"For the Undefeated": The 2020 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

Abstract

Written by both veteran and debut poets, these works—picture books, memoirs in verse, verse novels, and collections of voices for all ages—by and large sought to bear witness to our unique moment in history, and to celebrate, in the words of our winner, "the undefeated." Each spread contains an image evoking unspeakable violence: the victims of the transatlantic slave trade; the young girls Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, who were killed by white men who were members of the KKK in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and an impromptu memorial honoring victims of the persistent racist criminalization and dehumanization of young Black men and women, including Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin. Specifically, the first illustration in the set of three closely resembles the image of the British ship the Brookes that was published in 1788 by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade to show the horrors of the Middle Passage. Color photographs of Bland, Brown, Rice, and Martin appear amidst objects of mourning and tribute, such as candles, flowers, stuffed animals, an American flag, and a balloon.

Winner:

Kwame Alexander. The Undefeated. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson. Versify, 2019.

Honor Books:

Nikki Grimes. Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir. WordSong, 2019.

Aida Salazar. The Moon Within. Scholastic, 2019.

Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond, editors. Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. Seven Stories P, 2019.

Though many of the works of poetry published for young readers in 2019 were imaginative, engaging, and delightful, a few stood out as particularly excellent contributions to the larger field. Written by both veteran and debut poets, these works—picture books, memoirs in verse, verse novels, and collections of voices for all ages—by and large sought to bear witness to our unique moment in history, and to celebrate, in the words of our winner, "the undefeated." The poetry published in 2019 was part of a larger project undertaken by poets seeking to reflect upon and recover histories, cultures, traumas, and triumphs of the past. Speaking of the blurry line between poetry and politics, Major Jackson asserts in his introduction to The Best American Poetry 2019 that "poets today write in the wake of a long tradition of resistance in American poetry. They heed the ethical imperative to bear witness, to speak out, to advocate for social and economic equality, to combat the forces of various '-isms,' yet not at the expense of artful language or a loyalty to self—a duality of purpose that is consistent from generation to generation" (xxviii–xxix). While Jackson's comments are focused specifically on poets writing for adults, his assessment holds true for poets writing for young readers as well, who—as is evidenced by the works published this year—are very clearly working in that same rich tradition of resistance.

Our winner this year is Kwame Alexander's The Undefeated, a powerful poem—an ode in picture book form—illustrated by Kadir Nelson in his signature figurative-style oil paintings against white backgrounds. Winner of the 2020 Caldecott Medal and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, as well as a Newbery Honor, The Undefeated is striking not only narratively and visually, but also poetically. The poem makes use of anaphora, intertextuality, repetition, imagery, and lyricism, examining the African American experience throughout history and into the present moment. It is, as the book's dust jacket proclaims, "a love letter to America. To black America," creating a woven tapestry and celebration of Black history, resilience, and joy. This love letter, as both a poem and a picture book, aches to be read aloud–a plea which is not lost on Alexander, who includes a link to an audio version of the poem on the copyright page.

Across the book as a whole and within individual double-page spreads, Alexander's poetry and Nelson's images create a collage of the past and present. Many of Nelson's illustrations are literal collages of notable figures from Black history and culture, as when artists and writers such as Romare Bearden, Zora Neal Hurston, Phillis Wheatley, and Langston Hughes mingle across two pages. The figures are identified in The Undefeated's substantive paratextual material, which provides details about the people and events depicted in the book's pages. Alexander's poetry similarly pulls together the writings of Black figures, highlighting this intertextuality through the use of italics and capitalization. He utilizes words from Frantz Fanon made famous during the Civil Rights Movement by Malcom X as he writes that the poem is for "the ones who survived / America / by any means necessary" (emphasis original), accompanied by an image of an unnamed family. Langston Hughes's poem "Weary Blues" is juxtaposed with Nelson's illustration of a Black Union soldier during the Civil War, one of

The audacious ones

who carried the red, white, and Weary Blues

on the battlefield

to save an imperfect Union.

(emphasis original)

The linkage of past to present is powerfully accomplished in three separate double-page spreads that each contain the phrase, "This is for the unspeakable." Each spread contains an image evoking unspeakable violence: the victims of the transatlantic slave trade; the young girls Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, who were killed by white men who were members of the KKK in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and an impromptu memorial honoring victims of the persistent racist criminalization and dehumanization of young Black men and women, including Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin.

