Books like Abdul's Story
By Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow
For the kid who tells amazing stories out loud but freezes up with a pencil in hand, this one says the words in your head still count. Encouraging, warm, and quietly affirming, with a classroom-visit moment that lands like a pep talk.
A boy who loves to draw anytime, anything, anywhere loses his confidence after one careless comment from his older brother — until his little sister shows him a different way to see his own work.
A girl convinced she can't draw jabs an angry dot onto a blank page just to prove her teacher wrong — and that single mark becomes the start of something unexpected.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
The true story of a boy born to formerly enslaved parents who reads the newspaper aloud to his father every day, then carries that hunger for knowledge into the coal mines and beyond, eventually transforming how the world understands Black history.
A girl who loves acting out every story she hears sets her heart on playing Peter Pan in the school play, then hears a classmate say she can't — because she's a girl, and because she's Black.
A real-life picture book biography follows young Alma Thomas from a childhood soaking up color in Georgia to becoming a celebrated painter — teaching art for decades before beginning her own boundlessly colorful paintings near age seventy.
A determined young dancer in the 1930s and 40s trains for ballet despite discriminatory schools, then refuses to paint her skin white for a company's offer — and rises to become the Met Opera's first Black prima ballerina.
A true portrait of an enslaved man in 1800s South Carolina who became a master potter, shaping massive clay jars and carving his own poetry into them despite the world telling him he had no voice.
A boy who longs to be a trumpeter can only play an imaginary horn, until a musician from the neighborhood night club notices his ambition and takes him seriously.
A bricklayer works hard every day building the city, while his son works hard at school and plays at molding tiny clay bricks, until one Saturday his father surprises him with something built just for their family.
Four small animals — a yellow bird, a white dog, an orange fox, and a brown squirrel — each face a little setback in one day, until something good turns things around for all of them.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
