Brown Girls Do Ballet: Celebrating Diverse Girls Taking Center Stage

Gr 1-4–Photographs of brown girls of all ages, shapes, skin tones, and abilities are the star of this empowering ode to the grace and beauty of dancing brown bodies. With the powerful opener “yes, you there/ with the thick curl in your hair/ and the deep, dark hues of melanin/ buried down within your skin. Brown girl/ you were born to take that stage,” Wallace-McMillian and Brown-Wood craft a rhyming text paired with images of girls bearing broad smiles and clear delight in movement (“poem of a body paired with music”). The text subtly nods to an unseen audience “so blessed/ to see you in motion” and Black Girl Magic (“now stretch and twist and/ leap and keep/ that magic burning brightly”), while the photos offer subtle nods to ballet’s often racist history (one Black girl in a group of white girls, wearing “flesh-colored” tights that are all pink, for example). Paired together, text and image send the fierce message not just that ballet is for everyone, but that brown girls, too, have the right to move, to take up space, and to be seen. An ideal nonfiction companion text to Vashti Harrison’s Caldecott-winning Big, this is a joyful, hopeful celebration.