Brenda Woods

Saint Louis Armstrong Beach (2011) leaves a New Orleans boy in the city as Hurricane Katrina comes ashore. Saint earns money playing clarinet for tourists and will not evacuate without Shadow, the stray dog he has adopted; looking for him strands the pair in an elderly neighbour's attic as the water climbs. Brenda Woods, who wrote it, was born in Cincinnati, raised in southern California and educated at California State University, Northridge. An earlier novel, The Red Rose Box, earned a Coretta Scott King Honor. The Unsung Hero of Birdsong, USA (2019) is set in the segregated South soon after the Second World War, where a white boy named Gabriel becomes friends with Meriwether, a Black veteran who served in the army's all-Black 761st Tank Battalion, after the two start working at the auto shop run by Gabriel's father. Her other novels for young readers include Emako Blue, The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond and When Winter Robeson Came.