Once I Was You: Finding My Voice and Passing the Mic

Emmy Award–winning journalist Maria Hinojosa adapts her New York Times bestselling, “quite simply beautiful” (BookPage) adult memoir for young readers with this special edition filled with unique content in the vein of Jason Reynolds’s Stamped. “There is no such thing as an illegal human being.” Maria ​Hinojosa is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, a bestselling author, and was the first Latina to found a national independent nonprofit newsroom in the United States. But before all that, she was a girl with big hair and even bigger dreams. Born in Mexico and raised in the vibrant neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago, Maria was always looking for ways to better understand the world around her—and where she fit into it. Here, she combines stories from her life, beginning with her family’s harrowing experience of immigration, with truths about the United States’s long and complicated relationship with the people who cross its borders, by choice or by force. Funny, frank, and thought-provoking, Maria’s voice is one you will want to listen to again and again.