Dustin Brinton-Wilson, District Consultant

I remember reading Ezra Jack Keats books, like Snowy Day, very early and casually thinking, “oh, there’s a character that looks like me.”

However, the first impactful book for me was reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy in fifth or sixth grade. I remember feeling the unfairness and a sense of hopelessness in the early part of the book being experienced by a kid my age and really thinking about what I would do in his situation. It certainly made me start to think about a lot of issues and concerns that I hadn’t before.

Honorable mention: Reading Stephen King’s It in high school. A central, significant character, Mike, was written as a black character who wasn’t a jock, was nerdy and studious, and later became the librarian of the town. All unusual character traits to ascribe to a black character in the mid 1980’s, that eerily described me.

Tynan Edwards, Programming & Outreach Administrator

The first one I remember is one that my dad read to me. Oddly enough, I later found out it was written by a white woman. The book was Galimoto.  It was a book about a seven-year-old African boy. He built a Galimoto, which is a toy vehicle made from scraps of wire. I think he builds a bike, and he carries it around all day.

It’s it always stuck with me because I think it was the first time I heard of another person building a toy, and it was something that, culturally, I’d never like, oh, we just built a toy out of wires. Like, it was a very interesting little book. I think the illustration stuck with me as much as anything, honestly.

I remember it from, Reading Rainbow. It was one of the first books, that I read or at least that I think my dad read to me where the characters were obviously nonwhite.

I think I mentioned the other day when we were speaking, an author named Brian Pinkney and his father, Jerry Pinkney. They’re two African American illustrators, and I think Brian Pinkney is a writer as well, an author. And their illustrations are like scratch. I don’t know enough about art to know the type of illustration, but the illustrations for his books always stuck with me.

Then there’s a book called The Faithful Friend. It was a tale of friendship between, I think, a Dominican person and a white person in the French West Indies.

That was probably the first time I saw someone biracial in a book, which was, especially growing up in Central Pennsylvania, super important to me. I was that weird in-the-middle kid.

My father did a great job of presenting those books to me and my brother because he thought it was important. He’s also an English teacher for 26 years, so he had the inside track of getting books that he knew were important, having done it for so long.

I remember it was the first book I ever bought at a book fair as a kid. It was The Dark 30. It was 30 southern tales of the supernatural. It was all African American ghost stories; thrillers that occurred throughout slavery and the Civil Rights movement in the South. I would have been somewhere between seven and ten when it came out.  I can’t stress how much I love the illustrations in that book.

I liked ghost stories as a kid, so I loved Goosebumps, but I think [this] was the first time it was a cultural telling of a ghost story rather than just a scary story for little kids. That book made me want to learn more about southern black culture.

Nekesha Johnson, Public Services Assistant

I was always a musical child, so for me, the book was Just the Two of Us by Will Smith. I would say I was at least five or six years old. At that time more books were starting to include black boys, and then slowly trickling in, for the black girls too.

That was the book for me because my dad and I loved music so much. We read that to tatters. I would be like, “Dad, can you read the story? Can you read the story?” He would, and then he’d play the song and we’d sing it together.

And it was like, oh my gosh. This was one. And then the other one when I got older was the book called Dancer by Laurie Hewitt. It’s about a girl who wanted to become a ballerina. It is a thicker book. A book for teens.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a dancer. I went to the tryouts and noticed I was a little bit bigger than the other girls. The dance instructor was like, “Yeah, you’re not gonna cut it.” I was sad, but reading that book helped me understand that even if I was not cut out for dancing, I wanted to be as dedicated as the dancer in the book. She was fighting adversities left and right. I was so inspired by it. It taught me resilience.

One book I also liked was a poetry book called Crowning Glory by Joyce Carol Thomas. that helped me fall in love with poetry. My favorite genre of poetry was free verse. It didn’t have to rhyme. No rules. It was just me expressing what I felt.  Representation means something to a child.

Jasmine Conway, Public Services Assistant

I think I was about five when my grandmother gave me a paperback book that, a paperback picture book that had, a black girl with a yellow dress playing in a field of flowers.

I don’t remember the title of the book or really what it was about. I just remembered thinking, “Her hair is like mine, and her dress looks like the one my grandma made me.” I wasn’t quite old enough to read it and understand it completely, so my grandmother read it to me. I just have the vivid memory of a girl wearing a yellow dress and playing in the wildflowers.

The second one that I remembered was getting Addy, the American Girl book, but that was year later when I was around nine. I definitely remember most of that story. When I first read it, it had a deep impact on me because of history and her being a runaway slave.

Later, I mostly got into Goosebumps and stuff like that. There weren’t descriptions of the characters in those books. There weren’t any pictures. The characters became what I imagined them to be, so they became a rainbow of different people depending on their personalities.

I also had a lot of Sesame Street books growing up. A lot of them were learning and life lessons and that sort of thing. Sesame Street always had their rainbow of friends in the neighborhood and stuff like that. It was like both the monsters and the humans were blending together. It made an impact.

Dwana Pinchock, Marketing & Public Relations Manager

I was an avid reader as a child. The Weekly Reader was everything to me as a young child. Until I was in fifth grade, the only Black people I had seen in books were drawings of enslaved people in a copy of Frederick Douglass Fights for Freedom I had ordered from Scholastic Books. I remember how the drawings made me cry because that was the only time I had seen someone with brown skin like me in a book.

Then, the last issue of Weekly Reader before summer break came out and I found the book Zeely. I was ecstatic. I saw a little girl who looked like me on the cover — a little black girl with pigtails like mine who was living in modern times. She was curious and a little bit of a detective, just like I wanted to be. I read that book until it literally fell apart. After reading that book for the millionth time, wishing the story would never end, it dawned on me that maybe I could be a writer too. I could create my own stories.

That summer, I discovered the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou, and I was hooked. There was no turning back. A writer was born!