2 Books Published by The Calliope Group on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

“A beautiful and poignant reminder of the industry, joy and resilience of Black people in America.” —Trey Ellis, Peabody and Emmy winning producer of King in the Wilderness and True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality

The year is 1921, and Opal Brown would like to show you around her beautiful neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Filled with busy stores and happy families, Opal also wants you to know that “everyone looks like me.”

In both words and illustrations, this carefully researched and historically accurate book allows children to experience the joys and success of Greenwood, one of the most prosperous Black communities of the early 20th Century, an area Booker T. Washington dubbed America’s Black Wall Street.

Soon after the day narrated by Opal, Greenwood would be lost in the Tulsa Race Massacre, the worst act of racial violence in American history. As we approach the centennial of that tragic event, children have the opportunity through this book to learn and celebrate all that was built in Greenwood.

A 2020 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner.

Traversing twenty-three years of earth and breath, Quraysh Ali Lansana’s first new and collected poems roadmaps small town Oklahoma to southside Chicago in compelling poems that question, surprise and dare. As a direct descendent of the Black Arts Movement and last student of Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, Lansana explores the complicated internal and external terrain of Blackness and history from a post-King, post-Kennedy childhood through the election of the first non-White president, while grappling with the definition of home. These are poems that cry, sing, scream and see.