When 12-year-old Jerome is killed by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real one, Jerome becomes a ghost. Stuck on earth and watching his family grieve, Jerome wonders why he remains there. He begins to notice other ghost boys and as their stories are revealed, he learns they have something in common and remain behind on earth for a reason. But what can the dead do to bring about change? Combining fiction and real events, the book explores themes of racism, prejudice and discrimination. As it jumps between past and present, Ghost Boys spans generations of injustice, inspiring discussions of social justice and the fight for equality.

A heartbreaking and powerful story about a black boy killed by a white police officer, drawing connections with real-life history, from award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes.

ALIVE

Twelve-year-old Jerome doesn't get into trouble. He goes to school. He does his homework. He takes care of his little sister.

Then Jerome is shot by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real threat.

DEAD

As a ghost, watching his family trying to cope with his death, Jerome begins to notice other ghost boys.

Each boy has a story and they all have something in common...

Bit by bit, Jerome begins to understand what really happened - not just to him, but to all of the ghost boys.

A poignant and gripping story about how children and families face the complexities of race in today's world.

A powerful coming-of-age story about two brothers - one who presents as white, the other as Black - and the ways they are forced to navigate a world that doesn't treat them equally.

Donte wishes he were invisible. As one of the few black boys at his school, he feels as if he is constantly swimming in whiteness. Most of the students don't look like him. They don't like him either. Dubbed the 'Black Brother', Donte's teachers and classmates make it clear they wish he were more like his lighter skinned brother, Trey.

When an incident with a white student leads to Donte's arrest and suspension, he's sure the only way to get even is to beat the student at the school's most valued game: fencing.

With the help of a former Olympic fencer, Donte embarks on a journey to carve out a spot on the school's fencing team and to find a way to make people at school see past the colour of his skin to who he really is.

From NYT bestselling author Jewell Parker Rhodes, another poignant and gripping story about how children and families face the complexities of race and racism in today's world.

"A compelling page-turner that will keep readers hoping against hope that everything will somehow, magically, turn out for the best." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution With a new Afterword from the author reflecting on the 100th anniversary of one of the most heinous tragedies in American history-the 1921 burning of Greenwood, an affluent black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as the "Negro Wall Street"-Jewell Parker Rhodes' powerful and unforgettable novel of racism, vigilantism, and injustice, weaves history, mysticism, and murder into a harrowing tale of dreams and violence gone awry. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. A white woman and a black man are alone in an elevator. Suddenly, the woman screams, the man flees, and the chase to capture and lynch him begins. When Joe Samuels, a young Black man with dreams of becoming the next Houdini, is accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty mob. Meanwhile, Mary Keane, the white, motherless daughter of a farmer who wants to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, must find the courage to help exonerate the man she accused with her panicked cry. Magic City evokes one of the darkest chapters of twentieth century, Jim Crow America, painting an intimate portrait of the heroic but doomed stand that pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the prosperous town they had built.

When her fifth-grade teacher hints that a series of lessons about home and community will culminate with one big answer about two tall towers once visible outside their classroom window, Deja can't help but feel confused. She sets off on a journey of discovery, with new friends Ben and Sabeen by her side. But just as she gets closer to answering big questions about who she is, what America means, and how communities can grow (and heal), she uncovers new questions, too. Like, why does Pop get so angry when she brings up anything about the towers?

Award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes tells a powerful story about young people who weren't alive to witness this defining moment in history, but begin to realize how much it colors their every day.

t's Maddy's turn to have a bayou summer. At first she misses life back home in the city, but soon she grows to love everything about her new surroundings -- the glimmering fireflies, the glorious landscape, and something else, deep within the water, that only Maddy sees. Could it be a mermaid? As her grandmother shares wisdom about sayings and signs, Maddy realizes she may be only the sibling to carry on her family's magical legacy. And when a disastrous oil leak threatens the bayou, she knows she may also be the only one who can help. Does she have what it takes to be a hero? A coming-of-age tale rich with folk magic, set in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Bayou Magic celebrates hope, friendship, and family, and captures the wonder of life in the Deep South.

