Angie Thomas, Author of The Hate You Give, Comes To Iowa!

We have started an awesome book club at Van Meter!  This is just the start as we included our high school students this time, but have plans to include middle school and elementary students too. 

My friends, and colleagues at Van Meter, Jessica Rabe and Renee Martin, and myself are the ones who are helping our students organize, plan and carry out our book club. 

For the last month, we have been reading The Hate U Give getting ready for the very special event we went to yesterday in Des Moines. 

We went to the Iowa Event Center for...

...an amazing author event DMACC Libraries planned with the author of The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas. 

We were all so excited to see Angie speak and hear her story and the power behind her book and voice.

 As we listened to Angie, we thought about the things she spoke about...

 ...and remembered the power of our voice too.  

As we think about our next book, we are going to be Skyping with teacher librarian Cicely Lewis and her students in Georgia as they share ReadWoke and the books they included in this list.  

After I heard Cicely and her students story at the School Library Journal Summit last week in Brooklyn, I told our group at Van Meter about them and the list of Read Woke books.  We are all very excited to pick one of these for our next week. 

Thank you Angie Thomas for inspiring our readers and giving us so many important things to think about from our school in Iowa.  You are truly a voice we will continue to follow and celebrate within our community. 

And thank you DMACC Libraries for making this day possible! 

You can read all about Angie Thomas here.