Featured Children's Collection

Ordinary People with Extraordinary Superpowers© is an award winning, nationally recognized, groundbreaking, powerful series on parental incarceration and its impact on youth and justice impacted families. In this collection, Noura takes the reader on a journey that centers the lived experiences of a justice-impacted Arab American, Muslim family, navigating the challenges of having an incarcerated loved one. The reader gains a critical, nuanced perspective about Noura's culture, faith, and community, as they struggle to be seen, valued, and heard within the collective struggle for equity and inclusion.

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About The Author

Reda A. Taleb is an award-winning, nationally recognized decarceration advocate. She is a native Detroiter, and the proud daughter of Lebanese Muslim immigrants. Reda's transformative leadership is deeply rooted in 20 years of nonprofit experience that spans civic, legal, entrepreneurial, and social justice movements across the United States. She is a certified trauma informed healing facilitator, sought after speaker, spoken word poet, author, and grassroots servant community leader.

All children need books where they can see themselves represented in the characters who share their lived experiences - intersecting identities, dreams, ideas, culture, faith, pain, trauma, challenges, grief, love, hope, family, belonging, and the journeys associated with all of these experiences. Like many others from the MENASA Community (Middle East North Africa South Asia), Reda yearned to see herself and her community's lived experiences authentically and accurately represented in the books/curriculum used throughout her schooling. The erasure of her community, by the federal government and others, sparked her writing career, and passion for reclaiming that narrative through storytelling that is aimed at amplifying her community's voices, while also preserving those stories for generations to come.

Shaping that narrative will require us all to challenge the negative stereotypes and misconceptions we were taught, and to center the most marginalized voices among us - justice impacted and others - as we struggle towards a more just and equitable world. Reda aims to leverage storytelling for cultivating healing, joy, and collective liberation through re-imagining a world with less cages and more community care.

Reda is the recipient of the ASU Champion for Child Well Being Founder's Award, the MENA Chamber of Commerce Author of the Year Award, the UM-Dearborn Distinguished Alum of the Year Award, and a Trailblazer Feature in the Cooley Law School Benchmark Magazine.