Don T Let My Mama Read This

Meet Hadjii. He’s got a loving family, a taste for making trouble, and a wicked sense of humor. His first book, Don’t Let My Mama Read This, is a rarity—an upbeat memoir about a blessedly normal childhood written by a natural-born storyteller. In it, he offers a warm, witty look at the pleasures and pitfalls of growing up in a close-knit Southern family, from a young man who’s just like you, only funnier.

Hadjii has a loving family, a taste for making trouble, and a wicked sense of humor. His first book is a rarity--an upbeat memoir about a blessedly normal childhood written by a natural-born storyteller. In it, he offers a warm, witty look at the pleasures and pitfalls of growing up in a close-knit Southern family.

For use in schools and libraries only. Miles teams up with three other musicians to form the Swamp Band, in a tale inspired by an American folksong.

*Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography* An Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others. A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.” With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

Celebrate the heart connection between adopted children and the forever families who welcome them with kindness, care, and unconditional love in this powerful picture book from the author of Honey Baby Sugar Child. Carol Olivia Clementine lives with Mama Rose. Mama Rose is everything—tender and sweet. She is also as stern and demanding as any good parent should be. In the midst of their happy home, Carol misses her mother and father. She longs to be with them. But until that time comes around, she learns to surrender to the love that is present. Mama Rose becomes her “home.” And Carol Olivia Clementine concludes that she loves Miss Rose, “just like a mama.” This sweet read-aloud is, on the surface, all about the everyday home life a caregiver creates for a young child: she teachers Clementine how to ride a bike, clean her room, tell time. A deeper look reveals the patience, intention, and care little ones receives in the arms of a mother whose blood is not her blood, but whose bond is so deep—and so unconditional—that it creates the most perfect condition for a child to feel safe, successful, and deeply loved.

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment?Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “social justice?”Recognizing these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the “bottlenecks” that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation – one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse – about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a “how-to” manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to “get” heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice.

" I don't think I want you around Bobby Lowe anymore-and I sure don't want him around me or Jason." Rick sat back and looked at Kylie. "Sweetheart, he's one of my oldest and best friends. I can't just 'not' see him anymore." Kylie glowered at Rick, "And I'm your wife," she pointed toward the room where Jason slept, "and that's your son. Your friend is a menace to himself, this family and anyone else he comes in contact with." Traveling through his old hometown on a photo assignment, photographer Rick Gaines stops in Zephyrhills, Florida, to visit his old friends, Mit Suggs and Bobby Lowe. Rick wants a career in New York until he runs into Kylie Simmons, an old friend from high school. Mit Suggs, the redneck, wants to drink beer and chase women-until he meets Kylie's older sister, Trina. Bobby Lowe, the mama's boy, works at his mother's Laundromat and soon joins the army. The friends pick up their relationship where they left off, and things seem to be the same. But something is about to change, taking each of them to new highs and, ultimately, to a tragic low.

"This ground-breaking book on pedagogy, research, and philosophy in teacher education expands the imagination of justice-oriented education and arts-based scholarship. Based on a multi-year study of Jones’ use of feminist pedagogies, the book seamlessly moves between classroom practice, theory, and philosophy in a way that will offer something for everyone: those who are looking for new ways of doing teacher education, those who hope to better understand philosophy, and those who seek new ways of doing inquiry and scholarship. Demonstrating through pedagogy, method, and form that we “have more power than we think” and don’t have to repeat what has been handed down to us, the creators critique the restrictions of traditional teacher education and academic discourse. This critique prompts a move outward into unpredictable spaces of encounter where a “maybe world” might be lived in education. In this way, Jones and Woglom don’t make the case for a certain kind of pedagogy or scholarly inquiry that might be repeated, but rather they invite educators and researchers to take seriously the philosophical ideas of Deleuze, Guattari, Barad, and others who argue that humans are in a constant aesthetic process of becoming with other humans, non-human life, and the material world around them. Thus, education – even teacher education – is not about reaching an already known end goal, but growing and changing through multiple ways of being and perceiving in the world. The authors call this mutant pedagogies and show one ethical path of mutating."