Rita Williams-Garcia Books in Order

Fifteen-year-old Joyce struggles to feel at home in her neighborhood, school, and changing body. Through dance, she searches for a place to belong and a way to express herself with greater confidence and self-respect.

Valedictorian Denzel discovers that his usual tactics cannot carry him through a Princeton summer program. Hiding his failure from his proud family, he throws himself into selling candy and a rivalry that forces him to examine his ambitions.

Sent from New York to relatives in Georgia with her baby, Gayle resents a life of church and chores. Time with her cousin and the family matriarch gradually reveals a history that changes how she imagines her future.

A young girl imagines herself escaping into a jungle as her mother tries to braid and bead her hair. Their familiar struggle becomes a lively chase through an invented wilderness, turning an everyday routine into an adventure.

Withdrawn after his mother’s death, Thulani spends his time caring for pigeons on a Brooklyn rooftop. Helping a girl after a violent attack draws him back into the world, but earning her trust requires more than a desire to protect.

Ayize goes to work in South Africa’s diamond mines and discovers the dangers faced by Black workers. The story introduces a young person’s experience of a labor system where valuable stones come at a severe human cost.

Akilah’s best friend returns from a visit to Nigeria withdrawn and silent. Determined to understand what happened during a coming-of-age ceremony, Akilah uncovers a painful secret that challenges her ideas about friendship, protection, and unanswered questions.

During one school day, an angry basketball player decides to attack a classmate over an unintended slight. A third girl knows what is coming, leaving her to choose between intervening and remaining safely outside someone else’s trouble.

Three sisters leave Brooklyn to visit the mother who abandoned them, arriving in Oakland in 1968. Instead of the holiday they imagined, a Black Panther day camp introduces them to new ideas about family, politics, and themselves.

Back in Brooklyn after their Oakland summer, Delphine and her sisters find their family changing. A new girlfriend for their father, a troubled uncle home from Vietnam, and school pressures challenge Delphine’s efforts to hold everything together.

The Gaither sisters travel to Alabama to visit relatives and encounter an old quarrel between two elderly half sisters. As Delphine learns the family’s history, an unexpected crisis tests the ties that connect them across generations.

After his blues-playing grandfather dies, Clayton’s mother forbids him from playing their shared music. Taking a harmonica and his grandfather’s hat, he runs away through New York in search of the band and a way to express his grief.

In 1860 Louisiana, an elderly plantation mistress insists on having her portrait painted despite her family’s objections. The sitting reveals intertwined generations of the Guilbert household and enslaved workers, exposing the violence and secrets sustaining their world.

Brothers Randy and Rudy tap dance on a New Orleans street, using bottle caps fixed to their shoes. Told through rhyme, their story celebrates a local performance tradition and the children who keep its rhythms alive.