Deep appreciation to Gabriela Paola Franco Peña!
She is our designer extraordinaire and without her,
for two pressure-filled weeks, there would be no book.
72 pages, 56 photos, 44 essays, poems, and reports –
all adding up to one story of love, loss, history, mystery,
healing, hope, reclamation, and anticipation
in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.,
all adding up to one story of love, loss, history, mystery,
healing, hope, reclamation, and anticipation
in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.,
accomplished in a whirlwind six weeks!
Stay tuned for more news about the book
and how to get your copy. Email me
(caroline@carolinebrewerbooks.com) about
how to bring Nature-Wise professional
development training to your educators
and/or student literacy and the environment workshops to your school.
For a limited number of schools this school year,
a book like this, on a smaller scale, can be produced
in a day or a week, with me as an Author-in-Residence.
Let’s talk about it!
Let’s talk about it!
About what the Anacostia High School students saw
with their own eyes,
and filtered through their lived experiences.
This book is about voice.
About what came from the students’ mouths
–rhythmically, poetically, chronologically, with vulnerability —
about what they observed, reflected on,
and processed alone and in community with one another.
And in the seeing and speaking,
they have given us a book to cherish
— a book of poems, essays, reports, and images
that reveals what they felt, emotionally,
what they touched physically,
what they tasted, and what they heard.
And we owe them our deepest appreciation,
because what they have given us is profound!
The book is about journeys,
each of us separately, and all of us together
liberating ourselves, flying, like the birds, free,
dismantling the shackles of fear,
overcoming our insecurities,
touching truth and becoming one with it.
This book is about partnerships.
Many thanks to Conservation Nation
for sponsoring my Nature-Wise program with
the students, to Xavier Brown for
inviting me in to host the literacy
and the environment training,
to Patrick Gusman, UDC, the
Department of the Interior and
NPS for leading the establishment
of this summer internship program
and enthusiastically supporting our efforts
to engage the students as thinkers, readers, writers,
and critical observers of their relationship to nature
and in how to become even better advocates
for sustainability.