Big Clock By Li Young Lee (Grades 10+)

Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, later immigrating to the United States. A distinct and influential voice in Asian American poetry, he is most known for his collection The City in Which I Love You. Influenced by classical Chinese poetry, Lee's work embody characteristics of strength, silence, and simplicity, often in conjunction with existentialism, as exhibited in his poem "Big Clock", a rumination on time, aging, and grief. On the writing of this poem, Lee: “This poem is an attempt, I suppose, to understand time—the nature of time—and it seems to me that each of these stanzas is a figure of time on the one hand, and on the other hand a figure for eternity. I’m not sure if I’ve successfully communicated that, and I don’t mean in terms of subject matter or narrative, but in terms of what the language might inspire in the reader: the images, the ideas, but even more than the images and ideas (which are all in the head) something at a cellular level of understanding, something at a logic beyond our diurnal logic."

Elegy for my Sadness By Chen Chen (Grades 7-9)

A queer Chinese American poet, Chen Chen's work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Poetry. His first collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, was selected by Jericho Brown for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. From the same book, Elegy for My Sadness is an intimate and lyrical examination of love, romancing, and poetic whimsy.

While I was Away By Waka T. Brown (Grades 4-6)

This inspring memoir, While I was Away talks about the unfamiliar feeling author Waka T. Brown feels when she's forced to go to Japan. Known as the "smart Japanese girl" in rural Kansas, she is soon labelled as the "dumb foreigner" in Japan as she struggles with reading and writing in kanji, doesn’t quite mesh with her complicated, distant, and strict Obaasama (grandma), and gets made fun of by the students in her Japanese public-school classes. Waka T. Brown is a Stanford graduate with a BA in International Relations and a Master's in Secondary Education.

Yes We Will: Asian Americans Who Shaped This Country By Kelly Yang (Grades 1-3)

Written by Front Desk author, Kelly Yang, Yes We Will: Asian Americans Who Shaped This Country is a valuable survey of influential Asian Americans who have had profound impact on contemporary society. From Yo-Yo Ma to Jeremy Lin to Sandra Oh to Kamala Harris, kids (and grownups!) will read about and be inspired by the stories of Asian Americans and their stories of success and overcoming obstacles to get to where they were.

Kelly Yang, as mentioned, is the award winning author of the Front Desk series. Yes We Will has garnered recognition from the Texas Topaz Reading List, the Bank Street College Best Children's Books of the Year, and is a NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book

Homewrecker By Ocean Vuong (Grades 10+)

Ocean Vuong is an award-winning Vietnamese-American poet, novelist, and essayist from Northhampton, Massacheusetts. Homewrecker is the fourteenth poem in Vuong's 2016 book Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which has won numerous accolades including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Homewrecker explores themes of the body and love through Vuong's recounting of a forbidden affair between two lovers that could have destructive consequences for both parties.

The Magic Fish By Trung Le Nguyen (Grades 7-9)

Trung Le Capecchi-Nguyen (Trung Le Nguyen, professionally) is an award-winning Vietnamese-American cartoonist, artist, and writer from Minnesota. He is also known as Trungles, has been a cartoonist for over 10 years, working on DC and Marvel comics, Adventure Time, The Sea is Ours, his own work and much more."The Magic Fish", which was published in 2020, is Trung Le Nguye's semi-biographical debut graphic novel. It follow the life of Tiến Phong as he navigates his life as a second generation American Vietnamese teenager. He is trying to help his mother learn english through fairy tales, all the while, he is struggling to tell her about his sexuality.

I Ask My Mother to Sing By Li-Young Lee (Grade 4-6)

Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, but had to flee due to rising anti-chinese sentiments. They fled to Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, finally arriving in the United States in 1964. Although Lee’s parents were from China, he himself has never been to China. So in the poem I ask my mother to sing, Lee talks about how his mother and grandmother sing about all the wonders in China. Through this song, Lee is able to envision his parents’ birthplace with much clarity, despite having never been there before. Despite being a poem with a light and beautiful tone, it depicts the pain of exile from one’s homeland.

Buzz By Janet S. Wong (Grades 1-3)

A child experiences his environment as he interacts with the sighs and sounds of the morning. "Buzz" is a coming-of-age children's picture book that explores family routines reoccuring sounds. Janet S. Wong is a Chinese-Korean American poet and author of children's literature. She is the winnder of the 2021 NCTE Award for Excellence in poetry, one of th most prestigious award for a children's poet. She grew up in Los Angeles, California in Koreatown, however did not speak neither Chinese nor Korean. She draws inspiration from her own identity and cultural background, and features these experiences in her published writings.

Obit By Victoria Chang (Grades 10+)

Victoria Chang was born in Detroit, Michigan. Her publications include books include The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022); OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020); Circle (2005), and Barbie Chang (2017). In 2015, she loses her mother to pulmonary fibrosis, a loss that took away her language and forever altered her syntactical organization. Published in 2020, Obit explores, in the format of newspaper obituaries, what she lost, beyond the obvious, beyond the material. It depicts the boundaries between what is public and private, and makes visible the path of grief as it struggles to personify itself in language. It makes clear that grammatical constraint itself was an invention, and how to deny that is to deny that we made it up as we went.

Things We Carry on the Sea By Wang Ping (Grades 7-9)

“Things We Carry on the Sea” by Wang Ping tells of the different stories, skills, and experiences carried by immigrants from Eastern Asia, often to a place that disregards their labor and hard work.These places treat the refugees who now provide for their nations without welcome, forcing them to drift without a place to call home. Ping, a Chinese-American English professor, is an expert both in writing and multimedia projects, creating exhibits like “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges” and "We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers,” alongside editing the anthology New Generation: Poetry from China Today. She has also founded the Kinship of Two Rivers project at Macalester College.