The repetition of the line "This is for the unspeakable" alongside images of brutality from the past and present powerfully conveys the point that racism and attitudes of white supremacy are still forces in the world today that need to be dealt with and eradicated. Alexander's triple iteration of the line combined with Nelson's jump from historical-looking images to contemporary ones deftly sends this message. Specifically, the first illustration in the set of three closely resembles the image of the British ship the Brookes that was published in 1788 by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade to show the horrors of the Middle Passage. Like that engraving, Nelson's image is primarily monochromatic, an appearance some readers may associate with the distant past. Similarly, in the second illustration, Nelson depicts framed photographs of Collins, Wesley, Robertson, and McNair in sepia tone. The glass covering the girls' faces is cracked, signaling their tragic loss. When the reader turns the page to the final spread accompanied by the line "This is for the unspeakable," they are met with a vibrant, full-color illustration that disrupts the pattern of the other two monochromatic/sepia ones. Color photographs of Bland, Brown, Rice, and Martin appear amidst objects of mourning and tribute, such as candles, flowers, stuffed animals, an American flag, and a balloon. Significantly, also in the assortment of objects surrounding the photographs are protest signs calling for change. Though they are partially obscured by the flowers, one clearly bears the word "Justice," another "Stop" and images of crossed-out guns, and another a pair of hands, echoing the "Hands up, don't shoot" chant used at Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police brutality. The juxtaposition of these images denies the inclination some readers may have to separate, in their minds, the violent acts of the past with those of the present. Alexander and Nelson express that "the unspeakable" happened hundreds of years ago, was still happening in 1963, and is still happening today. In this way, the book calls upon readers to take a stand against such injustice.

Importantly, Alexander and Nelson's picture book balances representations of Black trauma and Black joy. The title page of The Undefeated contains an image of herons in flight, birds that disappear from the illustrations until the spread following the image of victims of police brutality. From here, these birds reappear as the text celebrates Black athletes and creators like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Gwendolyn Brooks:

his is for the unbelievable.

The We Real Cool ones.

This is for the unbending.

The black as the night is beautiful ones.

(emphasis original)

The birds fly across a largely blank page to images of smiling Black children, "the undefeated." Alexander's stated goals for his writing mirror the forward motion of the birds, connecting the past to present and pain to joy: "I write about the things that matter to me. I'm a part of a community. I embrace that community. I want to move it forward" (qtd. in Aldama 31).

This work is powerful and important. As the illustrated infographic "Diversity in Children's Books 2018" by David Huyck and Sarah Park Dahlen and contributed to by Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner shows, only ten percent of children's books published in the United States in 2018 featured African and/or African American characters. And, as the infographic also shows via a crack in the mirror the Black child gazes into, not all of those representations are balanced or accurate. Vanessa Willoughby argues, for instance, that books centering Black protagonists frequently foreground "the brutalities of racism and oppression," omitting more positive experiences. She writes, "Books for young people that highlight the struggle for equality are important, but so are works that show joy, works that do not fetishize trauma, or view Blackness as an anthropological study. . . . Black joy is a radical act of defiance, a refusal to accept the narratives filtered through the white gaze." Jessica H. Lu and Catherine Knight Steele agree that "conscious acts and expressions of joy are vital forms of resistance in a society shaped by oppression, racism, and violence" (823–24). Literature is one opportunity for such acts of joyful resistance. While there is still much work to be done, books like The Undefeated contribute to the creation of a literary landscape where representations of Black joy and thriving abound.

The message of The Undefeated is echoed in the larger ways in which both Alexander and Nelson are actively working outside of their roles as authors and illustrators for young readers. Nelson's powerful illustrations regularly appear on the covers of The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, and, similarly, Alexander has shared his writing in other venues. The poem that became The Undefeated first appeared on a highly public, large-scale platform as part of a collaboration between Alexander and ESPN in 2016. This version of the poem, entitled "This One is For Us," was released as part of the launch of ESPN's The Undefeated, a website dedicated to content that explores the ways in which sports, culture, and race intertwine. In 2018, Alexander announced that he was partnering with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to create Versify, an imprint that "reflects Alexander's vision that accessible and powerful prose and poetry—in picture books, novels, and nonfiction—can celebrate the lives and reflect the possibilities of all children" ("Versify"). In its first year of existence, Versify published several notable works of poetry, including The Undefeated, Aimee Lucido's light, STEM-focused verse novel Emmy in the Key of Code, and Kip Wilson's powerful White Rose.

