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Photo Credit: Sherrie Y. Young
Elementary-age students, teenagers,
and English-as-a-Second Language adult students met
with Victor Martinez. In preparation for Mr. Martinez's
visit, the Foundation donated Parrot in the Oven
to participants.
Victor Martinez's author-residency included visits
to two settlement houses: Seneca Center located
in the Hunts Points section of the Bronx, and Lincoln
Square Neighborhood Center in New York City.
 In
1996 Mr. Martinez won the National Book Award for Young
People's Literature for his first novel Parrot in
the Oven. The book contains a series of stories
about Manny Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old Mexican-American
struggling with adolescence and poverty.
Photo Credit: Sherrie Y. Young
As part of his residency at Seneca,
Mr. Martinez also visited fifth and sixth graders at
neighboring I.S. 74. The students and teachers showed
their appreciation for Mr. Martinez's visit with their
enthusiastic questions.
During Mr. Martinez's two-day
residency at Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center in Manhattan,
he had a "chat and chew" with senior citizens,
encouraged a young-adult GED class that with practice,
patience, and hard work they can write well, and met
with young readers ranging from six-years-old to thirteen-years-old.
The young readers weren't motivated to ask questions
until they were told that Victor was a great author
who won an award for writing Parrot in the Oven.
The 1997 National Book Foundation's
Settlement House Author-Residency program was made possible
with funding from the Theodore H. Barth Foundation,
McGraw-Hill Foundation, and New York State Council on
the Arts.
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Victor
Martinez at 
