The Diverse Families bookshelf was created and funded through numerous grants. Due to lack of additional grants and the loss of key personnel, the project has come to an end. We have tremendously enjoyed creating this database and hope that it can help bring readers and books together.
This collection contains materials from the DIVerse Families bibliography organized by genre.
DIVerse Families is a comprehensive bibliography that demonstrates the growing diversity of families in the United States. This type of bibliography provides teachers, librarians, counselors, adoption agencies, children/young adults, and especially parents and grandparents needing to empower their children with materials that reflect their families.
Browse by Genre:
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Adopted like Me: My Book of Adopted Heroes
Ann Angel
Adopted Like Me is a children's picture book that tells the stories of famous and inspirational people, all of whom were adopted. Read about great musicians like Bo Diddley, politicians like Nelson Mandela, stars like Marilyn Monroe as well as inventors, athletes, a princess skilled in judo and fencing, and many more.
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All Kinds of Friends, Even Green!
Ellen B. Senisi
In a school assignment, seven-year-old Moses, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, reflects that his neighbor's disabled iguana resembles him because they both have figured out how to get where they want to be in different ways than those around them.
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A Picture Book of Helen Keller
David A. Adler
Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880. When she was just a year and a half old, she was left blind and deaf from an illness. In a very simple text, the author covers the important facts of Helen Keller's life. Besides her extraordinary work with teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan, she published several books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Her bravery, brilliance, and spirit brought hope to millions of disabled people.
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A Picture Book of Louis Braille
David A. Adler
Presents the life of the nineteenth-century Frenchman, accidentally blinded as a child, who originated the raised dot system of reading and writing used throughout the world by the blind.
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As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl
John Colapinto
In 1967, after a baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment. On the advice of a renowned expert in gender identity and sexual reassignment, the boy was surgically altered to live as a girl. This book is the human drama of one man's - and one family's - amazing survival in the face of odds.
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Autism and Me: Sibling Stories
Ouisie Shapiro
In these moving essays, children tell their stories of what it is like to live with a sibling who has autism.
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Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope
Nikki Grimes
When David asks his mother about the man on television, she tells him the story of Barack Obama, discussing his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his parents' divorce, and his desire to help others.
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Beyoncé: Singer-Songwriter, Actress, and Record Producer
Chuck Bednar
Presents the life and career of the pop singer, from her childhood and early career with Destiny's Child to her solo career in music and motion pictures.
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Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
Susan Kuklin
Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages, augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender, and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves.
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Binge
Tyler Oakley
Pop-culture phenomenon, social rights advocate, and the most prominent LGBTQ+ voice on YouTube, Tyler Oakley brings you Binge, his New York Times bestselling collection of witty, personal, and hilarious essays. For someone who made a career out of over-sharing on the Internet, Tyler has a shocking number of personal mishaps and shenanigans to reveal in his first book: experiencing a legitimate rage blackout in a Cheesecake Factory; negotiating a tense standoff with a White House official; crashing a car in front of his entire high school, in an Arby’s uniform; projectile vomiting while bartering with a grandmother; and so much more. In Binge, Tyler delivers his best untold, hilariously side-splitting moments with the trademark flair that made him a star.
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Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin
The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.
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Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
Rebecca Walker
In a memoir about the power of race to share one's personal identity, the daughter of Jewish father and African-American mother recalls her confusing but ultimately rewarding life lived between two conflicting ethnic identities. When Mel Leventhal married Alice Walker during the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, his mother declared him dead and did not reconcile until after the birth of her first grandchild.
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Booker T. Washington (Biographies of Biracial Achievers)
Jim Whiting
Biography of the African American slave who was freed, got an education, and opened Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and devoted his life to black education.
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Born Both: An Intersex Life
Hida Viloria
From Hida Viloria, writer and intersex activist, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people. Hida Viloria was raised as a girl but discovered early on that he/r body was different. Unlike most people who are born intersex in the first world--meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female--Hida had the freedom to explore the person s/he was born to be because he/r parents did not agree to have he/r sex characteristics surgically altered at birth. It wasn't until s/he was 26 and encountered the term "intersex" in a San Francisco newspaper that s/he finally had a name for he/r difference. That's when s/he began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders--to be both and neither. As s/he began to reach out to others like he/r, however, Hida discovered that most intersex people had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to "correct" their bodies. Eager to help end this practice, Hida came out as intersex at a national and then international level. By answering the question "Are you a boy or a girl?" with "I'm both," Hida's helped blaze a trail for people--particularly intersex and genderqueer/non-binary people--to celebrate the middle space where male and female are not separate and opposite but entwined. Born Both is an intimate and powerful account of Hida's search for authentic identity and love in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or.
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Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson's poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
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Cathy Williams, Buffalo Soldier
Sharon K. Solomon
Cathy Williams was the first documented woman to enlist in the United States Army. By disguising herself as a man after the Civil War, she joined the Buffalo Soldiers in protecting the expanding Western states. Cathy's efforts as a soldier earned her an adequate salary and a small place in history.
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Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London
Andrea Warren
Warren takes you on a journey into the workhouses, slums, factories, and schools of Victorian England, and into the world of Dickens. She shows how he used his pen to do battle on behalf of the poor, becoming one of the great reformers of his or any age.
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Clara Hale: Mother to Those Who Needed One
Bob Italia
Presents the life of the New York woman whose love of children led her to establish a foster care program to help babies born addicted to drugs.
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David Blaine: Illusionist and Endurance Artist
Chuck Bednar
A look at the life and career of the famous magician.
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Days with Dad
Nari Hong
A young girl and her wheelchair-bound father share many special moments because she treasures all they can do together, although he apologizes for not being able to do more.
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Derek Jeter: All-Star Major League Baseball Player
Chuck Bednar
A look at the life and career of the famous baseball player.
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Dreamers
Yuyi Morales
An illustrated picture book autobiography in which award-winning author Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story.
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Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy
Andrea Warren
Chronicles the experiences of an orphaned Amerasian boy from his birth and early childhood in Saigon through his departure from Vietnam in the 1975 Operation Babylift and his subsequent life as the adopted son of an American family in Ohio.
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Extraordinary People with Disabilities
Deborah Kent and Kathryn A. Quinlan
Profiles seven dozen people throughout history with various physiccal or mental disabilities.