The Name Jar By Yangsook Choi (Gredea 4-6)

Being the new kid in school is hard, but what about when nobody can properly pronounce your name? The Name Jar is a picture book that explores the indentities, specifically names, of young immigrants. Unhei is nervous that about the students not liking her, so she doesn't introduce herself, instead telling the class that she doesn't have a name. This picture book talks about the voices of immigrants whose traditional names have been supressed, and possibly overpowered by more Western sounding names.

Wishes By Mượn Thị Văn (Grades 1-3)

This book takes you on a journey from one side of the world to the other. "Wishes" tells an influential and powerful story in a gentle way that can capture people's hearts. It talks about a Vietnamese family in search of a new home and how much it makes an impact on one of the youngest members of the family. Through the perspective of the young girl, this picture book shows the obstacles of travelling to a new and unknown place in a crowded boat. So many awards have been given to this novel including the "#1 Best Picture Book of the 2021" by BookPage and also the "Margaret Wise Brown Prize". The master behind this book is Mượn Thị Văn. She is a Vietnamese author who doesn't just loves to write books, but loves to read them as well.

Find X By Grace Q Song (Grades 10+)

Grace Q Song is an Chinese American poet specialising in short-forms and poetry. Achieving success and recognition on the teen writing scene, her words have been feature in collections such as Best Microfiction, Best Small Fiction, and more. "Find X", a microfiction work selected into the 2020 Best of Net anthology. From Laura Billow, an editorial intern at Passages North, where the piece was first published: "Grace Q. Song's "Find X" made me question the way I view the world and all its wonders. Her story is like an adult version of a child's imagination running wild inside the unknown."

The Shampoo By Elizabeth Bishop (Grades 7-9)

Elizabeth Bishop was an artist in the 1900's. She is known to be able to catch significant scenes in a dramatically effective way. Bishop is a queer artist, some called her the lesbian poet. She attended Walnut School for the Arts which is an elite program in order to get her degree of arts. Her piece Shampoo is a lot poem about her and her partner taking a bath and taking care of each other. The poem is short but captures a lot of emotions in that one picture. The piece is a metaphor for time and includes the imagery of nature. She implores this through the washing of her partners hair. The line “They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed,” talks about how their memories will last despite their time together slowly fading.

Her Blue Body Full of Light By Warsan Shire (Grades 4-6)

Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Her Blue Body Full of Light is found in Warsan's collection of work Her Blue Body that explores the complexities in liife including heritage, cultural sensitivity, trauma and womanhood. This poem, through imagery, explores the impact of cancer. Mirroring the first poem in the collection, Her Blue Body Full of Light ends off the collection, a final testamony to friendship and loss.

Jazz Jiv Jam By Kwame Alexander (Grades 1-3)

"Poetry is a lot like music. Poetry has rhythm and it can rhyme like a song. Jazz Jive Jam is a fun poem about the power of music. It's by poet Kwame Alexander, who dedicated the poem to another famous poet, Langston Hughes.

Kwame Alexander is the award-winning author of many books for kids, including the basketball verse novel, The Crossover. Langston Hughes was a poet famed for writing poems influenced by jazz music. He was part of the ""Harlem Renaissance"" in the 1920s when many African-American artists, writers, and musicians produced remarkable works of art."

Mine Eyes are Lean By Ins Choi (Grades 10+)

Ins Choi is an asian poet who wrote the poem “Mine Eyes Are Lean” addressing the struggles and hardships of being an Asian actor. Choi addresses how having lean or smaller looking eyes does not define the perspective he has on the world and despite the racist views the society has upon actors, they are able to achieve grand things. He addresses the unstable income of minority groups and the unequal pay. He dedicated this piece to the famous actors Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park. He is also the producer of Kim’s Convience a show about what it’s like to run a small store on the corner of a busy street as a Korean family.

Father's Advice By Allison Albino (Grades 7-9)

Currently a teacher at The Dalton School in New York, Allison Albino is also a celebrated Filipina American poet. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and earned an MA in French Literature from NYU. Her poems have been published in Poetry Northwest, Aperion Review, and the They Rise Like a Wave poetry anthology.

"Father's Advice" discusses the tension between first and second generation immigrant families as they struggle to deal with the racism and prejudice faced by people of colour. Published under the name "Advice from my Immigrant Father", this poem was also a finalist for the 2017 Joy Harjo Poetry Award.

The World is About to End and my Grandparents are in Love By Kara Jackson (Grades 4-6)

Kara Jackson is a 23-year-old singer/songwriter, musician and writer. She was born and raised in Oak Park Illinois and is a graduate of the Oak Park and River Forest High School poetry program. Jackson released her debut album "Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?" in april of 2023. She became the National Youth Poet Laureate at the age of 19 in 2019. She held that title from 2019-20. Jackson was chosen as a National You Poet Laureate because she was both an amazing poet at such a young age but also because she used her voice in engage youth all over with the issues that effect young women of colour. This specific poem "The World is About to End and my Grandparents are in Love" is about the strenght of her grandparents love. It shows that through all the things the worlds may throw at them, her grandparents will love each other.

Speak Up By Janet Wong (Grades 1-3)

Award winning author Janet Wong was born in California, the child of a Chinese Father and a Korean Mother. However, growing up, she spoke neither Chinese nor Korean. She is the author of over 30 works of children's literature including picture books and poetry anthologies and her work has also been highlighted in numerous poetry anthologies not written by her. Most recently, Janet Wong received the 2021 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children.