"Mismatched Yet Perfectly Puzzled": Collage and/as Black

Girls' Literacies in Piecing Me Together

Karly Marie Grice, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, Caitlin Murphy

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, Volume 59, Number

1, 2021, pp. 16-27 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bkb.2021.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785315

[ Access provided at 19 Mar 2022 16:55 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

 “Mismatched Yet
Perfectly Puzzled”:
Collage and/as Black Girls’ Literacies
in Piecing Me Together
by KARLY MARIE GRICE, RACHEL L. RICKARD REBELLINO, and CAITLIN MURPHY

In their work on Black girls’ literacies, Muhammad and Haddix demonstrate

the importance of centering and valuing texts that both celebrate Black girl-
hood and speak to specific aspects of literacy, particularly multimodality and
criticality. Drawing upon their call and framework, in this article we examine
Renée Watson’s Piecing Me Together (2017) as a text that celebrates art and
Black girls’ literacies. Our analysis focuses on how Watson uses collage—the
action, the artwork, and the conceptual metaphor—to address identity and
history (re)making in the Black diaspora for Jade, her protagonist.

A
s Rudine Sims Bishop explains in her history of
African American children’s literature, collage
is an established technique for award-winning
Black illustrators such as Nina Crews, Javaka Steptoe,
and Christopher Myers. In an interview with Bishop,
Myers considers its prevalence:

[C]ollage is one of those central metaphors

of the African Diaspora. A lot of art work, be
it jazz, be it blues, be it musical forms, be it
artistic forms, be it dance forms, are oftentimes
collages of other forms. It’s about making do,
it’s about economic factors that we had in our
past.… I think that’s why we have such giants of
collage, people like Romare Bearden and Jacob
Lawrence, because I feel like as Black people we
have a special relationship to it. (qtd. in Bishop
187)

As Myers theorizes, for Black artists collage is both

artistic production and critical engagement with the
world. The power of collage extends beyond its literal
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 “MISMATCHED, YET PERFECTLY PUZZLED”

use in illustrations. In her novel Piecing Me Together (2017), hereafter

referred to as PMT, author Renée Watson draws on this form. She uses
collage to address the (re)making of Black identity and history for Jade,
the book’s protagonist, through showing collage as action, as artwork,
and as conceptual metaphor. In this article, we argue that Watson’s narra-
tive implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—provides a rationale and
guide for valuing the ways of knowing, creating, and communicating that
Gholnecsar Muhammad and Marcelle Haddix term Black girls’ literacies.
According to these scholars, Black girls’ literacies are “(1) Multiple (2) Tied
to identities (3) Historical (4) Collaborative (5) Intellectual (6) Political/
Critical” (325). These literacies go beyond traditional notions of literacy
versus illiteracy, acknowledging that literacy is not something we do or do
not have; rather, it is “multidimensional, layered, nuanced, and complex”
(301). As such, the following reading of Watson’s text employs this Black
girls’ literacies framework in order to deepen our understanding of
Jade’s engagement with the multimodal art form of collage as culturally
grounded in Black art history. Ultimately, we detail how Watson’s work
illuminates the potential for youth-centered arts-based activism and iden-
tity exploration.

