Use these links to supplement and complement students’ reading of the work and to increase their overall enjoyment of literature. Challenge them to discern parallel themes, engage through visual and aural stimuli, and delve deeper into the thematic possibilities presented by the title.

Recommended Texts for Pairing

Brown Girl Dreaming

• 2014 memoir in verse by Jacqueline Woodson. Woodson is, like Myers, a writer of middle grade and YA fiction.
• connects to themes of being Black in mid-20th-century America (Woodson was born in 1963), the desire for community, and the power and limitations of language
• Consider how factors like gender and place (Woodson grows up partially in the South) affect Myers and Woodson’s experiences of race and racism.
• Brown Girl Dreaming on SuperSummary  

“Sonny’s Blues”

• 1957 short story by James Baldwin (content warning: contains discussions of drug use and dependency)
• connects to themes of being black in mid-20th-century America and the relationship between parents and children
• Myers describes “Sonny’s Blues” as the story that “gave [him] permission to write about [his] own experiences” (Chapter 19). Compare and contrast Myers’s childhood with that of the story’s narrator and his brother: What in particular might Myers have related to?
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