Showing results by narrator "Lisa Renee Pitts" in All Categories

Before she was 30 years old, Vernice "FlyGirl" Armour had become a decorated naval aviator, Camp Pendleton's 2001 Female Athlete of the Year and Strongest Warrior winner, the first female African-American on Nashville's motorcycle police squad, and a member of the San Diego Sunfire professional women's football team. She's a force to be reckoned with, and she believes that women and men from all walks of life have the potential to achieve the highest levels of success with the right flight plan.

Not long ago, no one could even imagine a 28-year-old Latina upstart running for Congress representing Queens and the Bronx: It required facing the city’s nearly all-white, all-male political machine. But since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez graced the scene in all her bartending, tweet-talking, mold-breaking glory, the face of politics in the 21st century has changed. Today, Ocasio-Cortez is a foremost advocate for progress, whipping up support among her colleagues and gaining the secret admiration of her foes.

Identical twins Cassie and Caitlyn Waters may be able to see into the future, but with a teacher who suspects they have powers waiting to catch them midvision and the grandmother they just met in town to teach them how to better control what they foresee, the last thing they need is more trouble. Luckily, a class-wide game of Truth or Dare has begun and the twins are having fun competing. When a vision shows the girls' friend getting hurt, Cassie and Caitlyn know that they're the only ones who can prevent it.

Self-educated and brown skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for "colored music" and dreams of life as a big-city radio star. These teenage girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes on a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham, and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the Deep South of the 1950s.

Black Lives Matter at School succinctly generalizes lessons from successful challenges to institutional racism that have been won through the Black Lives Matter at School movement. This book will inspire many more educators and activists to join the Black Lives Matter at School movement at a moment when this antiracist work in our schools could not be more urgent and critical to education justice. The book includes essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from educators, students, and parents around the country who have been building Black Lives Matter at School on the ground.

Dr. Janet Watson knows firsthand the horrifying cost of a divided nation. While treating broken soldiers on the battlefields of the New Civil War, a sniper’s bullet shattered her arm and ended her career. Honorably discharged and struggling with the semi-functional mechanical arm that replaced the limb she lost, she returns to the nation’s capital. Homeless and jobless, Watson is uncertain of the future when she meets another black and queer woman, Sara Holmes, a mysterious yet playfully challenging covert agent who offers the doctor a place to stay.

Identical twins Cassie and Caitlyn Waters have adjusted to small-town life, but they’re still not used to seeing visions of the future. When a troubling and mysterious package arrives with a connection to the father they’ve never known and the grandmother they never knew they had, the twins distract themselves by planning a birthday bash with their new friends. But when the visions of the upcoming party show it will be more of a catastrophe than a celebration, the girls have to work together to keep it fiasco-free.

Eighteen-year-olds Rose and Rosebud have never met, but they share a birth year, a name, and a bloody pair of sneakers. Rose's quest to atone for the accident that kills Rosebud, a young woman so much like herself but for the color of her skin, unfolds alongside Rosebud's battle to survive the devastating flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and to find help for her unstable mother.

Natalie is different from the other kids in Dreenie's fifth-grade class. She comes to school in a wheelchair. She always wears a knitted hat. And she's allowed to bring her puppy to class. The kids in the class call Natalie "Bluish" because her skin is tinted blue from chemotherapy.

In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anti-capitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community.

Princess Sofia of Drachenburg is sick of being used for her older sister's political gains. At 12 years old, she's already been a hostage to invading dragons and promised to marry a wicked fairy. Now she's being sent to far-off Villene to play the part of a charming, diplomatic princess. Her only comfort lies in writing letters to her pen pal and best friend - Jasper, a young dragon she's never even met. But when an accident leads to her exile from Villene, Sofia is free to wander as she pleases for the first time in her life.

The first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was no one like Effa Manley in the sports world of the 1930s and 1940s. She was a sophisticated woman who owned a baseball team. She never shrank from going head to head with men, who dominated the ranks of sports executives. That her life story remained unchronicled for so long can only be attributed to one thing: her team, the Newark Eagles, belonged to the Negro Leagues. Author James Overmyer brings to light new details regarding Effa Manley's fascinating story.

Telling her son's story against the backdrop of a society plagued by systemic racism, economic inequality, and mass incarceration, Golden offers a form of witness and testimony in a time of crisis for Black Americans. Explore Black boys' difficult road to adulthood in the US and learn why single Black mothers are often wrongly blamed for their sons' actions. Gain invaluable advice and knowledge from trustworthy sources. In Saving Our Sons, Golden documents her conversations with psychologists, writers, and young Black males themselves.

Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard educated, African-American professor of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro-football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even more distressing, however, is that her beloved son has just become engaged to a gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.

Sarah E. Goode was one of the first African American women to get a United States patent. Working in her husband's furniture store, she recognized the need for a multi-use bed, and through hard work, ingenuity, and determination, invented her unique cupboard bed. She built more than a piece of furniture. She built a life far away from slavery - a life where her sweet dreams could come true.

Navigating the world of dating can be like wandering an enchanted forest, full of creatures with peculiar habits and baffling behavior. In Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur, Francesca Lia Block provides a guide to this often-treacherous terrain, classifying all those mystifying men and women into various types of mythical forest fauna - Fauns and Werewolves, Mermaids and Banshees. After answering questions to determine your own type, you can learn to identify others.

Overground Railroad chronicles the history of the Green Book, which was published from 1936 to 1966. For years, it was dangerous for African Americans to travel in the United States. Because of segregation, Black travelers couldn't eat, sleep, or even get gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, stores, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for Black travelers. It took courage to be listed in it, and the stories from those who took a stand against racial segregation are recorded and celebrated.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was "given, as a slave" to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green's library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai'i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility.

When the storms of life blow in unexpectedly, wreaking havoc and leaving a trail of destruction, why does one person fall apart while another perseveres and even finds a deeper sense of purpose afterward? In Beyond the Storm, Debra Morton reveals why, providing the techniques and strategies that helped her and many others not only survive but also thrive, even in the most painful of circumstances.

In this fourth and final book, tween twins Cassie and Caitlyn Waters are excited to be returning to their hometown, San Antonio, on a class trip. But as they reach their destination, trouble finds them as quickly as a vision, and one of their friends soon disappears. Using their Sight and their street smarts to try to save the day, the twins also begin to see things they didn’t expect - a man in captivity who looks exactly like their father’s pictures. Could he really be alive? And can they use the clues they see to save him before it’s too late?