After Othella--the daughter of the town tramp in Shreveport, Louisiana--convinces her to give her baby away, 15-year-old Ruby Jean Upshaw runs away to New Orleans where nothing can erase the memories of the child she lost or quell her simmering rage at Othella for persuading her to let her baby go.

When seventeen-year-old Lucy discovers her family is under an ancient curse by an evil Elfin Knight, she realizes to break the curse she must perform three impossible tasks before her daughter is born in order to save them both.

Raven, a teenage mother and high school dropout living in a housing project, decides, with the help and sometime interference of her best friend Aisha, to study for a spelling bee which could lead to a college preparatory program and four-year scholarship.

In this harrowing tale, sixteen-year-old Precious Jones has endured a broken home under the most horrific circumstances. Impregnated by her rapist father, Precious prepares for the birth of her second child as she runs away from home and befriends a counter-culture teacher who whisks her away on a soul-searching journey.

In order to earn money for college, fourteen-year-old LaVaughn babysits for a teenage mother.

A self-portrait of a black teenage girl, big, fat, unloved, with a father who rapes her and a jealous mother who screams abuse. For Precious, as she is called, hope appears when a courageous teacher, a young black woman, bullies, cajoles and inspires her to learn to read. By the author of American Dreams.

"Cassandra McMurtrey has the best parents a girl could ask for; they've given Cass a life she wouldn't trade for the world. She has everything she needs--but she has questions, too. Like, to know who she is. Where she came from. Questions her adoptive parents can't answer, no matter how much they love her. But eighteen years ago, someone wrote Cass a series of letters. And they may just hold the answers Cass has been searching for. Alternating between...

A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life...

"When two Depression-era migrant workers, Paul and Vern, find an abandoned baby in the woods, they take it upon themselves to care for the mysterious child. When fifteen-year-old Marigold, reviled by her family after an unwanted pregnancy, loses her baby in the forest, her whole world is painted black. She's still fraught with despair when she discovers what seems to be a miraculous power within her. Coot, a child preacher on the Kansas plains, escapes...