It’s release party season as we’re nearing the end of Spring semester, and our design department has been aflutter with busy, busy bees churning out chapbooks and magazines, broadsheets and journals, anthologies and essay collections of our student’s heartfelt writing. Following on the heels of all the hard work the students put in crafting and editing their own writing with their tutors, we are fortunate and so grateful to work with a long list of volunteer designers, illustrators, photographers, editors and copy editors who all come together to get this work produced and sent out into the world.
The Young Author’s Book Project took place at Thurgood Marshall High this year, producing Uncharted Places: An Atlas of Being Here, essays about places of personal importance. Our on-site After-School Tutoring program in the 826 Valencia Writing Lab is wrapping up with a bilingual chapbook Look Closer/Mira de Cerca on the physicality of the body, heart and brain, examining notions of identity and self. Our newest satellite program at Buena Vista Horace Mann School has produced two publications, a precocious chapbook of third- and fourth-grade voices entitled Other Imaginary Things that Do Not Exist, in addition to a journal of poetry from middle school students, Issue 2 of Say What? magazine. We celebrated 10 years of the Straight-Up News at Everett Middle School, and printed the 50th issue of the Valencia Bay-Farer, our in-house newspaper. In collaboration with the American Conservatory Theater, our tutors worked with students at Downtown High to craft monologues and plays which they then preformed on-stage with professional actors as part of the final project, and we published in a chapbook You Belong to the Sky. And many more, too many to list! Look out for the wrap-up in the 826 Quarterly, an anthology of our student writing, published twice a year, at least. You can find all these and more for sale in the Pirate Store next time you stop by.
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