Lesa Cline-Ransome (lesaclineransome.com) is the award-winning author of many critically acclaimed books for young readers, including Not Playing By the Rules: 21 Female Athletes Who Changed Sports, Young Pele: Soccer's First Star, Before She was Harriet, Overground Railroad, and Game Changers: The Story of Venus and Serena Williams. Her numerous honors include the Jane Addams Honor Award, the Christopher Award, Kirkus Best Book of the Year, SLJ Best Book of Year, and three NAACP Image Award nominations. Her debut middle grade novel, Finding Langston, received the Coretta Scott King Author Honor and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. The companion novel is Leaving Lymon. She is currently an SCBWI board member and host of KidLitTV's Past Present: Giving Past Stories New Life. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York with her family. You can follow Lesa on Twitter @lclineransome.
You may think that the story of the saxophone begins with Dexter Gordon or Charlie Parker or on a street corner in New Orleans. It really began in 1840 in Belgium with a young daydreamer named Joseph-Antoine Adolphe Sax—a boy with bad luck but great ide...[SEE MORE]