Poems in the Attic

Award-winning poet Nikki Grimes presents a tender poetry collection where a young girl learns about her mother, the child of an Air Force serviceman.

During a visit to her grandma’s house, a young girl discovers a box of poems in the attic, poems written by her mother when she was growing up. Her mother’s family often moved around the United States and the world because her mother’s father was in the Air Force. Over the years, her mother used poetry to record everything she saw and did in the many places their family lived.

Reading the poems and sharing those experiences through her mother’s eyes, the young girl feels closer to her mother than ever before. To let her mother know this, she creates a gift: a book with her own poems and copies of her mother’s. And when she returns her mother’s poems to the box in the attic, she leaves her own poems too, for someone else to find, someday.

Using free verse for the young girl’s poems and tanka for her mother’s, master poet Nikki Grimes creates a tender intergenerational story that speaks to every child’s need to hold onto special memories of home, no matter where that place might be.

Nikki Grimes, New York Times bestselling author of more than one hundred books for young people, is well-known for the poetry that appears in both her picture books and novels. Grimes is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Grimes lives in Corona, California. To learn more, visit nikkigrimes.com.

Elizabeth Zunon has illustrated several books for children, including Bottle Tops: The Art of El Anatsui, published by Lee & Low Books. Zunon spent her childhood in Ivory Coast, West Africa, and now lives with her husband and young son in Albany, New York, where she was born. Her honors include Bank Street’s Best Children’s Books of the Year list, the Children’s Africana Book Award Honor, and a Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People selection. To learn more, visit lizzunon.com.