Jewell Parker Rhodes

Visiting her grandmother in the Louisiana bayou, ten-year-old Maddy begins to realize that she may be the only sibling to carry on the gift of her family's magical legacy.

Fifth-grader Deja lives with her family in a shelter in New York City. When her teacher gives her class assignments related to the attacks on the Twin Towers, Deja wonders why she should care so much about something that happened before she was even born. But as she investigates 9/11, she learns things about her friends and her family she never imagined.

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...

Jewell Parker Rhodes follows up her acclaimed Voodoo Dreams with a present-day mystery surrounding the gifts of an ancestor of the Voodoo Queen. Doctor Marie Levant can't explain why she's drawn to New Orleans, why it's comforting and unsettling at the same time. And she can't shake her haunting dreams. But when she delivers a dead woman's baby, Marie knows malevolent forces are at work-and it's up to her to stop them.

The second novel in Jewell Parker Rhodes' acclaimed Voodoo series, Yellow Moon finds New Orleans' preeminent voodoo practitioner hunting an African vampire -a wazimamoto. Marie Levant is tired of seeing corpses drained of blood arrive at the hospital each night, and tired of being haunted by their ghosts. It'll take all her skills to expel the deadly spirit.

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...

Bronx middle-grader Addy, who struggles with a family tragedy by drawing maps and studying mazes, joins other city youngsters on a wilderness adventure in California that turns deadly when wildfires erupt.

"Ranging from late nineteenth-century writers such as Charles Chesnutt to contemporary authors such as Walter Mosley, the works in The African American West demonstrate how the West, as seen through the eyes of African Americans, has evolved over the last century. Glasrud, a historian, and Champion, a literary scholar, combine their varying areas of expertise in The African American West, and their introductions to each part of the book provide both...