Jewell Parker Rhodes

Ninth Ward puts a twelve-year-old girl who can see ghosts in New Orleans in the days before Hurricane Katrina, and refuses to stop where a disaster story usually stops. Free Within Ourselves is a different kind of book altogether, a practical guide for Black writers that Rhodes wrote because nobody had handed her one. Her doctorate is in American studies, has published adult novels about Marie Laveau and about the destruction of Black Tulsa, and built the creative writing programme at Arizona State University. Her books for children are taught in American classrooms and challenged in some of the same districts.