Books like Libba: The Magnificent Musical Life of Elizabeth Cotten
By Laura Veirs
For the kid who insists on doing things their own backwards way, Libba is proof that the unconventional path can lead somewhere extraordinary. Warm, musical, and quietly triumphant, with the steady rhythm of a life built one determined step at a time.
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.
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 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.
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 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 quiet, piano-loving boy — the son of a man once enslaved — grows up to compose music so joyful and rhythmic it earns him a new name: the King of Ragtime.
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 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 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 spider artist longs to spin beautiful webs and one true masterpiece, but is shooed from room to room of Beekman's Boardinghouse until she finally finds a home that welcomes her gift.
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.
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.
