Martha Southgate is the author of the award-winning young adult title Another Way to Dance, as well as the 2002 adult novel The Fall of Rome, which, with its prep-school setting, has attracted readers young and old. Both Southgate's novels deal with the topic of race, of belonging, of fitting in, and of remaining true to oneself. In Another Way to Dance a young black dancer confronts racism when she wins a scholarship to a prestigious, almost all-white dance company, while in The Fall of Rome the only black faculty member at an exclusive prep school is forced to examine his own denial of his race by a young black student.

Between Two Worlds

Southgate herself grew up in a world much like that of her protagonists, and she detailed that upbringing in a 1987 Essence magazine piece titled "Between Two Worlds." Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, she attended...