Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

"It’s a slim book that contains an immense amount of information about one of the most well-known periods in contemporary American history—the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. It presents that history in a unique way. Prior to this book, even among civil rights specialists, the name Claudette Colvin was not well known. This book corrected that oversight. Philip Hoose found Colvin living in the Bronx and reconstructed her story. As a fifteen-year-old, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama. This was eight or nine months before Rosa Parks took her stand in Montgomery. At that time, it was felt that she was not the right figurehead for the civil rights struggle—perhaps, in part, because she got pregnant as a girl. So, she was pushed aside, and Rose Parks took a stand in her stead. “YA nonfiction looks immensely different than it did a few years ago” You’re looking for the special sauce in YA nonfiction. In each of the five books I named, it’s different. In this one, there’s something powerful about first-person testimony. At the New Press where I edit adult nonfiction as a day job, we publish the late Studs Terkel, who had this notion that you can learn new things about history by talking with ordinary people. This book is evidence of Terkel’s theory. It was published without much fanfare but went on to win the National Book Award. Hoose tells Claudette’s story from her perspective, through original oral history. He takes you inside her head. It demystifies the civil rights movement. Her story of personal courage and struggle, as a young marginalized African American woman in the South, is stunning. More and more young adult nonfiction writers are doing the same type of scholarly work done by the writers of adult nonfiction. These aren’t monographs, but they are often as rigorously researched as what is published by a university press or one of the big adult trade publishers. The field is attracting talented writers who ground themselves in the secondary literature and do other reporting, research and interviews to reconstruct nonfiction stories in new and more dynamic ways. The process of writing is partly one of inclusion and exclusion, and of deciding how to develop a narrative in a dynamic way. Writing for YA readers involves all of the same challenges of writing for any audience—but I believe that it also accentuates these challenges. With YA, you can’t take anything about your audience for granted, which imposes and added layer of responsibility. And you have to hold their attention."