• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2020 April #2
  Geometry. How many sides to a box? This concrete poem, its words curling into the shape of the number six, opens an unusual and powerful book of poetry. Henry Box Brown, born enslaved in 1815 or 1816, famously had himself shut into a wooden crate in Virginia and mailed to freedom in Philadelphia. In a series of sixain poems, the author interprets Brown's autobiography, telling his story in urgent, compelling language. The love and comfort Brown finds with his wife, Nancy, and their children changes to despair when his family is sold and sent to another state. With little left to lose, he proceeds with the perilous escape. Mixed-media illustrations combine thickly textured figures and backgrounds, collage, and painted, folded paper to create images with three-dimensional qualities. As the illustrator says in her note, the pictures convey deep suffering, hope, and determination. Cubic shapes appear frequently, echoing and amplifying the six lines of each poem. Intended for older readers than Henry's Freedom Box (2007), the book artfully expresses difficult truths while being mindful of a child audience. Grades 3-6. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.

Carole Boston Weatherford, a New York Times best-selling author and poet, was named the 2019 Washington Post Children&;s Book Guild Nonfiction Award winner. Her numerous books for children include the Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor Book Becoming Billie Holiday, illustrated by Floyd Cooper; the Caldecott Honor Books Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, illustrated by Ekua Holmes, which was also a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book; and the critically acclaimed Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library, illustrated by Eric Velasquez. Carole Boston Weatherford lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Michele Wood is an illustrator, painter, filmmaker, and designer with a master&;s in divinity from Christian Theological Seminary. She has won numerous awards for her illustration work, including a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, as well as a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom is her first book with Candlewick Press. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.