Abandoned by her peers because of her ability to see spirits, Lanesha longs for connection despite the strong love of her adopted grandmother, Mama Ya-Ya. As hurricane Katrina approaches and her neighbours flee, Lanesha must stay and brace for a storm of epic proportions. As the levees break, Lanches must find a way to survive the floods on her own...

Ten-year-old Sugar lives on the River Road sugar plantation along the banks of the Mississippi. Slavery is over, but laboring in the fields all day doesn't make her feel very free. Thankfully, Sugar has a knack for finding her own fun, especially when she joins forces with forbidden friend Billy, the white plantation owner's son.
Sugar has always yearned to learn more about the world, and she sees her chance when Chinese workers are brought in to help harvest the cane. The older River Road folks feel threatened, but Sugar is fascinated. As she befriends young Beau and elder Master Liu, they introduce her to the traditions of their culture, and she, in turn, shares the ways of plantation life. Sugar soon realizes that she must be the one to bridge the cultural gap and bring the community together. Here is a story of unlikely friendships and how they can change our lives forever.
From Jewell Parker Rhodes, the author of "Ninth Ward "(a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a Today show Al's Book Club for Kids pick), here's another tale of a strong, spirited young girl who rises beyond her circumstances and inspires others to work toward a brighter future.

'Addy is a heroine any reader might aspire to be, a teenager who learns to trust her own voice and instincts, who realizes that fire can live within someone, too' - New York Times WINNER OF THE GREEN EARTH BOOK AWARD From award-winning and bestselling author Jewell Parker Rhodes comes a powerful coming-of-age survival tale set during a devastating wild fire. Addy is haunted by the tragic fire that killed her parents, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother. Now, years later, Addy's grandmother has enrolled her in a summer wilderness programme. There, Addy joins five other Black city kids - each with their own troubles - to spend a summer out west. Deep in the forest, the kids learn new (and to them) strange skills: camping, hiking, rock climbing and how to start and safely put out campfires. Most important, they learn to depend upon each other for companionship and survival. But then comes a furious forest fire ... From award-winning and bestselling author Jewell Parker Rhodes comes a powerful survival tale exploring issues of race, class, and climate change. Cadmus Children's Fiction Award winner for the 2022 Green Earth Book Award

Donte wishes he were invisible. As one of the few black boys at Middlefield Prep, he feels as if he is constantly swimming in whiteness. Most of the students don't look like him. They don't like him either. Dubbed the "Black Brother," Donte's teachers and classmates make it clear they wish he were more like his lighter skinned brother, Trey. Quiet, obedient. When an incident with "King" Alan leads to Donte's arrest and suspension, he knows the only way to get even is to beat the king of the school at his own game: fencing. With the help of a former Olympic fencer, Donte embarks on a journey to carve out a spot on Middlefield Prep's fencing team and maybe learn something about himself along the way.

If only Maddy can see the mermaid, can it be real? It's Maddy's turn to have a bayou summer. At first she misses life back home in the city, but soon she grows to love everything about her new surroundings -- the glimmering fireflies, the glorious landscape, and something else, deep within the water, that only Maddy sees. Could it be a mermaid? As her grandmother shares wisdom about sayings and signs, Maddy realizes she may be the only sibling to carry on her family's magical legacy. And when a disastrous oil leak threatens the bayou, she knows she may also be the only one who can help. Does she have what it takes to be a hero? A coming-of-age tale rich with folk magic, set in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Bayou Magic celebrates hope, friendship, and family, and captures the wonder of life in the Deep South.

Bestselling and award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes reimagines the classic novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson in this thrilling adventure set in modern-day Manhattan, in which three children must navigate the city's hidden history, dodge a threatening crew of skater kids, and decide who they can really trust in order to hunt down a long-buried treasure. Three kids. One dog. And the island of Manhattan, laid out in an old treasure map. Zane is itching for an adventure that will take him away from his family's boarding house in Rockaway, Queens. So when he is entrusted with a real treasure map, leading to a spot somewhere in Manhattan, Zane wastes no time in riding the ferry over to the city to start the search with his friends Kiko and Jack and his dog, Hip-Hop. Through strange coincidence, they meet a man who is eager to help them find the treasure: John, a sailor who knows all about the buried history of Black New Yorkers of centuries past--and the gold that is hidden somewhere in those stories. As a vicious rival skateboard crew follows them around the city, Zane and his friends begin to wonder who they can really trust. And soon it becomes clear that treasure hunting is a dangerous business... Jewell Parker Rhodes has written a version of Treasure Island like none you've never seen--one that takes the reader through little-known Black history, and under the city of Manhattan itself.

