Black Authors & Illustrators - High School

"Henri 'Halti' Haltiwanger can charm just about anyone. But his easy smiles mask a burning ambition to attend his dream college, Columbia University. There is only one person who seems immune to Henri's charms: his 'intense' classmate and neighbor Corinne Troy. When she uncovers Henri's less-than-honest dog-walking scheme, she blackmails him into helping her change her image at school. Henri agrees, seeing a potential upside for himself. Soon what...

"Maverick feels strongly about family ties, making choices he feels necessary to help support his mom while his King father serves time, and leave him literally holding his son in a doctor's waiting room after he gets paternity test results back and his babymomma ghosts. Now the child he's raising is impacting the lives of his family and his girlfriend, and the gang life he led to support them all financially could leave them all bearing his responsibilities...

"Ada" means first daughter, means oldest girl, means most pressure. When Ada leaves home for her freshman year at a historical Black college, it's the first time that she's been able to make her own choices. As she stumbles deeper into the world of dance and explores her sexuality, she also begins to wrestle with her past-- her mother's struggle with addiction, her Nigerian father's attempts to make a home for her. Will she find the courage to shape...

"Sixteen-year-old Tessa Johnson has never felt like the protagonist in her own life. She's rarely seen herself reflected in the pages of the romance novels she loves. The only place she's a true leading lady is in her own writing--in the swoony love stories she shares only with Caroline, her best friend and #1 devoted reader. When Tessa is accepted into the creative writing program of a prestigious art school, she's excited to finally let her stories...

"Harlem teenager Nala is looking forward to a summer of movies and ice cream until she falls in love with the very woke Tye and pretends to be a social activist." --

High school junior Mia, who hates romantic comedies, must endure the "meet-cute" encounters her best friends set up to help her find a date for her sister's wedding. Mia hates rom-coms. They're silly, contrived, and not at all realistic. She's more interested in things like how to handle living with her bridezilla sister, Sam, who's never appreciated Mia, and surviving junior year juggling every school club offered and acing all of her classes. So...

After falling for Kate, her unexpected death sends Jack back in time to the moment they first met. He soon learns that his actions have consequences when someone else close to him dies. --

"School's out, senior year is over, and Isaac Martin is ready to kick off summer. His last before heading off to college in the fall where he won't have his best friend, Diego. Where--despite his social anxiety--he'll be left to make friends on his own. Knowing his time with Diego is limited, Isaac enacts a foolproof plan: snatch up a pair of badges for the epic comic convention, Legends Con, and attend his first ever Teen Pride. Just him and Diego....

"Jake Livingston is one of the few Black kids at St. Clair Prep, one of the others being his infinitely more popular older brother. To make matters worse and definitely more complicated, Jake can see the dead. In fact he sees the dead around him all the time. Most are harmless: stuck in their death loops as they relive their deaths over and over again, they don't interact often with people. But Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids...

"When hospitalized for her clinical depression, Whimsy connects with a boy named Faerry, who also suffers from the traumatic loss of a sibling, and together they work to unearth buried memories and battle the fantastical physical embodiment of their depression."--