Alice Piper Speaks Up
(Fighting for Justice #3)
Authors: Sage Andrew Romero and Loralee Sepsey
Illustrator: Morgan Thompson
Published June 2nd, 2026 by Heyday Books
Instagram: @heydaybooks | Facebook: Heyday Books
Summary: Volume 3 in the acclaimed Fighting for Justice Series for young readers: the story of a Native teenager’s history-making fight for equal education.
Alice Piper just wanted to go to public school. The year was 1923, and Alice, a Native Paiute (Nuwuvi) teenager in California, dreamed about learning from teachers, making new friends, and being respected for who she was. So when the school board refused to let her and six other Native students attend, she decided to speak up, and she sued for her right to an equal education. Alice Piper Speaks Up, the first book dedicated to this major champion of civil rights, features new research into Alice’s life and court case. Each chapter begins with lyrical verse and full-color illustrations that invite readers into Alice’s story. Paired with the poems are visually engaging sections filled with keyword definitions, historical context, timelines, primary sources, and questions that help readers relate Alice’s experience to their own lives. The text connects Alice’s case to larger themes about education, Native rights, and movements for school desegregation across the United States. The third book in Heyday’s widely acclaimed Fighting for Justice series, Alice Piper Speaks Up shows how one teen’s action resonates throughout America’s history, even now.
About the Creators:
Sage Andrew Romero is from the Tovowahamatu Numu (Big Pine Paiute) and Tuah-Tahi (Taos Pueblo) tribes. The founder and director of the AkaMya Culture Group, a nonprofit dedicated to cultural revitalization, he lives in Big Pine, California. For more info, see nama.media/sage-andrew-romero.
Loralee Sepsey is a writer and a member of the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley. Based in Santa Ana, California, she lives with her husband and their two cats. To learn more, visit her website: loraleesepsey.com.
Morgan Thompson is a Cherokee (Cherokee Nation) artist with a love for Indigenous stories. When she’s not working, she enjoys a bit of stomp dancing or some beading on the side. Visit skadoodlin.com.
Instagram Sage Andrew Romero: @digitalndn | Morgan Thompson: @skadoodlin
FacebookSage Andrew Romero: Sage Andrew Romero
Review and Educators’ Tools for Navigation: Integration of education is taught in history classes but primarily focuses on Brown v. Board of Education and it isn’t often shared that there were fights all over the country from different marginalized communities to have the right to an equal education. This book focuses on a fight 30 years before Brown v. Board of Education, when Alice Piper, a 15 year-old Paiute student, along with six other children, sued the Big Pine School District stating that they had the right to attend Big Pin School based on the 14th amendment, AND THEY WON!
This book is MADE for teaching. The creators and publisher of this book know what they are doing. Through the authors’ beautiful free verse intertwined with emotions and onomatopoeia, we experience Alice’s story along with her. Then intertwined between chapters, the nonfiction spreads tie it all together with more history and information. By combining a biography-in-verse with nonfiction information that has vocabulary, timelines, discussion questions, and photographs makes it so the book is so easily cross-curricular as well as supportive of so many language arts standards, both literary and informational.
(And I am so curious about the other two books in the series! Because if they are formatted in similar ways, this series would be perfect for literature circles where each group read a different Fighting for Justice book then shares what they learned about their activist with their classmates.)
And I love that the book ends with “Speaking Up for What’s Right: From Alice’s Day to Ours” to truly connect it all together. Really adds that extra bit to the book.
Oh, and did you know that Alice Piper Day is June 2 in California; this information is featured in the book also and is definitely a person deserving of her own day!
Discussion Questions: There are many discussion questions found scattered throughout the book, including:
- What does it mean to be respected for who you are, and to respect other for who they are?
- When was a timea family member or elder taught you an important skill?
- How would you feel if your government decided to change your family’s name?
- Some traditional Paiute names are non-lexical. Can you think of some non-lexical names commonly used today?
Flagged Passages & Spreads:
Chaptier 1: Preparing Tüba
Alice is sweaty,
sticky, and ready
to grind.
It’s almost fall in Payahuunadü
and the summer heat still lingers.
Alice, a few months into thirteen,
is helping her family prepare
the season’s first batch of pine nuts–
tüba–
into today’s meal.
Alice’s mother, Annie, places
winnowing baskets on the ground.
Alice’s sisters, Ola and Mamie,
toss handfuls of tüba inside.
The hard shells make a clickety-clack
against the willow reeds.
Chapter 4: A Day at the Day School
“Wake up, Alice,
it’s time for school.”
Alice rubs the sleep out of her eyes
and blinks at her mother.
It’s cold and so dark
that she can still see the stars
in the morning sky.
Alice has a long journey
from Soha-witü–
Fish Lake Valley–
to the Indian day school in Tovowahamatu,
almost forty miles away.
Early mornings are normal for Alice,
and if she wants to learn
as much as she can,
the day must start early.
Read This If You Love: History, Activism
Recommended For:
**Thank you to Blue Slip Media (@blue_slip_media | @blue-slip-media) for providing a copy for review!**