Though not one of our honor books, Wilson's historical fiction verse novel deserves attention for both its moving free verse and its participation in the project of honoring historical figures while implicitly advocating for young readers to critically consider their own relationship to resistance. White Rose moves between the earlier life of protagonist Sophie Scholl, a member of the titular German resistance movement, and the days leading up to her execution by the Nazis in 1943. In addition to highlighting the lives of those who participated in this lesser-known historical movement, because of its shifts back and forth through time, White Rose emphasizes Scholl's journey from compliance to resistance as she ages. In a poem entitled "Round and Round" that is set in 1934 but that is placed near the end of the book, a young Scholl shares her initial frustration with her parents' harsh objections to Hitler's stated goals for Germany:

adults

simply don't understand

Herr Hitler's

belief

in a country

we couldn't love more.

(320)

Readers come to understand that Sophie's resistance work in the White Rose was preceded by not just silent complicity but active alignment with Hitler's malevolent propaganda, reflecting the necessity of approaching such nationalistic speech critically. Just as the herons flying through The Undefeated link past to present, White Rose's closing poem calls upon a bird to connect its story to present-day readers. In "Soaring Skyward," the final poem in the Epilogue of the verse novel, a young Sophie spots a falcon while lounging near the Iller river with her younger brother Werner in 1932:

tipping its wings, reaching for the heavens.

Majestic bird!

I can only hope

to one day become

such an inspiration.

(341)

The image of a bird is similarly called upon in another notable book from this year, James E. Ransome's The Bell Rang. Its seven poems, one for each day of the week, draw upon the book's title to trace the life of an enslaved family that begins each day as "the bell rings." Ransome captures the uncertainty experienced by the family when one member runs for freedom, hoping that he is "Free like the birds. / Free like Moses. / No more bells." The book's final page and endpapers feature the ambivalently hopeful image of a bird in flight as the young protagonist begins another week in slavery.

Recovering history is likewise the theme of one of this year's honor books, Nikki Grimes's Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir. This time the focus is the personal history of one of the most well-known African American poets for young readers. Grimes's Künstlerroman traces her growth and development as a writer during the first sixteen years of her life. Ordinary Hazards marks a slight departure for Grimes, who usually writes for younger readers, producing picture books and middle-grade verse novels, such as One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance (2017) and Garvey's Choice (2016), both past winners of the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. In her memoir in verse, she explores the impacts of growing up with a mother suffering from mental illness and alcoholism, living in foster care for a short period of time, and experiencing sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her stepfather and other adults. Divided into four sections each spanning three to five years of her life ("Book One 1950–1955," "Book Two 1955–1960," "Book Three 1960–1963," and "Book Four 1963–1966"), Grimes intersperses the poems in her narrative with a series of poems entitled "Notebook." These "Notebook" poems provide imagined glimpses into a young Grimes's writing practice, as her mother threw out all of her notebooks from her earliest writing life.

In an early poem, "On Our Own," she recounts one of her experiences with abuse at the hands of a caretaker who would lock Grimes and her older sister, Carol, in a bedroom closet all day without food or water while "the occasional roach / skittered along [her] calf" (23). Though Carol tells their mother of "the horrors of that first day," their mother chastises her "to quit lying" (24) until she discovers the girls locked in the woman's closet herself one afternoon. Grimes notes in the first lines of the poem:

No one warned me

the world was full of

ordinary hazards

like closets with locks and keys.

(22)

Describing the first time she found catharsis in writing, Grimes revisits the memory of herself as a six-year-old girl in foster care. She writes that while she routinely experienced anxiety, one night it became too much: "There was no more room in my head to hold the anger / rising like steam, searing the edges of my brain, there was not even / a shelf where I could stack the questions crying out for answers" (59). It was this desire for an external space to help hold her thoughts and feelings that made her turn to her notebook. Grimes writes:

I leaped out of bed, switched on the light,

grabbed a piece of paper and a pen,

stabbed the page, and let my thoughts gush like a geyser,

shooting high into the moonless sky,

then falling down on the page I held captive

till every line was stained with my feelings and

the heat of them had a chance to cool, and

suddenly, I could breathe, breathe, breathe. . .

(59)

Her characterization of writing as a furious act continues–"a rage of red ink," she calls it (61)–yet alongside finding an outlet for her anger, she discovered, too, a sense of wonder. "[T]his writing thing / was some kind of magic trick," she writes (60), adding the following in the next poem,

The daily march of words

parading from my pen

kept me moving

forward.

