With her young adult historical fiction, Copper Son (available in the Briggs Library), award winning author and educator, Sharon Draper, takes us on a journey with young Amari as she is brutally captured by slave traders, her African home and family destroyed, and shipped across the Atlantic to be sold to work on a plantation. As she attempts to hold on to her memories of home and the essence of her true self in spite of the cruel conditions she is forced to endure, Amari looks towards the future and escape. Inspired by her visit to the slave castles of Ghana, Draper has shared that this is the book of her heart, and in her research she found in America the opposite of those slave castles, a fortress of freedom for those few slaves who were able to reach Fort Mose near St. Augustine, Florida.

Discover more…

Sharon Draper – http://sharondraper.com/

Door of No Return: Cape Coast Slave Castle, Ghana – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRb-vCqcLcs

Fort Mose – https://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/histarch/mose.htm

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