Remaking Identity through Collage

At the start of PMT, Jade hopes to be nominated for a volunteer trip with
her predominantly white private school in Portland, OR. Her interest in
this trip arises because of how it positions her: “It’s not a program offering
something I need, but it’s about what I can give” (13). When, instead, she
is selected for a mentorship program, Jade views the offer as patronizing,
proof her school views her as needy. Jade returns
repeatedly to this question of perception, espe- Using her skill as a collage artist,
cially as connected to opportunity and agency.
Using her skill as a collage artist, she processes she processes her own identity and
her own identity and composes new visual composes new visual narratives,
narratives, speaking back to historical erasures
and contemporary injustices. Organically, Jade
speaking back to historical erasures
grows and shifts her perspective on her multi- and contemporary injustices.
modal literacies and agency. At first, collage is a
personal practice, a way to create beauty out of what is deemed ordinary,
including, according to Jade, herself. For instance, while ruminating on
perceptions of her neighborhood, she explains, “Lots of people can’t find
beauty in my neighborhood, but I can. Ever since elementary school, I’ve
been making beauty out of everyday things—candy wrappers, pages of a
newspaper, receipts, rip-outs from magazines. I cut and tear, arrange and
rearrange, and glue them down, morphing them into something no one
else thought they could be. Like me” (10). While Jade explicitly describes
the materials and process of her art, we argue that in the book as a whole
Watson utilizes collage—both the act and the art—as an implied concep-
tual metaphor for identity and history.
Collage is both verb and noun. The name of the art form (collage) comes
from the act of the creation (to collage) and is usually described as cutting
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ordinary, everyday objects into pieces that are then collected, arranged,
and pasted into a new fragmented but collective whole. In Jade’s words,
it is “ripping and cutting. Gluing and pasting. Rearranging reality, rede-
fining, covering, disguising…taking ugly and making beautiful” (25). When
introduced into the art world, collage was seen as extending the break
from traditional realism and the (mis)conception of a singular perspec-
tive, inspiring multiplicity and subversion. This led critics to agree with
Gregory Ulmer’s assessment of collage as “the single most revolutionary
formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in [the 20th century]”
(qtd. in Alexander 65).
In 1963, abstract artist Romare Bearden shifted to collaging for its
ability to speak to the collective needs of African Americans in the civil
rights movement while representing the shifting Black diasporic aesthetic
(Powell 121). In Bearden’s hands, collage mirrored the “composite aspects
of African American life, viewing it as an amalgamation of disparate
elements” and “reveal[ing] a complex understanding of black subjectivity
and identity as something that has itself been ‘collaged’” (Malone, par. 2).
Watson directly invokes this history when Bearden’s art is introduced to
Jade. After encountering Bearden and other collage artists, Jade realizes
her own art is part of a tradition of Black collage, placing Jade into the
legacy of artists using the form to speak to Black subjectivity and iden-
tity. Even though Jade is introduced to Bearden—and, as we discuss later,
Mickalene Thomas—as an American artist, Richard J. Powell positions
the Black US multimodal art as one thread of the rich global tapestry of
the Black diasporic art tradition: “African American styles of religious
worship, performance, and verbal and literary expression stand out among
U.S. cultural products, representing a shared vision that often resonates
with black diasporal counterparts in the Caribbean, Central and South
America, Europe, and Africa” (13).
Yet collage extends further backward in
Understanding collage as both Black artistic ancestry to the art of quilting.
Understanding collage as both evolving from
evolving from and functioning and functioning parallel to quilting recenters
parallel to quilting recenters Black Black women and their multimodal pieced-
women and their multimodal together ways of being and knowing in Jade’s
collage practice. Elizabeth Alexander asserts
pieced-together ways of being and that “[a]ny discussion of the African American
knowing in Jade’s collage practice. collage must include a discussion of the quilt”
as it “embod[ies] the simultaneous continuity
and chaos that characterize African American history in all spheres”
(62). Quilting must be understood as not only an art but a multimodal
literacy passed down through enslaved Black women. Many of these
quilting artists remain nameless in art history, either known by the collec-
tive moniker of the Gee’s Bend quilters1—who originated the Black US
diasporic variation of the form—or represented by the first recorded US
Black quilt artist, Harriet Powers (Powell 26-29; Robinson). Through this
critical arts history, we can understand Jade’s enactment of collage as a
contemporary instantiation of the historical practices of Black women.
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Like contemporary Black women quilters, Jade “uses black women’s

