This is a story about one high school where I did an I author visit, novels important to students I met, and YA novels in the I’m Your Neighbor Books collections. IYNB curates and shares Immigrant and New Generation collections called “Welcoming Libraries.” Each book, and the book displays that accompany them, carry the invitation, “Read to Welcome, Read to Belong.”
There’s so much to distract the world from reading novels. Or even wondering why you would, when you could read a summary, or a nonfiction book on whatever the subject is. Why novels for teens?
In my role as a writer, I recently presented to students at Gorham High School in Maine. They came to hear a writer who often writes as a witness to the world and its people. The title of my talk was “Writing as a Witness” and I wanted to bring them the world.
I’m influenced by and in love with the vision of I’m Your Neighbor Books, the Portland-based nonprofit that puts its trust in children’s books and novels to help readers meet newcomers in their communities. The IYNB vision is that we can meet these neighbors through story. What experiences make us different from one another, and how are we so much the same?
Gorham High School students with Terry Farish. Gorham, Maine, Nov. 2025
A girl in the second assembly, 11thand 12th graders, asked if there was something I learned from being in other countries, something I brought back home with me. I loved the question and I was excited a YA novel could take her down that road, and I imagined her on her own hero’s journey. She was exploring and imagining being in the world. I told her in Kenya, I never saw anyone throw anything away. Everything is used over and over. I brought that home.
The organizer of my week in Gorham was the high school librarian, Kelly Tibbetts. The high school Civil Rights team was honoring the Day of Welcome, Because Our School Communities are for Everyone, a state-wide project in Maine. Kelly said, “We piggybacked on the Civil Rights team project.” The Day is for welcoming immigrants and refugees, and also people with disabilities, and Native Americans, the area’s First People. She also collaborated with the ILC, the Instructional Leadership Corps, a staff committee with a goal “to ensure that all students’ holidays are represented and that staff have the knowledge to support students who may be observing different religious practices.” Also, the faculty of the 10th grade English course, American Studies. They read literature about indigenous people, enslaved people, and immigrants including many recent newcomers from Asia and Africa. Lori Littlefield, the Narragansett School librarian, whose students I also visited, told me that Aspire Gorham was a major collaborator. It’s a “community-wide initiative of businesses and community organizations to connect students to professionals for career exposure.” The community of educators understand the novel is like alchemy. Novels play to our imaginations so that we can step into the experiences of others. Students’ reading can open the way to the power of their own writing.
I asked Kelly to recommend some books she and her students loved and learned from about cultures new to them. Kelly’s students follow a lot of BookToc creators so that’s part of discoverability. The following are selected books on Kelly’s list and are also in I’m Your Neighbor Books collection. Follow the links for information and resources about the books on the IYNB site.
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. All My Rage is a ferocious story about love and the impact of a family’s tragedy in Pakistan that brings a young boy, Salahudin, to live in California’s Mojavi’s Desert. All My Rage asks a lot of readers and yet Kelly’s students pass it around among themselves. Kelly describes it as a book about mental health, something students talk about and read about. Tahir portrays a tender bond between Salahudin and the girl he grows up with, Noon. The student readers are totally engaged in the lives of the teens in high school in the novel and in how they negotiate contemporary America’s prejudice and troubles with addiction in their town. Tahir is writing across humanity. When Noon and Salahudin first meet as children, Tahir writes, “they spoke a language of pain and memory.” Maybe that’s the human language readers respond to. They find themselves.
American Born Chinese. “Students constantly check this out,” Kelly says. American Born Chinese is the now-classic 2007 graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. Yang captures what I hear from many nonwhite minority students about how they want to not be the other, not be the outsider. Gene Yang’s characters make it feel like a badge.
A book I’d love to read with teens is Our Beautiful Darkness. It’s by Ondjaki, an Angolan writer and is illustrated by the graphic novelist, António Jorge Gonçalves. The book is an illustrated dialogue between two teens, set in the night in a blackout toward the end of the Angolan civil war. The pages are mostly black with streaks of the characters’ faces, eyes, feet lit by headlights and starlight.
“Can star-wishes be said out loud?” the boy narrator asks.
“Sure. Do you have one in mind?”
