What do you do when the world shuts down?
Follow four friends as they navigate the pandemic, discover the power of community, and figure out exactly what social justice—and true friendship—really means.
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When the World Turned Upside Down
“As clear-eyed as it is engaging, as timely as it is timeless. I fell in love with every single student in this book. And days after reading it, each of them remains with me.”—Jacqueline Woodson, MacArthur Fellow and 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature
Nobody expected a tiny little virus to change the whole world in such a big way, especially not Shayla, Liam, Ai, and Ben. But when school closes to keep everyone safe, their lives turn upside down. It is one thing to learn that the outside world isn’t safe, but why does it seem that the virus is causing trouble inside their homes too?
How to Be a Writer
Writing will not always be easy or fun or predictable, but if you keep going, you will discover more about who you are and what you have to offer to the world.
On a television show I was recently watching, there was a curvy girl trying out for a ballet summer program. She got cut almost immediately. Her ballet teacher gave her a wig and told her to go audition again under another name. She quickly got cut again. Her ballet teacher sent her in again under…
As human beings, we do a lot of damage to ourselves. Sometimes the most heinous damage may seem the most benign. It is impossible to measure the toll of those voices—those internal voices that we have running through our minds on continuous loop—the voices that say we aren’t good enough, funny enough, or stylish enough;…
In the subways of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) advertising is ubiquitous. Paid advertising lines the walls of subway cars. Ads hang overhead and lurk around at eye level. Entrepreneurs hijack the paid advertising by attaching their own flyers and stickers to the glossy surface of the “legitimate” ads. Up until last year, the…