Raven Leilani – Black History Month 2021 #BlackHistoryMonth
In celebration of this year’s Black History Month, I’ve decided to focus on some awesome black authors who are currently making history. Raven Leilani’s debut novel Luster was a revelation in many ways. The book is spellbinding (to use publishing world, book-jacket speak) but also terribly funny and tender. It’s the kind of book where you are afraid to google the author’s age because you know from the brilliant freshness of the prose that she will be younger than you, while at the same time you are hoping you could ever be half as wise, or see things quite as sharply. In other words, if you haven’t already, read this book.
“I didn’t want the Black characters in this book to be defined primarily by the pain that they can endure, or the isolation that they are trying to reconcile,” says Leilani. “And in this way, bringing two Black women together, though they are in two different parts of their lives of the self-actualization, it was a way to explore the joy of community, the complexity of community.”
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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