Education.
Since 1998, Mosaic magazine has celebrated the work of Black and Latinx writers. Through the magazine and Mosaic Literary Conference, we build on this history by creating workshops and lesson plans that help educators, families, and community organizations use literature and culture to inspire curiosity, learning, and a love of reading. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
The Numbers
Few residents of 20th-century Black communities grew up without hearing about The Numbers. While 21st-century America gets giddy every time the Mega Millions or the Powerball Jackpot soars into the hundred million (or, as was the record-breaking case in January 2016, cracks a billion), African Americans are traditionally well-versed in The Numbers, the side-hustle of many a striving, struggling Black family. This lesson plan focuses on two informative books on the subject: Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Bridgett Davis’ The World According to Fannie Davis. Click here to preview and download the lesson plan. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
Kalief Browder
Accused of a crime he did not commit and not willing to accept a guilty plea, Kalief Browder spent three years on Rikers Island, primarily in solitary confinement, while awaiting trial. Two years after his release, he committed suicide –he was 22 years old. Kalief Browder’s life has come to symbolize all that is wrong with policing and the soul-grinding policies of the American penal system. This lesson plan will use his life as a nexus to explore media representation, racial criminalization, and judicial inequality. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
The Fire This Time
Jesmyn Ward is the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the novel Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award. An associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University, Ward also wrote the memoir Men We Reaped. With her fourth book, The Fire This Time, Ward works in the African tradition of call and response, recognizing Baldwin’s 1963 Fire as a call that the author-activist issued through time and across Movements to his literary descendants. Those descendants, Gen X and Millennial writers like Edwidge Danticat, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Emily Raboteau, and Mitchell S. Jackson, respond, with meaningful reflections, stirring meditations, and calls to action, all collected in Ward’s 21st century Fire. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde (1934 – 1992) described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” A champion for the liberation of all dispossessed people, Lorde concentrated her activism on the struggle for freedom for Black lesbians. Her poetry has impacted the lives of countless diverse people around the world, enabling active readers of her work to move closer to their own personal freedom. Lorde’s work is important because it is art; it is also important because it is activism. Lorde worked as a freedom writer to dismantle homophobia, racism, classism, and sexism. She also famously said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The hope is these lesson plans will help give a new generation of learners the experience, information, and inspired vision to build their own houses. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
James Baldwin: In Perpetuity
There are many lenses through which to view literary great James Baldwin. These lesson plans examine Baldwin the author activist and provide a historic context for young people to better understand that #BlackLivesMatter is a fresh iteration of the centuries-long Black freedom struggle.
Civil Rights struggles are as varied and diverse as the beautiful diversity within the Black community. For contemporary youth to begin to know and appreciate the revolutionary aspects of Black life, they must begin to know and appreciate more than what most schools teach. One way to examine the deep engagement of countless African Americans in our own liberation is to study the contributions of one of them. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
Black Poets Speak Out/BlackLivesMatter
Black Poets Speak Out (BPSO) began as a response to a conversation initiated by Amanda Johnston. Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, Jonterri Gadson and Sherina Rodriguez-Sharpe responded to the call with ideas, suggestions and various plans of action. What resulted was a hashtag video campaign house on a tumblr site featuring hundreds of videos from Black poets reading in response to the grand jury’s decision on November 24 not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who murdered Mike Brown. According to organizer Mahogany Browne, the project’s purpose “is to centralize in one space hundreds of poems, songs, prayers and testimonies speaking on behalf of black mothers, black fathers, black brothers and sisters—thousands of voices insisting on justice. BlackPoetsSpeakOut videos are a collective outcry for our black lives.” CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS
Jamel Shabazz
At the intersection of instinct and genius we find Jamel Shabazz. With a camera in his hand and love in his heart for his people and his community, Shabazz makes you stop, look and wonder. Shabazz, a photographer from Red Hook, Brooklyn followed his gut, triggered to shoot what many would find mundane; street culture in the early 80s. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LESSON PLANS.