Tracey Baptiste

Grace has always had wild red hair like no one else in her family and a birthmark on her shoulder that her mother told her was the mark of an angel. While visiting her grandmother in Trinidad, thirteen-year-old Grace sees a photograph of a stranger with a birthmark identical to hers, and begins to wonder if the reason she feels different from the rest of her family is that he is her real father.

A tour-de-force collection of stories about the black experience, by award-winning, bestselling, and emerging African American YA authors, including Tracey Baptiste.

I’m looking for a jumbie, I’m going to find a scary one. But Mama says jumbies exist only in stories. So Naya sets out on a nighttime adventure to find out for herself. No such thing, say the friends she makes along the way.  But Naya is sure that jumbies are real. Some have big mouths. Or thick fur. Or glowing skin. Or sharp teeth.

In this series, writers of some of the best-loved children's books are profiled in a series that includes character profiles and the writers' inspiration for writing children's books. Tracey Baptiste writes about Madeleine L'Engle in this installment.

Bianca has never been good at following the plan. She's more of an act-now, deal-with-the-consequences-later kind of person. But consequences can't be put off forever, as Bianca learns when she and her best friend, Lonnie, are in a terrible car crash. Waking up in the hospital, almost paralyzed by her injuries, Bianca is faced with questions she's not equipped to answer. She chooses instead to try a new virtual-reality version of Minecraft that responds to her every wish, giving her control over a world at the very moment she thought she'd lost it.

Tracey Baptiste writes about the life of the South African icon, including his early career, his fight to end apartheid, and how he became the president of South Africa.

Corinne La Mer claims she isn't afraid of anything. Not scorpions, not the boys who tease her, and certainly not jumbies. They're just tricksters made up by parents to frighten their children. Then one night Corinne chases an agouti all the way into the forbidden forest, and shining yellow eyes follow her to the edge of the trees. They couldn't belong to a jumbie. Or could they? Based on the stories she heard as a child growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Tracey Baptiste weaves folklore from the Caribbean throughout this spooky tale.

Corinne LaMer defeated the wicked jumbie Severine months ago, but things haven’t exactly gone back to normal in her Caribbean island home. Everyone knows Corinne is half-jumbie, and many of her neighbors treat her with mistrust. When local children begin to go missing, snatched from the beach and vanishing into wells, suspicious eyes turn to Corinne.
 

When an out-of-season hurricane sweeps through Corinne’s seaside village, she knows it’s not an ordinary storm. At first Corinne believes Mama D’Leau, the powerful and cruel jumbie who rules the ocean, has caused the hurricane. Then an even more ferocious storm wrecks the island, sending villagers fleeing their houses for shelter in the mountains, and Corinne discovers the chaos wasn’t caused by a jumbie, but by an angry god, Huracan.

Tracey Baptiste tells kids all about disgusting ancient Egyptian medicinal practices, culinary delicacies, and battle practices, including the dirty details of what really happens to bodies as they are prepared for mummification.

"Concise and direct, this series explores the cause-and-effect relationship between slavery and other issues, such as the abolition of slavery and the enacting of segregation. The books also examine political and economic injustices faced by African Americans, past and present, and relevant court cases. The writing is straightforward, and the authors lay out step by step how an event happened or how a law came to be. The main narrative is bolstered by sidebars featuring key players, including well-known figures such as Booker T.