(61)

Writing is positioned as a transformative and propulsive force in the young artist's turbulent life, a resilient defense against the ordinary hazards she faces. Grimes's expert use of enjambment mirrors that quality of transformation in many places, surprising the judges as their eyes moved down the page in passages like, "You cannot blossom / in this soil" (308, emphasis original) and "That place of light—it's not always easy / to get to, but it's there" (311, emphasis original). In both its form and content, Grimes's poetry illustrates the power of writing and its ability to help young people better navigate difficult circumstances.

Ordinary Hazards participates in the recent trend of prolific authors of youth literature capturing their stories of growth as writers through verse memoir, as in Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (2014) and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). As Richard Flynn writes about those two works, such verse memoirs tend to focus on the poets "understanding the power of words and realizing their own power as they inhabit and are inhabited by poetry allow[ing] them to exercise greater agency in a difficult world" (123). Two other notable verse memoirs released in 2019 do similar work: Margarita Engle's Soaring Earth and Laurie Halse Anderson's Shout. Opening in 1966 during Engle's high-school years, Soaring Earth picks up where her 2015 memoir Enchanted Air, which focused on her childhood, concludes. Engle chronicles her experience of navigating the complex moment of her young adulthood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Particularly resonant in our present moment is Engle's discussion of the violent realities of police response to peaceful protest, where she is "caught in the deluge of eye-scorching / riot squad / poison" (74), ultimately deciding, as recorded in a poem entitled "Defeated," to leave college due to the dangers it poses: "No more student life, erupting / in violence" (75). Yet, as the rest of her memoir illustrates, Engle is not defeated. Instead, she goes on a personal journey that leads her to agronomy, the study of literal earth, and, eventually, to poetry.

With a cover design and title that mirror her immensely popular YA novel Speak, which tells the story of a girl who is raped the summer before she begins high school, Shout, Anderson's memoir told in three parts, chronicles her childhood and adolescence, her own rape, and her experiences as a writer whose most well-known book deals with that very subject. Like Grimes, Anderson captures writing as a messy, violent, and, ultimately, life-giving process:

writing rage-poems by the sea

pen, hands, claws stained with ink

until the bottle runs dry

and then I write in blood, spit, and fire

lantern's light in the mirror

scattering the dark.

(291)

Throughout Shout, Anderson's poems are characterized by this raw "blood, spit, and fire" approach, offering a powerful companion to her 1999 novel. All three of these verse memoirs can be read as stories of the undefeated, of authors who navigated pain and trauma, and, in turn, used their experiences as the fuel for lantern-like stories that work to inspire young people.

Another of this year's honor books, Aida Salazar's debut The Moon Within, is another such lantern for young readers. This verse novel tells the story of eleven-year-old Celi Rivera's impending moon ceremony, which celebrates the arrival of her first menstrual cycle. Told in four parts corresponding with the lunar phases ("New Moon," "First Quarter Moon," "Full Moon," and "Last Quarter Moon"), The Moon Within explores history, culture, gender, and the body. Celi also performs bomba with her best friend Marco, who is gender-fluid and uses he/him/his pronouns. In addition to its emphasis on education about the body and the self, Salazar's poetry lends itself to interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches through its references to science and the natural world, herbal medicine and Western medicine, music, and cultural tradition, among others. Much like Alexander and Nelson's picture book, Salazar's verse novel includes rich paratextual material that provides historical and cultural context for the protagonist's moon ceremony and bomba performances, drawing on her "bicultural Puerto Rican/Mexican, and multiracial Indigenous, African, and European" identity (224).

Salazar's free verse is full of rich metaphors, and one of the most memorable, which recurs throughout the book, is that of a person's innermost self as a locket. In the opening poem, "My Locket," Celi states:

There is a locket in my heart

that holds all of the questions

that do cartwheels in my mind

and gurgle up to the top of my brain

like root beer fizz.

(3)

Celi has many of these questions, which become central to the book as she is forced to define what loyalty and courage mean to her. Her crush mocks Marco for his genderfluidity, for instance, and her mother strongly wants her to go through with the moon ceremony despite Celi's initial reservations, causing Celi to feel torn between attraction and friendship, independence and family. There is deep fear about protecting the secrecy of the tensions stirring in her symbolic locket, as Celi states when she realizes another girl has overheard her talking about her crush:

My head's in a whirlwind.

