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The Moon Within
by Aida Salazar (Author)

Booktalk: Celi Rivera’s life swirls with questions. About her changing body. Her first attraction to a boy. And her best friend’s exploration of what it means to be genderfluid.

But most of all, her mother’s insistence she have a moon ceremony when her first period arrives. It’s an ancestral Mexica ritual that Mima and her community have reclaimed, but Celi promises she will NOT be participating. Can she find the power within herself to take a stand for who she wants to be?

Snippet:
LUNA

A beam of moonlight
squeezes through
my window’s curtain.

Luna is out tonight.

My eyes wide open like doors.

I’ll be twelve in a few months, I should
be allowed to go to sleep later
than seven-year-old Juju, who shares a room with me

Meet the author in this book trailer.

A 2019 Cybils Poetry nominee

Other Words for Home
by Jasmine Warga (Author)

Booktalk: Jude never thought she’d be leaving her beloved older brother Issa and her father behind, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her hometown start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives.

At first, everything in America seems too fast and too loud. The American movies that Jude has always loved haven’t quite prepared her for starting school in the US–and her new label of “Middle Eastern,” an identity she’s never known before.

Snippet:

Mama knows what happened
before Issa even brings me home.

She clings to both of us
and makes a sound I have never heard before.
It sounds like terror,
like primal relief.

They could have taken you, she says,
still squeezing us both tightly.
It is exactly what I said to Issa.

There is an Arabic proverb that says:
The offspring of ducks float.
It means,
all children end up like their parents.
I guess I am starting
to float.

A 2019 Cybils Poetry nominee