Central Kansas Library System

...this writing thing was some kind of magic trick I didn't yet understand... Nikki Grimes discovered the power of writing at the tender age of six, when, along in her room, she poured her fears, anger, and tears onto a piece of paper - and felt sweet relief. Words and faith were her most enduring companions as life flung her headlong from one harrowing experience to the next through her childhood and teenage years. Words, spilled into notebook after...

"Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood - but secretly, she pours her dreams and frustrations onto the pages of her notebook like prayers. When she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, Xiomara doesn't know how she could ever attend without her religious mami finding out. But even so, in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent."--taken from back cover. Xiomara...

"In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety, or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language. And they were barely out of their teens when their...

A man and a woman sustain a life-long passionate relationship even though they have been together only three times. At a literary festival in Toronto, Linda Fallon encounters the man who was once at the center of her life: Thomas Janes, the famous poet. Since last seeing him, she has married, given birth, and been widowed. Thomas's appearance rocks Linda, raises questions she had long abandoned, and inspires new dreams.

Robert Frost is considered the quintessential New England poet, though he was born in California. Left penniless by the death of her free-spending husband, Robbie's mother had to move her family east, where they relied on the charity of relatives. Young Robert would grow to love the landscape and make it a defining feature of his poetry. Though he constantly struggled to provide for his family, Frost eked out a living as a farmer, teacher, and poet,...

A biography of an Italian peasant who immigrated to America in the early twentieth century and endured poverty and the difficult life of an unskilled laborer, determined to become a published poet.