stories as subject…[and] establish[es] a tradition in art that appreciates the
unique beauty and aesthetics of black women” that is “founded on tradi-
tions handed down to them from mothers and grandmothers” (Robinson,
pars. 8, 7).
In addition to learning about Bearden, Jade is introduced to the work of
Black woman collage artist Mickalene Thomas, who herself lived in Port-
land when she began developing her identity as an artist. Thomas func-
tions as an additional mentor to Jade, and in Jade’s summation of Thomas’s
work, Watson places the book’s title: “I am looking through the book [of
Thomas’s artwork], staring at these brown women and their faces that are
pieced together with different shades of brown, different-size features, all
mismatched yet perfectly puzzled together to make them whole beings.
‘I want to do this,’ I say out loud” (77). Seeing Bearden’s and Thomas’s
artwork preserved and celebrated in art books legitimates the literacies
Jade already has and inspires further development in her collaging. She is
transfixed by the books: “All I can do is stare at these masterpieces, study
the making of me” (78).
Jade’s words hint at the additional function of collage as a conceptual
metaphor. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain, such conceptual
metaphors “structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do”
(4). In other words, we take the abstractions of the world and make them
concrete through comparative language and ideas, an act that occurs both
consciously and unconsciously. Taking as a given that “[t]he essence of meta-
phor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”
(Lakoff and Johnson 5), the abstract of Jade’s layered and multimodal
experience navigating the world as a Black girl can be more concretely
understood as, and through, collage. As she uses this conceptual meta-
phor, the characteristics that define her understanding of what a collage is
further shape how she engages with the metaphor’s original subject: Black
girlhood.
Jade turns to metaphorical collage to process the painful pulling
apart she encounters due to living in a white supremacist, sexist world:
“This makes me wonder if a black girl’s life is only about being stitched
together and coming undone, being stitched together and coming undone.
I wonder if there’s ever a way for a girl like me to feel whole” (86). Her
words, evocative of quilting, illustrate Jade’s use of both the literal act and
conceptual metaphor of collage as a Black girls’ literacy practice, episte-
mology, and ontology. As Muhammad and Haddix explain, “Black girls’
literacies are tied to identity…[and while] reading, writing, speaking, or
performing texts, [girls] were simultaneously coming closer to selfhood”
(326). Learning the context of collage, seeing it valued, and having space to
share her art and flourish serves, as in Muhammad and Haddix’s work, to
move Jade toward recognizing and understanding her identities.
Readers can see Jade using these literacies to move closer to under-
standing herself when she is harassed by a group of boys. She expresses
anger and shame at their perception of her and other girls as pieces for
consumption. “Who teaches [boys] that girls are parts—butts, breasts,
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legs—not whole beings?” (94), she asks. When she returns home, she meta-
phorically and literally pulls together pieces connected to this experience
of feeling violated. “I’m going to use it [her fast food bag] tonight. Tear it up
and make it into something. Maybe a dress for a girl more confident than
I am, who doesn’t feel insecure about eating whatever she wants in public.
Maybe I’ll morph it into a crown for the queen Dad says I am” (95). The
resulting collage is only the first of several that feature Jade remaking and
recasting her identity, as when Jade collages Black beauty:

“Things that are Black and Beautiful:

A Starless Night Sky

Storm Clouds
Onyx
Clarinets
Ink
Panthers
Black Swans
Afro Puffs
Michelle Obama

Me” (138)

Throughout her artwork, Jade remakes beauty in (and with) her own
image, echoing the traditions of Black women quilters whose work was
and is grounded in “sisterhood, female empowerment, and black feminine
beauty” (Robinson, par. 1).

