Learning how to choose and use diverse literature for students to read and as an inspiration for their writing has never been more important, as more than 50% of today's students in U.S. classrooms do not identify as white. This teaching tip explores the importance of finding high-quality diverse literature for all learners and how to use these books as mentor texts for writing based on the traits of writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. The author models combining high-quality diverse literature and the traits for readers in a fully developed lesson plan that leads to writing in different modes (narrative, informational, opinion/argument), based on the picture book "A Different Pond" by Bao Phi.