IRL: Resources for Teaching YA Nonfiction

The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater Project Contributors: Payton Davis, Gabriela Chavez,  Raeanne Cendejas, Macy Biography of the Author Dashka Slater The Author's Village Dashka Slater is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in such publications as Newsweek, Salon, The New York Times Magazine , and Mother Jones. She received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Slater currently resides in California, where she publishes children’s picture books in addition to longer fiction and nonfiction works. Her work in journalism even fueled the production of 57 bus , as the novel is based on a New York Times article that she wrote on the accident in Oakland. According to an interview with BookPage, while writing 57 Bus Slater was not sure that her version of YA literature was going to stick within a market that didn’t produce much similar to it. However, the inventive novel has been awarded many awards including, ...

Written and illustrated by Don Brown Reviewed by Leslie, Jesus, Nikita, and Timothy Review:       Don Brown’s graphic novel, The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees is a superb exploration and account of the Syrian refugee crisis that began in 2011 when thousands of Syrians fled Syria due to the terror of the Syrian Civil War. Don Brown begins the graphic novel by setting the scene of the igniting incident of the crisis, painting a picture of a country and a community of people on the cusp of revolution. Then, throughout the rest of the story Brown follows the Syrian people that have fled their country through the many trials and tribulations that they face on their journey towards a refugee and safe haven. Brown details the different pains and horrors that the refugees experience in search of asylum - focusing on the group of refugees as a whole rather than just a few specific characters - through the combination of his simplistic, but effective, w...