“It’s a tricky one. I’d wish for a rainbow, even now.”
“No one can draw a rainbow in a dark sky,” she said.
“I think the angels that steal voices can…I want a
rainbow dotted with lights, like a bridge at night.”
“A bridge?”
“To the other world. And back again. To call back
those who left when it was still their time to be here.”
The translator from the original Portuguese to English, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, writes an historical note to tell readers about the long war in Angola after the county’s war for independence from Portugal. The book is like a prayer to youth and youth’s hope.
Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian is set in a nearby fictional Lewiston, Maine next door to Gorham. Students like seeing their part of Maine in a major novel. It explores the rivalry between a soccer star and a newcomer to the team, a boy from Somalia.
A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi. Shirin, the main character, brings us into her life as a Muslim-American in the US one year after 9-11. She has always worn a hijab and does not change that tradition. Pair her story as one more account with others of the impact on Americans of the 9-11 attack. The author, Mafi, is Iranian-American. She shows us an angry 16-year old Shirin, hardened by prejudice against her, who undergoes a fascinating, unraveling of her steely indifference when she falls in love and faces a new kind of vulnerability and moral responsibility to another. It’s also about having breakdancing to live for.
When a Brown Girl Flees is by Aamna Qureshi. Kelly hopes to get her hands on this one since it’s popular and is always checked out. Qureshi’s main character, Zahra, 18 years old, runs away from her devout, Muslim home in California where one of the few choices allowed by her traditional family is to accept an arranged marriage. Students want to talk about how a person tries on different identities to be able to figure out their own and want to read novels with characters doing that, as Zahra does.
Ernesto Cisneros’ character, Efrén, in Efrén Divided is younger than the 16-18-year olds in the previous books here. He’s twelve. He lives in the America of ICE check points, ICE helicopters, ICE raids at work places. To me, it felt like young Efrén was in James Baldwin’s living room in his 1950s short story “Sonny’s Blues” in which the adults speak in hushed voices about tragic injustices to Black relatives and old friends. Efrén is confused (My mother has never done anything wrong) but he feels the fear that surrounds his family, a tension that multilingual-learner teachers in Gorham told me their students express. When Efrén’s mother is arrested by ICE, it is he and his father who exchange fearful looks as they try not to frighten younger ones. In a quick call, Efrén’s mom tells him, “I’m going to need you to take care of your brother and sister.” Efrén Divided, carefully told, is a story to help young readers understand the experience of their classmates who’ve been separated by the US government from their parents. Efrén Divided is a Pura Belpré Award winner; the author is a middle school teacher in Santa Ana, California and he has a new book, Queso, Just in Time, coming in March, 2026. You’ll find many teaching-support materials on his site: Ernesto Cisneros
The last thing the Gorham high school librarian tells me is, “We’ve created a space here where students are comfortable asking questions of newcomers. Students are comfortable meeting people from away.” Kelly wants to build up the library’s collection of novels in the languages the new students speak including Portuguese, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish. I’m Your Neighbor Books offers a valuable resource for identifying sources for multilingual books at I’m Your Neighbor Books.org/multilingual-resources/ The site’s data base offers a search by the community represented in the book and also tags books by cross-cultural theme.
Novels, with their deeply revealed characters as only novels can offer, their insistent voices, their ways of seeing, are key to a school community’s sense of belonging and welcoming.
Books mentioned:
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Putman Books
American Born Chinese, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang
MacMillan Books
Efrén Divided by Ernesto Cisneros
Quill Tree, imprint of Harper Collins
Go Home by Terry Farish and Lochan Sharma
Groundwood Books, House of Anansi
The Good Braider by Terry Farish
Marshall Cavendish/Skyscape Books
Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves,
translated from the Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Unruly is an Enchanted Lion Books imprint of picture books for teenagers
and adults. It was launched, Enchanted Lion writes, “because we believe
we never age out of pictures and visual stories.”
Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian
Knopf Books for Young Readers
Queso, Just in Time by Ernesto Cisneros
Quill Tree Books, imprint of Harper Collins
A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Taherehj
Harper Books
When a Brown Girl Flees by Aamna Qureshi
Lee & Low Books
