Humanities Medal, the Sibert Medal, the Orbis Pictus Award, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and was selected to give the 2006 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. Mr. Freedman lives in New York City and travels widely to research his books.

Alexander Weiss had just started his job as a California state park ranger on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay when he came across an old abandoned building. Off limits to the public, its windows boarded up, the two-story wooden structure stood dark and deserted behind a barbed wire fence. On an impulse, Weiss decided to venture inside and look around.

He pulled open the door. The floor creaked as he entered. The electricity had long since been turned off, so he found his way through the empty roomsbusy immigration station, where people hoping to enter the United States were examined and questioned and often held for days or weeks or even months while immigration officials decided their fate. For many immigrants, Angel Island was the gateway to a new life in America. But for others—those who were denied entry to the United States—it was a locked gate through which they caught just a glimpse of America before they were sent back to their native land.

While waiting for their cases to be decided, Chinese immigrants carved or painted row after row of poems on the walls of their detention barracks, telling of their long voyages from China, their confinement on the lonely island, their longing for families back home, their hopes, frustration, anger, and despair. And