war-torn Sierra Leone to ballet stardom, most recently appearing in Beyonce’s Lemonade and as a principal in a major American dance company.

Kang recounts his life as a boy growing up in Pyongyang during the Sixties after his Korean family returns to North Korea from their affluent lives in Japan. After Kang’s grandfather is accused of high treason, Kang spends ten years of his life surviving in a remote labor camp or gulag. Kang was only nine years old when he was first imprisoned at the Yodok camp in 1977.

As a child, Ta-Nehisi Coates was seen by his father, Paul, as too sensitive and lacking focus.  Coates details with candor the challenges of dealing with his tough-love father, the influence of his mother, and the dynamics of his extended family, including his brother Big Bill, who was on a very different path than Ta-Nehisi. Coates also tells of his struggles at school and with girls, making this a timely story to which many readers will relate. 

Learn about Justice Sotomayor’s rise and her amazing work as well as about the Supreme Court in this fascinating memoir that shows that no matter the obstacles, dreams can come true.

This is the memoir of a Nazi Holocaust survivor. This grandmother speaks from her experiences in the Lodz ghetto in Poland and Auschwitz when she was a teenager. Riva Minska vividly shares how the Nazis destroyed her family, her community, and her way of life and tells how she managed to survive the death camps of World War II.

When Amra’s best friend said they couldn’t speak anymore, she realized that this was the first sign her world was changing. Amra, who was Muslim, lived in Bihac, Bosnia. Then Muslim refugees from other Bosnian cities started arriving, fleeing Serbian persecution. When the tanks rolled into Bihac, bringing her own city under seige, Amra’s happy life in her peaceful city vanished. But there is light even in the darkest of times, and she discovered that light in the warm, bonfire eyes of a stray cat. Here is the stunning true story of a teen who, even in the brutality of war, never wavered in her determination to obtain an education, maintain friendships, and even find a first love ― and the cat who gave comfort, hope, and maybe even served as the family’s guardian spirit. YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist.

A man struggles to come to terms with his parents’ brutal past at Auschwitz in this seminal graphic novel.

Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution is beautifully rendered in this graphic novel series.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants yearly scramble across the U.S.-Mexican border and into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil’s Highway. Many do not make it out alive. This is the human story of those border crossings told with facts, anger, and poetry.

While studying migratory birds on the remote Farallones Islands, 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco, biologists noticed red blotches in the surrounding waters. These sightings evolve into a full blown scientific study of great white sharks revealing unknown secrets of this prehistoric beast.