Expanding the Foundation

Steven T. Bickmore is an Associate professor of English Education at UNLV and maintains a weekly academic blog on YA literature (http://www.yawednesday.com/). He is a past editor of The ALAN Review (2009-2014) and a founding editor of Study and Scrutiny: Research in Young Adult Literature. Shanetia P. Clark, PhD is an associate professor of literacy in the Department of Early and Elementary Education at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland. Her interests include young adult and children's literature, the exploration of aesthetic experiences within reading and writing classrooms, and writing pedagogy.

• Foreword by Nancy TolsonAcknowledgements Introduction-Steven T. Bickmore and Shanetia P. Clark THE FEATURED AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTHORS “We’re All Just People Here”: Freedom, Hope, and Migration in Brown Girl DreamingKaaVonia Hinton 2. Coming of Age and Confronting Sexual Identity in Jacqueline Woodson’s From The Notebooks of Melanin SunTammy Szafranski and Steven T. Bickmore3. A Life Revealed: Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last and the Transformation of the Personal NarrativeMatt Skillen4. Nikki Grimes: Poet, Writer, Advocate, and Creative Spirit Mary Napoli and Barbara Ward5.Nikki Grimes: Poetry as MemiorMary Napoli and Barbara Ward6. Constructing Understanding Through Advocacy: A critical Disability Studies Perspective on Sharon draper’s Out of My Mind Katie Caprino and Tara Anderson Gold 7. History, Memory, and Family Stories in Sharon Draper’s Stella by StarlightMorgan Jackson and Steven T. Bickmore 8. An Examinatin of Who We are through Historical Fiction: Using ChristopherPaul Curtis’ The Journey of Little Charlie as a Magnifying GlassShanetia P. Clark9.Finding and Accepting Oneself through Sharon G. Flake’s The Skin I’m In Steven T. Bickmore and Tammy Szafranski10. Narrating the Extraordinary Everydayness of Black Adolescents through the Works of Rita Williams-Garcia Roberta Price Gardner11. Jewel Parker Rhodes: Towers Falling, Hope RisingRegina S. Carter, Bethany B. Mickel, and Felicia Moore

Expanding the Foundation; African American Authors of Young Adult Literature, 1980-2000 edited by Bickmore and Clark is a perfectly timed and carefully edited follow-up to On the Shoulders of Giants: Celebrating African American Authors of Young Adult Literature. The selections give readers an inside look into the fascinating lives of some of the most talented literary geniuses of our time, while including instructional strategies for educators and students to think critically and deeply. The book combines a perfect blend of history, research, theory, and practice about African American literature and provides us all--publishers, teachers, librarians, parents and students-- direction for examining African American literature.