Collage and/as Critical, Community-Based History

Early in the book, Jade learns about York, an enslaved man who accom-
panied Lewis and Clark, from her friend Lee Lee. Lee Lee explains that
she learned about York in her history class because her teacher is “all
about teaching stuff we don’t necessarily learn in our textbooks” (23),
signaling that history itself is a collage. The pieces included and excluded
can construct immensely varied pictures. Yet, the institutionalized history
of textbooks is often expressed as objective truth. In the United States,
textbook histories have too often centralized the stories of white figures,
marginalizing—or fully cutting out—people of color and Black figures,
like York. This selective creation suggests that Black Americans have no
place in history and conveys a white supremacist vision of the past. In both
the story of York himself and the story of his erasure, Jade sees herself.
Just as York was forcibly given the “opportunity” to travel west, Jade feels
expected to be grateful for each of the “opportunities” she is given without
her input.
But Jade’s engagement with York does not stop there. She continues
collaging York’s narrative by imaginatively rewriting his story, implying
a critical awareness of the constructedness of history narratives and a
realization of the gaps in their tellings, highlighted through an art form
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that embraces fragmentation. The book’s final chapter, entitled “libertad,

freedom,” records multiple possible “ends” of York’s life. One story, told
by Clark, claims that York tried to return to Clark because he didn’t enjoy
his freedom. En route, he died of cholera. “But not everyone believes that
story,” Jade explains (260). Drawing on a recorded account that contradicts
this tragic ending, Jade reimagines York’s narrative in the book’s final
paragraphs: “I see York travelling west again.… This time he is no one’s
servant or slave.… This time he speaks for himself” (260-61).
Fittingly, this final collage, intermingling her interrogation of both
history and identity, is the first to include herself. “I am with York, both
of us with maps in our hands. Both of us black and traveling. Black and
exploring. Both of us discovering what we are really capable of” (261). This
ending suggests new beginnings. Writing about the role of art and imagi-
nation in education, Maxine Greene explains that when “a person chooses
to view herself or himself in the midst of things, as beginning or learner or
explorer, and has the imagination to envisage new things emerging, more
and more begins to seem possible” (22). Now,
rather than solely connecting to York’s erasure, History is more powerful
Jade corrects the narrative, finding identifica- and meaningful when it is
tion with him as an explorer. By layering York’s
story with her own, Jade suggests history is more conceptualized as collage, with
powerful and meaningful when it is conceptual- fissures and layers—spaces for
ized as collage, with fissures and layers—spaces
for exploration.
exploration.
Jade’s realizations about how to contend with York’s narrative as unfin-
ished but full of possibility come as a result of her present community.
Jade initially keeps her circle small—her mother, her uncle, her friend Lee
Lee. However, she slowly opens up. In a memorable interaction with her
mentor, Maxine, Jade shares her conceptual metaphor of feeling “stitched
together and coming undone” (214). She and Maxine discuss the shared
particular kind of exhaustion they have faced as Black girls. Maxine
connects the healing power of their conversation to her grandmother: “My
grandmother called it bearing witness.… I didn’t get it as a kid. I mean,
nothing got resolved, necessarily, so I thought it was silly to just sit and
rehash everything that was wrong with the world.… But I think what my
grandmother was saying is that it feels good to know someone knows your
story.… She’d tell me, it’s how we heal” (217-18). By turning to a figure from
Maxine’s personal history, she and Jade are able
to better understand the beauty of their rela-
tionship, one that, as B. J. McDaniel explains, is
These acts of care demonstrate
layered in the history of Black women’s relation- conscious collaboration toward
ships and built upon “appreciation, education, the goal of individual and
and sacrifice” (190). This idea of the power of
community is highlighted in the numerous rela-
communal change, each based
tionships and acts of care that occur between in cultural, historical Black girls’
women. Jade’s mother teaches Maxine to cook, lived experiences and multimodal
Maxine’s friends urge her to leave an unhealthy
relationship, Jade physically supports Lee Lee literacies.
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during an intense moment, Maxine assists Jade in taking out her braids.
These acts of care demonstrate conscious collaboration toward the goal of
individual and communal change, each based in cultural, historical Black
girls’ lived experiences and multimodal literacies.
Black girls’ literacies are not enacted in isolation but are a co-
construction of knowledge with the world, and specifically with other
Black girls (Muhammad and Haddix). This collaborative approach to
knowing and communicating can be seen in Jade and Lee Lee’s activist
work. As the friends turn toward each other to bear witness to violence
committed against Natasha Ramsey, a Black girl their age, they identify
a possibility for tangible action. Drawing upon their larger community,
they plan an art show honoring Natasha and collaboratively perfect their
individual art forms. Jade’s collage mirrors Lee Lee’s poetry. Lee Lee’s
poem evokes Jade’s conceptual metaphors:

