A Day in the Life of a BookUpNYC Field Trip

These photographs were taken during a BookUp NYC field trip on February 28th, when Brooklyn BookUpNYC students from the CAMBA Renaissance Program in Crown Heights and Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg spent their Saturday touring the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and lunching at the world famous Smoke Joint in Fort Greene. The day ended with book shopping at Book Court in Cobble Hill. The Foundation is grateful to BPL, Smoke Joint and BookCourt for welcoming us!

The National Book Foundation is committed to using innovative approaches to encourage young people to read for pleasure. Recent studies show that middle school age children are at great risk to stop reading on their own. Through BookUpNYC, we are addressing this issue and introducing young people to America’s rich literary culture. We believe that if young people aren’t readers, they haven’t yet found the right books. Working in weekly, after-school sessions with writer/instructors, BookUpNYC helps young people identify their interests and guides them toward finding quality books they will enjoy. BookUpNYC is an expansion of our settlement house program and builds on the successes of that program.

Here’s how BookUpNYC works:

• Sessions are held once a week for a minimum of twelve weeks, allowing for a stronger relationship to form between resident authors and students.
• The primary focus is on reading and creative, reading-related activities that enhance the appreciation of reading as an interactive, imaginative pursuit.
• Children read from a selection of challenging material including short stories, books, and literary journals in addition to books recommended by the resident author.
• Participants go on field trips to “reading hot spots” including libraries, bookstores, literary organizations, and cultural programs such as author readings.
• Participants are supplied with gift cards to these bookstores, where they are able to buy their own books, supervised by the staff of the Foundation and writer/instructors.
• Each student receives a printed map of “reading hot spots” in New York City, which lists all bookstores, libraries, and literary organizations in the five boroughs including their addresses, phone numbers, website, and opening hours.
  

About BookUp NYC Instructors, Fall '08

Elisha Miranda

Elisha Miranda is a writer, filmmaker and activist who moved to New York City from San Francisco in 1991. She holds a dual B.A. in Ethnic Studies and English from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MFA in Directing and Screenwriting from Columbia University. In addition to essays and screenplays, Elisha writes for young adults under the pen name “E-Fierce.” Her debut novel The Sista Hood: On the Mic (the first book in a four part series) about a multi-racial, all female hip-hop crew, was published in July 2006 by Atria Books.

Lissette J. Norman

Lissette J. Norman is the author of a children’s book, My Feet Are Laughing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). Her work appears in anthologies: Moving Beyond Boundaries, Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. She has also been published in Mosaic Literary Magazine, African Voices, Dialogue, Long Shot and Drum Voices Revue. Lissette won the Lee & Low Books’ “2003 New Voices Honor Award, the “2007 Original Work” grant from the Council on the Arts & Humanities for Staten Island, the “2007 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People” (Special Recognition) from The Poetry Center (PCCC), the “Americas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature” (Commended Title), and the Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year. Lissette received her B.A. in English at SUNY-Binghamton and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Willie Perdomo

Willie Perdomo is the author Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. He has also been published in The New York Times Magazine and Bomb and his children's book, Visiting Langston, received a Coretta Scott King Honor. He is a NYFA Arts Fellowship winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, a Urban Artists Initiative/NYC grant recipient and was recently a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is currently Artist-in-Residence, Workspace, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books. willieperdomo.com

Sofía Quintero

Sofía Quintero is the author of several novels and short stories that cross genres. Born into a working-class Puerto Rican-Dominican family in the Bronx., the self-proclaimed “Ivy League homegirl” earned a BA in history-sociology from Columbia University in 1990 and her MPA from the university's School of International and Public Affairs in 1992. After years of working on a range of policy issues from multicultural education to HIV/AIDS, she decided to pursue career that married arts and activism. Under the pen name Black Artemis, she wrote the hip hop novels Explicit Content, Picture Me Rollin’ and Burn. Sofía is also the author of the novel Divas Don’t Yield and contributed novellas to the “chica lit” anthologies Friday Night Chicas and Names I Call My Sister. As an activist, she co-founded Chica Luna Productions (chicaluna.com), a nonprofit organization that seeks to identify, develop and support women of color who wish to create socially conscious entertainment. She is also a founding creative partner of Sister Outsider Entertainment, a multimedia production company that produces quality entertainment for urban audiences. Sofía is presently working on her first young adult novel Efrain’s Secret which will be published by Knopf in 2009. To learn more about Sofia and her work, visit blackartemis.com, sisteroutsider.biz or .myspace.com/sofiaquintero.

Eisa Ulen

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning, a novel described by The Washington Post as “a call for healing in the African American community from generations of hurt and neglect.” Her essays, exploring topics ranging from Hip Hop to Muslim life in America post-9/11 to the gap between the Civil Rights generation and Generation X, have been widely anthologized. Nominated by Essence magazine for a National Association of Black Journalists Award, she has contributed to numerous other publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Heart & Soul, Vibe, The Source, Black Issues Book Review, Quarterly Black Review of Books, and CreativeNonfiction.org. She is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Ulen graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. She teaches English at Hunter College in New York City and lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

Books Read in BookUpNYC

As a key part of BookUpNYC, each student reads and receives his or her own copies of a group of books each semester. Students also select titles for purchase on field trips. The following are some of the books read in BookUpNYC group sessions:

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
• Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks
• Blubber by Judy Blume
• Tyrell by Coe Booth
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon
• Deep in the Mountains by Terrence Cheng
• My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier
• Behind the Mountains by Edwidge Danticat
• The Fire Thief Series by Terry Deary
• Drown by Junot Diaz
• Double Dutch by Sharon Draper
• The Sista Hood by E-Fierce
• The Skin I’m In by Sharon Flake
• Every Time a Rainbow Dies by Rita Williams Garcia
• Gemini by Nikki Giovanni
• Selected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The First Part Last by Angela Johnson
• Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones
• Madame President (How I Survived Middle School) by Nancy Krulik
• The Gun by Paul Langan
• Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
• Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
• Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach
• El Bronx Remembered by Nicholasa Mohr
• What They Found: Love on 145th St. by Walter Dean Myers
• Graffiti Girl by Kelly Parra
• Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Boy Without a Flag by Abraham Rodriguez, Jr.
• Buddha Book by Abraham Rodriguez, Jr.
• When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
• Push by Sapphire
• Uglies Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld
• Lena by Jacqueline Woodson
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
• American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
• A People’s Trilogy of the United States by Howard Zinn
  

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