Lee Bennett Hopkins: My name is Lee Bennett Hopkins, and I am talking with you about my book, Amazing Faces, a Book of Poems. It was joyous to create Amazing Faces. How lucky I am to bring the words of so many different poets into your lives. Faces are fascinating. Faces of babies, teenagers, parents, grandparents. Our faces. Each of our faces mirror emotions, whether we are happy, sad, excited, proud, or lonely. To do Amazing Faces, I selected 16 poems to show universal feelings each one of us share.

The book begins with the face of a newborn baby, and a poem by Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Amazing Face, where part of the poem tells us, amazing, your face, amazing. It shows there were betrayals to follow, porches to wave from, wonder from, play on. A Latino child in Jane Medina's Me Times Two proudly boasts she is fluent in two languages, and does twice as much as most people do, 'cause most speak one. But I speak two. Jude Mandell, in the poem I Am One, addresses bullying. Bullying of a young boy who's left out from things he'd enjoy doing. A boy who states, if only one day you could see what fun you'd have being friends with me.

Other poems in Amazing Faces deal with how proud a brother is of his brother, a football hero. How excited an Asian-American is to live in such a bustling place as Chinatown, with the smells and sights that surround her. A mother and father who warmly welcome a young soldier home from war. A firefighter whose face has trickles of sweat down wind-bitten cheeks, coated with ash but with a flash of blue eyes that twinkle with strength and triumphant pride, in Mary E. Cronin's Firefighter's Face.

When you get a chance, look at your face. Your amazing face. Come to poetry. There is nothing like it.