Our bodies a quilt that tells stories of the middle passage,

of roots yanked and replanted.

Our bodies a mosaic of languages forgotten,

of freedom songs and moaned prayers.

Our bodies no longer

disregarded, objectified, scrutinized. (259)

Together, the girls take their pain, lean on each other and their larger
community, and, uniquely, collage it into holistic beauty.

Performative Literacies and Artivism

The presentation of Jade as always-becoming, never-finished, and
in-community links to her activist use of collage. Exhibiting Muhammad
and Haddix’s description of Black girls’ litera-
The presentation of Jade as always- cies as “grounded in critical thought, discus-
becoming, never-finished, and in- sions, and reflection about society and social
problems” (326), Jade and her peers’ artwork and
community links to her activist use event planning demonstrate how Black girls’
of collage. literacies are interwoven with “power, misrep-
resentation, falsehood, and the need for social
transformation" (Muhammad and Haddix 326). As Lee Lee and Jade create
works to raise funds for social change, they speak directly to these ideas,
transitioning from critical, historical, and reflective to transformative.
In one of Jade’s transformative collages, she enacts an activist stance,
taking pieces of the history of violence that undergirds the Black Lives
Matter (BLM) movement and rewriting those stories visually with loving
images of life and community. While Jade is collaging about her experi-
ence and understanding of BLM within the United States, the movement
is one that spans countries and continents: “Black Lives Matter Global
Network Foundation, Inc. is a global organization in the US, UK, and
Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local
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power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the

state and vigilantes.” She explains, “I’ve been combining moments from
different photos, blending decades, people, and worlds that don’t belong
together…Emmett Till meets Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Rosa
Parks and Sandra Bland talk with each other under southern trees.
Coretta Scott King is holding Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones in her arms”
(Watson, PMT 244). Her image displays the past, through ancestry and
legacy, as informing the present without condemning the future. Jade
explains her creation as a critical, historically informed act of liberative
imagination: “Knitting history into the beautiful, bloody tapestry it is…I
take the words from the headlines and spell out new titles, rewrite history.
Make it so all these people are living and loving and being” (244). For Jade
personally, this art is symbolically healing and restorative, yet it extends
figurative healing socially to her community through the planned event
where the girls will share their art. Tangibly, this event also helps repair
the wounds of racialized pain through the money gathered for Natasha’s
literal recovery.
Since the fundraiser Jade helps organize
includes the creation and presentation of these The fundraiser can be understood
art pieces, it can be understood as performative as artivism, the combination of art
literacies, or “creative expression through arts,
music, dance, and theatrical performance,”
and activism in community- and
which “include embodied ways of knowing, youth-centered projects.
communicating, and meaning making”
(Muhammad and Haddix 315). Further, because the girls’ performative
literacies create social change within their communities, the fundraiser
can be understood as artivism, the combination of art and activism in
community- and youth-centered projects. Artivism disrupts the top-down
power dynamics of traditional adult/youth interactions, particularly
for youth of color (Sandoval and Latorre; Butler et al.) and queer youth
(Rhoades). These kinds of activities acknowledge the power of art for
amplifying young people’s voices and providing a multimodal means for
inquiry and communication to outside audiences. As Butler et al. posit,
since artivism centers young people as decision makers, it creates the
opportunity for “revolutionary civics,” or a critical, youth-empowering,
inquiry-driven civics education that can lead to lasting personal change
(96).
When Jade brings her community together through the art show, she
recognizes the moment’s import: “I get my camera and take a photo of the
crowd. This one, I will not rip or reconfigure. This one, I will leave whole”
(257). The Black girls and their community in this book do not need recon-
figuring; they are already whole—multiple, critical, contextual, historical,
but nonetheless whole. What Watson is suggesting needs ripping and
reconfiguring is the way Black girls are seen in society, including both the
media and the classroom. When books like Watson’s—books that value
Black girls’ lives and literacies— are included in classroom settings, they
can begin to be a part of this work.

