Nonfiction texts demand critical literacy, as evidenced by these teachers' experience teaching Phillip Hoose's "Claudette Colvin: Twice toward Justice" with ninth graders. In addition to selecting high-quality nonfiction, the authors are committed to high impact teaching of those texts. For the authors that means supporting students' literacy skills, students' understanding of diverse perspectives, and their engagement. Powerful nonfiction means quality content and form. The authors argue that teachers can design informational reading curricula most powerfully by embedding a critical literacy approach that foregrounds social justice in both the selection of texts and literacy practices with which teachers ask students to engage. Simply selecting an award-winning nonfiction title didn't guarantee that the authors would find both the content and text features they sought. The practice of critical reading of informational text was a gateway: deepening students' understandings of histories as complex, nuanced, researched, and subjective retellings.