Books like Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave
By Laban Carrick Hill
For families who want art and history to sit side by side, this is a picture book that turns a real potter's wheel into a lesson about dignity and creation. Reverent, grounded, and glowing with earth tones — more meditation than adventure.
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.
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 young Japanese American artist grows up determined to draw, even as her family is sent to a WWII internment camp — and she goes on to create groundbreaking picture books that show children of every race together.
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 child piano prodigy flees revolution in Venezuela for the United States, and despite feeling lonely and out of place, grows famous enough to be invited to play for President Lincoln at the White House.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
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 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.
An aspiring young musician hauls his double bass through busy city streets on the long walk home from school, weaving between crowds while music fills his heart the whole way.
A lyrical, free-verse journey traces enslaved Black Americans' path to freedom, from the moment shackles fell in 1865 Galveston, Texas to how Juneteenth is honored today.
Enslaved people in 19th-century Louisiana count down the days through endless labor — slopping hogs, chopping logs, plucking hens — toward Sunday afternoon, when they gather in New Orleans' Congo Square to sing, dance, and briefly live free.
With a baby on her hip and laundry still waiting, a no-nonsense creator demands light and dark, earth and sky, and every living creature into being — then sits back satisfied with what she's made.