What if Aurora now also knows

what I hold tight in my locket

with all of my might?

(61)

Yet in the end, part of what Celi learns is that interconnectedness and openness are what make her strong. During the moon ceremony, to which she eventually agrees, Celi draws immense wisdom and courage from the family and friends her mother has invited to help take part in her rite of passage. "I am as open as the moon. / I look up to see Luna's moonbeams / circle all of the people that surround me: . . ." (220), she explains, listing all those there to support her. She continues the metaphor in the following poem: "They fill my locket / and I feel it overflow" (221). Salazar's use of this extended metaphor invites young readers to contemplate both the nature of their complex, interior selves and their relation to the outside world: their connections to other people, traditions, and phenomena.

Also of note is the way Salazar's book seeks to repair some of the damage done by colonialism in terms of negative attitudes toward menstruation and gender-expansiveness. In an Author's Note, Salazar writes, "The modern-day Western ideas so prevalent in the United States today, which say that our bodies and our menstruations are to be feared or hated, are but one small piece of the human experience throughout history. . . . Many of the oral histories, passed down by indigenous women, tell us that our moon cycle is something beautiful and worth celebrating and honoring" (223). She continues, "Similarly, it was precolonial indigenous ideas that inspired me to write a genderfluid character like Marco. . . . Mesoamericans had a broader understanding of gender and some evidence shows that xochihuah (sho-chee-wah) were more often seen through a sacred lens, with respect" (224, emphasis original). In addition to Celi's celebratory moon ceremony, Salazar writes of an equally reverent ceremony that honors Marco's identity. In the scene where it takes place, his mother tells him, "Wherever you decide to thrive / remember that you are perfection in the crossroads" (214–15, emphasis original). As is stated in the writings of Melissa J. Gillis and Andrew T. Jacobs (12, 22–25) and many other places, numerous cultures around the globe have embraced conceptions of gender that differ from the binary common to Western discourse, and it is exciting to see a verse novel for young readers that demonstrates that these beliefs are undefeated by acknowledging precolonial history, condemning the wrongs of colonialism, and providing a dynamic representation of a gender-expansive character.

Several other notable books for readers of various ages attended to this project of rediscovering or revisiting histories, honoring the resilience and resistance of those people often left out of dominant narratives of the United States. Kevin Noble Maillard and Juana Martinez-Neal's picture book Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, with its endpapers that list the names of hundreds of Indigenous tribes and nations, traces the titular food's connection to the present day as it celebrates the contemporary lived experiences of Native peoples: "We are still here / . . . We strengthen each other / To learn, change, and survive." Evan Turk's beautifully illustrated You Are Home: An Ode to the National Parks alters its refrain of "you are home" to "you are still home" when it addresses Indigenous children whose families "lived on these lands before / the stars and stripes / took them as their own." In Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems, Margarita Engle compiles a verse history of the United States that centers Latinx and Indigenous voices. The poems are told from the perspective of fictional and fictionalized historical speakers, from the Taíno peoples who lived on Borikén (current-day Puerto Rico) to contemporary Latinx young people. The speaker of the book's final poem, entitled "Enough," is a fictional, young Puerto Rican girl. Writing about her admiration of Emma Gonzalez, an activist and survivor of the Parkland school shooting, she proclaims, "We are the hopeful future, / triumphing over this country's / troubled past" (196).

This year's final honor book, Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience, is a collection of sixty-four contemporary poems edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond that includes works written by both poets known for their writing for young readers such as Elizabeth Acevedo, Gary Soto, and Samira Ahmed, and poets who write primarily for adults such as Ilya Kaminsky, Ada Limón, and Ocean Vuong. This collection forefronts the ways in which the line between poetry for young readers and poetry for adults is and has always been blurred. As the editors note, the collection is consciously assembled with an aim of reframing dominant narratives about immigration and inspiring young readers to use their own voices. They write, "Ink Knows No Borders celebrates the lives of immigrants, refugees, exiles, and their families. . . . Enter the place of these poems, bordered only by the porousness of paper, and you'll find the world's people striving and thriving on American soil" (xiii), and conclude, "writing poetry will help you realize that you are stronger than you thought you were and that within your tenderness is your fortitude" (xiv).

