Award-winning author Rob Sanders here teams with award-winning illustrator Harry Woodgate on an inspiring volume celebrating LGBTQ heroes. While such biographical compilations are not new (see the excellent Rainbow Revolutionaries, among others), this one stands out for the use of poetry to convey the meaning and importance of the heroes’ lives.
Sanders, whose middle-grade novel Blood Brothers was told in verse, here uses a wider variety of poetic forms, carefully matched with the lives of historical and contemporary LGBTQ political and social activists. He deploys the march-like beat of rhyming couplets for the poem about Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington; creates a duet of alternating voices for Michael McConnell and Jack Baker, the first gay couple legally married in the United States (in 1971!); uses limericks for José Sarria, the fun and flamboyant performer and political candidate; and crafts a diamante poem, a seven-line poem in the shape of a diamond, for Cleve Jones, who first envisioned the AIDS Quilt. Other figures here, whose importance is portrayed with similarly appropriate poetic forms, include Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Marsha P. Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, Harvey Milk, and Pete Buttigieg.
A few paragraphs of prose on each figure offer more details about the person’s life, adding informational substance to the emotional connections that the poems create. Backmatter includes a glossary and note about pronouns; short explanations of each poetic form; an author’s note, and suggestions for additional reading.
Whether for home enjoyment or school use—in either history or English classes—this is a highly recommended title.
