bronx (new york, n.y.)

"Eight-year-old Ava Murray lives in a Bronx neighborhood filled with music, art, and people from all over the world. It is very different from the Bronx she sees in the news. When her mother explains that the power of stories lies in the hands of those who write them, Ava decides to become a journalist. She shows everyone the world as she sees it, inspiring children to use the power of their own voice"--OCLC.

Contains nine short stories set in Brooklyn and the South Bronx that feature the vulnerability of black men and boys who frequently deal with race, gender, and class issues while coping with relationships between friends, lovers, and family.

The author, a Rhodes scholar and combat veteran, analyzes factors that influenced him as well as another man of the name and from the same neighborhood who was drawn into a life of drugs and crime and ended up serving life in prison, focusing on the influence of relatives, mentors, and social expectations that could have led either of them on different paths.

Twelve-year-old Nick Garc?a dreams of winning MVP of his summer baseball league, of finding a cure for his sister, of meeting his hero, Yankee pitcher Michael Arroyo, and of no longer living in fear of the government and ICE agents.

Ambitious high school senior and honor student Efrain Rodriguez makes some questionable choices in pursuit of his dream to escape the South Bronx and attend an Ivy League college.

A graphic novel which examines the true story of Benjy Melendez, son of Puerto Rican immigrants, who, in his youth, founded the notorious Ghetto Brothers gang in the late 1960s during a time of poverty, multiracial violence, and drugs. Eventually, as an adult, Melendez calls a truce with rival gang members and reclaims his Jewish roots after learning about his family history.

A memoir of the author's childhood in the Bronx during World War II, where his father was an air-raid warden and made fur-lined vests for the Navy, and his mother, a Russian immigrant, became a poker dealer to a cicle of powerful Bronx politicians who dealt in the blackmarket.

Tamika, a fifteen-year-old hearing-impaired girl, Jimmi, an eighteen-year-old veteran who stopped taking his antipsychotic medication, and sixteen-year-old Fatima, an illegal immigrant from Africa, meet and connect in their Bronx, New York, neighborhood, with devastating results.

With her fourth sibling on the way, Dominican American Ana Mar?a Reyes feels a need to get out of her family's small, Washington Heights apartment. She learns of an upcoming piano competition that offers a scholarship to a private school in New York City. To win, she needs to practice a lot but a family trip to the Dominican Republic gets in the way. Then a near calamity and the advice of friends show her what really matters.