The anthology covers many different aspects of what it means to leave one's country, reminding readers that there is not one monolithic immigrant or refugee experience, but countless ones. Part of the collection's strength lies in its inclusion of many different points of view and authors whose work contains ambivalence and complication. For example, in her epistolary poem "Dear America," Sholeh Wolpé writes: "I loved you more than bubble gum, / more than the imported bananas / street vendors sold for a fortune," continuing, "And when I arrived at you, you punched / yourself into me like a laugh" (10–11). The poems take up subjects like the anxiety of departure, the discrimination and microaggressions faced upon arrival in the U.S., the shifts in family dynamics, and the impact all these things have on the young people who go through them. For instance, Samira Ahmed writes, "You realize, too young, that racists fail geography but that their / epithets and perverted patriotism can still shatter moments of / your childhood" (21). Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes of a teacher "butcher[ing]" her last name (25), Leila Chatti of struggling to find a doll that looked like her "in any pink aisle" (36), Carlos Andrés Gómez of being turned away from a restaurant for allegedly not "meet[ing] dress / code" even though his father is "wearing a double-breasted suit" (65). In her poem "A New National Anthem," Ada Limón analyzes "The Star-Spangled Banner" as a microcosm of the United States itself, pointing out that the complete song contains a reference to slavery. She states:

Perhaps

the truth is every song of this country

has an unsung third stanza, something brutal

snaking underneath us as we blindly sing

the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands

hoping our team wins.

(69)

Through revelation of some of the pain and disillusionment the speakers in these poems have experienced in the United States, these poets call on the country to face its history of racism and live up to its stated ideals of being a place that welcomes all people.

In a similar vein, the judges had profound admiration for Jasmine Warga's Other Words for Home, Margarita Engle and Rafael López's Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln, and Mariko Nagai's Under the Broken Sky, books that delve into the experiences of young immigrants and refugees. Other Words for Home focuses on Jude, a young girl who is forced to leave Syria with her mother when conflict erupts there. While Jude enjoys some aspects of life in the United States, such as participating in her school's musical, she also faces racism after a bombing is carried out by extremists in a distant U.S. city. Her friend Layla warns, "Be careful, Jude" and " . . . tells me that now I will learn what it means to be a / Muslim / in America" (261, emphasis original). Not long after this exchange, Layla's family's restaurant is vandalized, "T e r r o r i s t s. // The red paint glistens in the winter sunlight like jewels, / like blood" (274), and Jude is stunned, "My vision blurs with tears. / For the first time since I've been in America, / I wish I didn't read English" (275). Throughout its pages, Warga's novel, which was named a Newbery Honor Book, does not shy away from Jude's feelings of homesickness, anger, and loneliness, though it is ultimately hopeful in tone.

While Other Words for Home takes place in the present day, Dancing Hands and Under the Broken Sky are historical in scope. Dancing Hands tells the story of how Teresa Carreño, who fled violence in Venezuela with her family as a child, performed a recital for Abraham Lincoln in 1863, shortly after the death of his son. López's vibrant illustrations and Engle's lively, musical verse, which captures Carreño's ability to use the keys of her piano as a vehicle to share "dark and light / moments / of hope," make this picture book a memorable read. Under the Broken Sky centers on Natsu, a young Japanese girl living in Manchuria whose family is torn apart at the end—and in the aftermath—of World War II. Nagai's stunning free verse tells of the struggles Natsu and her sister endure as they seek safety. Together, these books call for greater awareness of and sensitivity toward people who leave their homes to seek better circumstances. As Nagai writes in her Afterword, "Next time you see refugees on the television, put yourself in their shoes: they have left everything they knew and loved to reach a place of safety. Nobody chooses to be a refugee" (289).

Exploring the purpose and power of poetry, Jackson explains, "What we seek in poetry is ourselves beyond the inarticulateness, silence, and immeasurable mystery that define human existence" (xxiv). He goes on to say that "As a child, I thought an answer, a meaning, was just around the corner. Poetry allowed me, as a teenager, to participate in the making of that meaning" (xxx–xxxi). These remarks show that adult poets and thinkers reach back to their earliest experiences reading and writing poetry as young people to help them understand poetry as adults. Jackson's comments also emphasize the ways that the best poetry asks readers to engage through interpretation and creation. This year's winner and honor books call upon young readers as participants and as future poets. The Undefeated concludes its final page with the lines, "This is for you. / And you. / And you," directing the address from historical figures and events to the contemporary child reader. The Moon Within engages young readers by including a "My Moon Within" section in its final pages that encourages tracking "the cycles of your body and heart with the cycle of the moon." Grimes concludes her Author's Note with the passage, "I hope my story helps you to live more fully into your own" (318), and, in her Afterword to Ink Knows No Borders, Emtithal Mahmoud writes, "The poets collected here have brought their voices forward. The rest is up to you" (143).

