If it wasn’t for Carol, we never would have worked together in the first place. The book was the brainchild of Lerner Editorial Director Carol Hinz.

The aim was to write about universal subjects with the topic of race as a through line, which turned into Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes and Friendship. This all started with an email from one poet (Irene) to another (Charles) in February 2015, with an invitation to work on poems for a potential book from Lerner Publishing Group. The poets discuss the origins of the project and the responsibility they felt to do justice to the survivors-and to their living descendants.Īfrican Town is your third literary collaboration. In many voices and poetic forms, Latham and Waters powerfully chronicle their story. After the Civil War, the group’s survivors created a community that still exists today, now called Africatown.

In 1860, decades after the federal government had banned the importation of slaves, a group of 110 Africans were forcibly brought to the United States and enslaved. Their third book together, African Town, is a novel in verse for teen readers about historical events known by far too few Americans. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.Poets Irene Latham and Charles Waters have collaborated on two books for young readers. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse.

African Town by Irene Latham