In "Season "(formerly titled "Voodoo" "Season"), Jewell Parker Rhodes revisits the sensual, magical landscape of her highly acclaimed debut novel, "Voodoo Dreams."
Marie Levant, raised in the North by foster parents, begins her medical residency in New Orlean's Charity Hospital. Plagued by deja vu and haunted by increasingly violent dreams, Marie tries to make a life in a city that seems both foreign and familiar.
Without warning her world falls apart, for it is voodoo season: the season of heat, humidity, the West Nile virus, of unexplained deaths of young adults all with a mysterious symbol marked in red clay on their foreheads. It is the season of babies cut from their dead mother's wombs.
It is the season when the Guede, the death gods, haunt Levant--whispering tales, sending memories and dreams of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth century "voodooienne," who walked on water and blended African "loas "with their Catholic saints, whispering tales of a second Marie, who murdered her mother and brought evil to the faith, whispering tales of a third Marie who died in a pool of blood, after abandoning her child to an orphanage. Marie Levant, the fourth Marie, must reclaim her heritage, reclaim the power of voodoo drums transformed to a jazz lament, reclaim her spiritual, womanist power. A contemporary epic and mythic tale, Marie learns "women hand down sight through generations, mother to daughter." She learns that love and passion can be intertwined, marriage and a profession can mix, and that a woman's love can redeem a world. She learns that there is no greater power than a mother's fierce passion and that of a woman secure in her self identity, secure in ancestral heritage as a black woman and a voodoo queen.

In the second part of the New Orleans trilogy that began with "Voodoo Season," Rhodes takes on an ancient African vampire in today's Big Easy, where thrilling chills await. Now in paperback.
When Marie Levant, the great-great granddaughter of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, sleeps, she dreams of rising waters. She knows better than anyone about New Orleans' brutal past, its legacy of slavery, poverty, racism, and sexism. As a doctor at Charity Hospital's ER, she treats its current victims. But she cannot cure her own terrifying dreams. When a jazzman, a wharf worker, and a prostitute all turn up murdered, their blood drained, Marie sees their ghosts and embarks on an adventure to uncover their dark connection. Meanwhile, in her dreams, the waters around New Orleans are rising and the yellow moon warns of an ancient evil, an African vampire called wazimamoto, intent on destroying Marie and all the Laveau descendants. Summoning her ancestral powers, Marie fights to protect her daughter, lover, and herself from the wazimamoto's seductive assault on both body and spirit. Echoing with the heartache and triumph of the African- American experience and the horrors of racial oppression, Yellow Moon gives readers an unforgettable heroine in the sexy, vulnerable, and mysterious Marie Levant, while it powerfully evokes a city on the brink of catastrophe.

Award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Jewell Parker Rhodes is a master of her craft, under-standing how both real and imagined stories can serve as a pathway to enlightenment. Porch Stories is Rhodes's tribute to her beloved grandmother, a real account of the love she received and the lessons she learned. Jewell Parker Rhodes was left in the care of her father and his mother when her own mother abandoned the family. Grandmother Ernestine's house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was home to four other grandchildren as well. And while its crumbling bricks, lack of air-conditioning, and neighborhood rodents meant that life was anything but easy, the family house was filled with love. Everyone on their street knew and loved Grandmother Ernestine; men would tip their hats and children would rush up for a hug any time she was outside. No one loved Grandmother Ernestine more than Jewell, who would pass up a movie with her cousins to sit outside on Ernestine's front stoop and listen to her stories and her words of comfort. Jewell would later move out West to live with her mother and father as they reattempted marriage. But that was a short-lived experience. Before long, she was back in the loving arms of her grandmother, whose wisdom and warmth gave all of her children the tools to overcome the ordinary and extraordinary challenges life brings. Porch Stories, described by Rhodes as "an intergenerational love song," is a loving tribute that is at once candid, courageous, and reverent -- a literary portrait of family love that readers from all walks of life can see in themselves.