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Piecing It All Together: Centering Black Girls’ Literacies

In writing about how Black women’s literature can support Black girls’
writing development, Muhammad emphasizes the importance of careful
text selection, including going beyond print texts. Muhammad and Haddix
offer specific guidelines for such selection:

1. Does the text have the potential to advance youths’ skills and
proficiencies in multiple literacies?
2. Does the text have the potential to advance youths’ sense making
of their multiple identities?
3. Does the text have the potential to advance youths’ intellectual
development?
4. Does the text have the potential to advance youths’ criticality?
(327)

As we’ve shown in our analysis above, PMT embodies these tenets. Jade
serves as a model for readers as she discovers collage as a part of Black art
history, which helps her frame her personal use of collage as a means to
process her emotions and experience within the greater cultural-historical
act of collage as Black art. Jade’s practice can provide a springboard
for readers’ own experimentations in multiple literacies. As the book
illustrates Jade’s use of collage as a means of dealing with oppressive, white
supremacist narratives of the past and present
In presenting interwoven narratives in order to rewrite both those histories and her
of Black history, art, and identity, own identity, readers can reflect and revisit their
own intersecting identities. And, in presenting
PMT offers rich opportunities for interwoven narratives of Black history, art,
intellectual depth and criticality. and identity, PMT offers rich opportunities for
intellectual depth and criticality. As a whole, the
book demonstrates the power of collage as a medium for communication,
offers a model of community-supported and individually enacted
grappling with identity, and asks readers to intellectually and critically
engage with the past and present.
PMT is not the only text in Watson’s oeuvre doing this work. Across her
writing—from coauthored texts like Watch Us Rise with Ellen Hagan to
her solo middle-reader texts like Some Places More Than Others—Watson
has crafted her own collage of Black girlhood(s) and Black girls’ literacies,
with girls from similar and different backgrounds, utilizing myriad litera-
cies, and concerned with overlapping questions of identity and history.
These novels work as the pieces of a broader narrative collage project frac-
turing the mythos of a Black cultural monolith. Further, Watson is not the
only Black woman YA author celebrating Black girls’ varied literacies and
artistries: culinary arts in Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High, rap
in Angie Thomas’s On the Come Up, game design in Brittney Morris’s Slay,
and dance in Brandy Colbert’s Pointe, among numerous others featuring
multimodal and performative literacies.
Muhammad and Haddix have provided questions to guide text

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selection, and Watson and other writers have brought that framework to
life in youth literature. Now, educators must act, envisioning their class-
rooms as “sites for this resistance, the solidarity of humanity, and for Black
girl love” (Muhammad and Haddix 330). Building on the justice-centered,
arts-based classroom practices advocated by other educational scholars
(Whitelaw; Butler et al.; Watson et al.; Weltsek
and Koontz), we ask teachers to recognize a We ask teachers to recognize a
need for a shift toward authentic, multimodal need for a shift toward authentic,
assignments and culturally sustaining litera-
cies. Teaching that values Black girls’ literacies multimodal assignments and
is critical, with long-term societal potential: culturally sustaining literacies.
What we believe and think about Black girls’ literacies directly
influences how and what we teach. It also has an effect on who
becomes teachers—when Black girls’ literacies and knowledge
claims are not valued in school spaces by educators, this indi-
rectly suggests that they are not equipped to become teachers and
educational leaders. (Muhammad and Haddix 328)