In a recent interview, the Poetry Foundation's current Young People's Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye notes, "I think poetry itself has a kind soul. Poetry wants to cherish and hold some particular moments and images of human life. Poetry wants to be a vessel of preservation or attention—to make a connection we might not have made otherwise" (qtd. in Corrigan 184). She continues, "I hope that something I've written might encourage a reader to imagine another person differently or have a slightly changed sense of the world. Empathy—crucial for resolving every single thing" (185). Nye's concept of the purpose of poetry as something to hold space for significant moments and images of humanity is visible in Alexander, Grimes, Salazar, and Vecchione and Raymond's works for young readers. The Undefeated centers African American heroes and contemporary Black children, Ordinary Hazards explores the artistic development of a prolific poet of color, The Moon Within emphasizes coming-of-age rituals for young Xicana and Latina girls and gender-expansive young people, and Ink Knows No Borders holds space for immigrants and refugees. Each of the works chosen by the judges as this year's winner and honor books represents some of the ways that poets for young readers are prioritizing empathy in their work and highlighting the historical and contemporary lives of Black and Indigenous individuals as well as other people of color. In another notable picture book we examined, How to Read a Book, Kwame Alexander urges readers to take their time as they read:

Don't rush through:

your eyes need

time to taste.

Your soul needs

room to bloom.

We encourage readers of the books we have discussed here to do the same; there is much power packed within their pages for readers of all ages.

Note

The judges and The Lion and the Unicorn editorial staff would like to thank Sofia St. John, Ashley Nguyen, Joseph T. Thomas Jr., and The National Center for the Study of Children's Literature at San Diego State University for their help administrating this year's award.

References

Aldama, Frederick Luis. "Interventions: An Interview with Kwame Alexander." American Book Review, vol. 40, no. 6, 2019, pp. 31–32.

Alexander, Kwame. How to Read a Book. Illustrated by Melissa Sweet, Harper, 2019.

———. The Undefeated. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson, Versify, 2019.

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Shout. Viking, 2019.

Corrigan, Paul T. "Kindness, Politics, and Religion: An Interview with Naiomi Shihab Nye." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 44, no. 2, 2019, pp. 173–88.

Engle, Margarita. Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreno Played the Piano for President Lincoln. Illustrated by Rafael López, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019.

———. Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems. Godwin Books, 2019.

———. Soaring Earth. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019.

Flynn, Richard. "Why Genre Matters: A Case for the Importance of Aesthetics in the Verse Memoirs of Marilyn Nelson and Jacqueline Woodson." The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 42, no. 2, 2018, pp. 109–28.

Gillis, Melissa J., and Andrew T. Jacobs. Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies. Oxford UP, 2017.

Grimes, Nikki. Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir. Wordsong, 2019.

Huyck, David, and Sarah Park Dahlen. Diversity in Children's Books 2018. 19 June 2019. sarahpark.com, created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children's Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp, https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/.

Jackson, Major. "Introduction." The Best American Poetry 2019, edited by David Lehman, Scribner Poetry, 2019, pp. xxi–xxxiii.

Lu, Jessica H., and Catherine Knight Steele. "'Joy is Resistance': Cross-Platform Resilience and (Re)invention of Black Oral Culture Online." Information, Communication & Society, vol. 22, no. 6, 2019, pp. 823–37.

Lucido, Aimee. Emmy in the Key of Code. Versify, 2019.

Maillard, Kevin Noble. Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story. Illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal, Roaring Brook P, 2019.

Nagai, Mariko. Under the Broken Sky. Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Ransome, James E. The Bell Rang. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019.

Salazar, Aida. The Moon Within. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2019.

Turk, Evan. You Are Home: An Ode to the National Parks. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019.

Vecchione, Patrice, and Alyssa Raymond. Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience. Triangle Square, 2019.

"Versify." Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020, https://www.hmhbooks.com/imprints/versify.

Warga, Jasmine. Other Words for Home. HarperCollins, 2019.

Wilson, Kip. White Rose. Versify, 2019.

Willoughby, Vanessa. "Representation Matters: Black Joy is an Act of Resistance." School Library Journal, 18 June 2020, https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=representation-matters-black-joy-act-resistance-publishing-disparities.