(2) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Bryan's vibrant, colorful, and moving illustrations accompany a selection of Giovanni's poems (new and previously published). Topics range widely (dance, self-reflection, nature, friendship); illustrations affirm the beauty and worth of black and brown children. Several poems recall slavery and the civil rights movement, providing a historical source of strength and courage. It's a combination of poetry and art that will bring readers back again and again.

Reviewer: Michelle H. Martin | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2018

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Drawing on Matisse, seemingly, as inspiration in technique, color, line, and shape, Bryan crafts vivid paper collages to illustrate a selection of water-related poetry by Langston Hughes. The construction-paper palette--a rainbow of pastels, jewel tones, browns, and grays--vibrates with energy. Happy faces, in a variety of dark complexions, smile up from boats and riverbanks, populating a brilliant world suffused with light.

Reviewer: Thom Barthelmess | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2015

(3) 4-6 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Photographs by Bill McGuinness. With vintage and contemporary photographs, original artwork and illustration, and lyrical evocations of Maine's landscape, this book explores Bryan's creative life. Readers will learn of his setbacks, tenaciousness, and artistic and philosophical prowess. The volume's scattered format doesn't do Bryan's books justice. However, the expansiveness and exuberance of the artist and his work carry the day.

Reviewer: Barbara Bader | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2009

(1) 4-6 Using only cut-paper and clamorous, swirling, out-of-sight colors, Bryan sets three spirituals to pictures that are dynamic, monumental, and stirring. Throughout, the imagery is brilliant. Bryan has long been known for his exuberant decorative motifs, but in this instance, with three sets of lyrics that are themselves all imagery, his scope widens. With words and music appended: exciting, absorbing, immensely moving.

Reviewer: Barbara Bader | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2007

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan & Jan Spivey Gilchrist. Bryan and Gilchrist illustrate Gilchrist's celebratory poem ("Have you seen my country? Seen my magic skies?...Have you seen my people? We hail from every shore") in alternating spreads. Bryan's are riotously colored, swirling paeans to nature; Gilchrist's are quieter dreamlike portraits of children. The contrast in the artists' styles, plus the propulsive page turns, make for a successful poem-as-picture-book.

Reviewer: Martha V. Parravano

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. "Our Caribbean Creole speech had become established as 'Bad Talk,'" says Berry in a foreword to this fine collection of poems evoking his school years in 1930s Jamaica. The poet's sensitivity to different modes of English underlies his deft handling of the relationship between language and meaning. Bryan's graciously composed illustrations present the budding writer and friends in vibrant black and white. Ind.

Reviewer: Joanna Rudge Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2004

(4) 4-6 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. These poems are divided into four topics: The Self and the Inner World, Where We Live, Anybody's Family, and the Wide Imagination (decorative illustrations introduce each section). Some poems occasionally catch fire, but not for more than a line or two. The collection shows that children can think about and play with words to rich effect; what is seldom apparent is what readers are expected to gain from these less-than-revelatory efforts.

Reviewer: Roger Sutton | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2000

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. While serving as a missionary in Liberia during the twenties, Lorenz Graham was intrigued by hearing Bible stories told in West African idiom, and he collected many of the stories, publishing them here in 1946. Ashley Bryan's magnificent black-and-white woodblock illustrations lend an added power and dignity to the text of this most unusual and captivating book.

Reviewer: Terri Schmitz

(4) 4-6 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Thirteen poems encompassing an ever-widening perspective use the art of weaving as an overly obvious metaphor to explore the life and experiences of a mixed-race young girl who is herself "a pleasing / living, breathing tapestry / christened Aneesa Lee." As colorful as the yarn Aneesa works with, the tempera and gouache paintings burst with "berry, apricot, and cherry / Lemon, tangerine, and peach." Glos.

Reviewer: Carolyn Shute

(2) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Six Langston Hughes Christmas poems, unexceptional in themselves, evoke from Ashley Bryan paintings--of the Wise Men, of the Holy Family, of a certain shepherd--that combine traditional iconography and composition with his own African-inflected language of exploding patterns, colors, forms. For children of color especially but for all children prospectively, Bryan brings the Nativity home.

Reviewer: | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 1998

(3) 4-6 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Featuring strong repetition, lively dialogue, and morals pithily wrought, these six Liberian animal tales will be a boon for story hour. Audiences will enjoy the humor (try "Why Spider Has a Big Butt"), and storytellers will appreciate the good notes and illuminating glossary. Bib.

Reviewer: Roger Sutton

(3) K-3 Illustrated by Ashley Bryan. The first page of each double-page spread poses an intriguing African riddle-poem ("I have a house / that has no door"), while the facing page offers many possible answers in Bryan's exuberant sun-bright illustrations, which evoke the African landscape and its inhabitants. Children and adults will delight in solving the riddles. Source notes and answers provided.

Reviewer: Pamela McCuen