A Bird by Bird for the African-American market--A top-notch writer's guide filled with practical guidance, essays, and journal exercises for the African-American writer including advice from E.Lynn Harris, Charles Johnson, and Yolanda Joe.

In her introduction, Jewell Parker Rhodes writes: "Never (in four years of college or five years of graduate school) was I assigned an exercise or given a story example that included a person of color...While the educational system and the publishing world have become progressively more welcoming of African-American authors, there is still little attention to educating, supporting, and sustaining the writing process of African-American authors. Free Within Ourselves is a solid first step--it is the book I wished I had when I started out as a writer. It is meant to be a song of encouragement for African-American artisits and visionaries. Free Within Ourselves is a step-by-step introduction to fictional technique, exploring story ideas, and charting one's progress, as well as a resource guide for publishing fiction."

For the legions of people who have a novel stuck in their word processors, help is finally on the way! Free Within Ourselves is an excellent guide to all the elements necessary to crafting fiction: character development, point of view, plot, atmosphere, dialogue, diction, sentence variety, and revision. Writing techniques are taught using exercises, journaling, story examples, and analyses of famous writing fragments, as well as several complete stories (including those of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Dandicat, among others). The book is further enhanced by inspirational advice from successful contemporary black writers (such as Bebe Moore Campbell, Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates, John Edgar Wideman, and others), a bibliography, and a guide to workshops, journals, magazines, contests, and fellowships supportive of black arts.

New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century: a potent mix of whites, Creoles, free blacks, and African slaves, a city pulsing with crowds, commerce, and an undercurrent of secret power. The source of this power is the voodoo religion, and its queen is Marie Laveau, the notorious voodooienne, worshipped and feared by blacks and whites alike.

WINNER OF THE 2003 PEN OAKLAND JOSEPHINE MILES AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING AND THE BLACK CAUCUS OF THE ALA LITERARY AWARD

Frederick Douglass, the great African-American abolitionist, was a man who cherished freedom in life and in love. In this ambitious work of historical fiction, Douglass' passions come vividly to life in the form of two women: Anna Murray Douglass and Ottilie Assing.

Douglass' Women is an imaginative rendering of these two women -- one black, the other white -- in Douglass' life. Anna, his wife, was a free woman of color who helped Douglass escape as a slave. She bore Douglass five children and provided him with a secure, loving home while he traveled the world with his message. Along the way, Douglass satisfied his intellectual needs in the company of Ottilie Assing, a white woman of German-Jewish descent, who would become his mistress for decades to come. How these two women find solidarity in their shared love for Douglass -- and his vision for a free America -- is at the heart of Jewell Parker Rhodes' extraordinary, epic novel.

In the stunning conclusion to award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes's mystery trilogy begun in "Voodoo Dreams "and "Moon," Dr. Marie Lavant, descendent of Voodoo queen Marie Laveau, must confront a murderous evil in New Orleans.
Dr. Marie Levant aka Leveau, great-great granddaughter of Marie Laveau, has achieved fame and notoriety for saving New Orleans from the wrath of a vampire. Now she's taking a break from the city, heading up the highway to DeLaire. She doesn't know this backwater town, but an elderly woman called Nana has been expecting Marie to arrive and save her and others in this God-forsaken place from sickness and death.
Yet all of Marie's powers can't bring life back to the corpses she finds in a house by the road. Nor can she force those who know how they died to say so or to confess. Were the crimes committed by shape-shifters, vampires, and ghosts--or by living men and women? And even as Marie searches for answers, a hurricane threatens to break the levees of Louisiana and cause unimaginable destruction.
Jewell Parker Rhodes blends magic and man-made evil and weaves New Orleans's past and present into a spine-tingling mystery that is masterfully crafted and deeply haunting.