Poetry Friday: Joyce Carol Thomas
Beginning today, we’ll participate in Poetry Friday every week on the TeachingBooks.net Blog.
Poetry Friday is a blogging community dedicated to sharing poets, poems, and poetry resources online. We are excited to feature special resources from TeachingBooks.net’s extensive collection of…

Engage students with technology as you explore best practices in writing. By integrating the online resource listed in this issue into your curriculum, students can have award-winning authors model the application of specific writing tips and techniques.
I went to Ghana several years ago and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the land and people, as well as the history of the place that hovered just out of reach. When I visited the slave castles, where millions of Africans were housed like cattle before being shipped as cargo and sold as slaves, I felt their spirits crying out to me. Crawling on my hands and knees through the Door of No Return, which led from the darkness of the prison to the incomprehensible vastness of a beach, I knew I must tell the story of someone who had passed that way.
Claudette Colvin, in 1955, was a 15-year-old African American girl growing up in Alabama. She refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama a full nine months before Rosa Parks later became famous by doing the same thing.
As a way to perpetuate readers' personal connections with book creators, we at TeachingBooks.net have periodically featured original artwork created by some of the illustrators with whom we've worked.