As McDaniel discusses, the impacts of this valuation extend even further,

shaping how academic scholarship by Black women is viewed. In PMT,
readers see glimmers of how change might occur. Contrary to white
supremacist narratives that demarcate well-funded, private, majority-
white schools like Jade’s as “good” and less-funded, public, majority-
youth-of-color schools like Lee Lee’s as “bad,” Watson shows how Lee
Lee’s teachers support youth-centered multiliteracies and draw from crit-
ical arts-based approaches. While Jade has a purportedly rigorous curric-
ulum and college-worthy extracurriculars, Lee Lee’s humanities classes
interrogate historical and contemporary systems of power, suggesting the
liberatory power of teachers working with culturally sustaining pedago-
gies and community-engaged multiliteracies.
Furthermore, the “DIY” poetry club Lee Lee What adult readers can see from
founds shows her teachers’ willingness to take
risks and relinquish control, affirming students’ Watson’s work is the importance of
agency. In so doing, Lee Lee’s school enacts the valuing the tools our youth already
requirements of Butler et al.’s call for a revolu-
tionary civics education.
have…and making the space for
Stories of creators who say the arts saved them to use those tools to uplift their
their lives abound. But as abolitionist educators peers and themselves.
like Bettina Love remind us, teachers should not
be approaching youth of color with a mindset of salvation. Instead, what
adult readers can see from Watson’s work is the importance of valuing the
tools our youth already have—the tools Jade and Lee Lee demonstrate
having—and making the space for them to use those tools to uplift their
peers and themselves.

Note
1. In a historical enactment of white supremacy, the moniker Gee’s Bend
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comes from the plantation on which the women were enslaved, not
only erasing the women’s individuality but also whitewashing their art.

Works Cited
Children’s Books
Acevedo, Elizabeth. With the Fire on High. HarperTeen, 2019.
Colbert, Brandy. Pointe. Putnam, 2014.
Morris, Brittney. Slay. Simon Pulse, 2019.
Thomas, Angie. On the Come Up. Balzer + Bray, 2019.
Watson, Renée. Piecing Me Together. Bloomsbury, 2017.
---. Some Places More Than Others. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Watson, Renée, and Ellen Hagan. Watch Us Rise. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Secondary Sources
Alexander, Elizabeth. “The Genius of Romare Bearden.” Something All Our
Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art, edited by Alivia J.
Wardlaw, Duke UP, 2004, pp. 57-70.
Bishop, Rudine Sims. Free within Ourselves: The Development of African
American Children’s Literature. Heinemann, 2007.
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Dr. Karly Marie Grice is an assistant professor of English education at

the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She has published work in English
Journal, The ALAN Review, and Red Feather Journal and in the edited
collections Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (UP of Missis-
sippi, 2017), Engaging with Multicultural Young Adult Literature in the
Secondary Classroom (Routledge, 2019), and The Routledge Companion
to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies (2020).

Dr. Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino is an assistant teaching professor of

English at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches under-
graduate and graduate classes in children’s and young adult literature.
Her research focuses on narrative form, digital youth cultures, girlhood
studies, and the role of youth literature in facilitating conversations
around equity and justice. Her work has been published in The ALAN
Review, English Journal, and The Lion and the Unicorn as well as in the
edited collections Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (UP of
Mississippi, 2017), Engaging with Multicultural Young Adult Literature
in the Secondary Classroom (Routledge, 2019), and Beyond the Block-
busters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction (UP of
Mississippi, 2020).

Dr. Caitlin Murphy is an assistant professor of adolescent literacy at

Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. She has published work in
The ALAN Review and Dragon Lode and in the edited collection Engaging
with Multicultural Young Adult Literature in the Secondary Classroom
(Routledge, 2019). She graduated from the Literature for Children and
Young Adults program at Ohio State University and taught high school
English for eight years prior to completion of her doctoral degree.
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