Presenter of the National Book Awards

National Book Foundation's BookUpTexas

Since 2007, we have been proud to administer BookUp, an after-school program for middle-school students, at five sites in New York City. In September, 2010, BookUp expanded to a new site at the Boys & Girls Club of Brazos Valley, Texas, led by instructor Angie Cruz and our very first BookUp Fellow, Casie Cobos. The new site began with a small group of just five students, but over the course of its first semester, membership grew to a total of twenty students. Generous financial support from the Education Department of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum goes toward purchasing books for BookUpTX participants and funding their field trips to literary destinations.

Angie Cruz

Angie Cruz is the author of two novels, Soledad (2001) and Let it Rain Coffee (2005). Her work has earned numerous honors, including the Camargo Fellowship, the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and residencies at Yaddo and the Macdowell Colony. Her shorter works have appeared in the New York Times, the Indiana Review, and the Callaloo Literary Journal. Angie currently teaches creative writing at Texas A&M University, where she is at work on her third novel, In Search of Caridad.

Casie Cobos

Casie Cobos graduated with an MFA in fiction and an MA in literature from McNeese University in 2006. She currently lives in Houston with her spouse, Andrew Cobos, and two cats (with two huge personalities) while she commutes to Texas A&M University to complete her Ph.D. in Cultural Rhetorics and Writing.

 

For more information, visit:

Boys & Girls Club of Brazos Valley
www.bgcbv.org

Angie Cruz, Department of English, Texas A&M University:
www-english.tamu.edu/index.php?id=1411

George Bush Presidential Library and Museum:
http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu

A Recent Field Trip

On March 27, 2011, the BookUpTX group took an hour-and-forty-five-minute bus ride to Houston, where they had lunch at the Downtown Aquarium and then shopped at the independent Brazos Bookstore. It was many of the students’ first time in Houston, and all of the students’ first experience visiting a small, independent bookstore. As is the custom in BookUp, the students received $25 each to purchase books for their own home libraries. The group then continued on to Pershing Middle School, where YA author Rebecca Stead read from her work, took questions from the audience, signed books, and posed for a photo with the group.