Emily traveled from Mar Vista to this 4th Street gallery and saw her story unveiled.

Student Adam reviews a sheet of art from GRworks manager Gennie Rim, who turned his imagination into book material.

Recent big event news, of course, included 826LA’s multiweek gallery exhibition of the art from Pen to Paper: My Imaginary Friend. The hardcover Pen to Paper book (available at 826LA) matches heartwarming original stories by Mar Vista and Echo Park creative writers to illustrations by professional animators.

Veteran artists from the likes of DC Comics and Pixar went completely wild with the 826LA kids’ source material and created some of the coolest drawings we’ve ever seen. Most were made available for viewing and purchase in Downtown Los Angeles, much to our students’ delight! We bow in awe of the folks at GRworks who put time and talent into Pen to Paper and created true magic.

Every year, 826LA takes a group of students at one of our best partner schools through the entire process of writing, designing, and publishing a book. It’s an astounding opportunity for teens who often never saw their one-of-a-kind voices in print before. We call it the Young Authors’ Book Project. For more than half of a typical school year, our 826LA YABP tutors (who include former teachers, aspiring editors, and professional writers) team up with student authors during visits to the classroom … and end up learning a lot about a young person whose future is just starting to take shape!

This year it was an easy choice for us to partner with Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnet, a fairly new incarnation of Westchester High School (which opened in 1948!). Westchester’s a diverse four-year campus in Los Angeles Unified School District that attracts students from some of our region’s toughest neighborhoods. We’ve spent four years collaborating with Westchester, and we knew this school was a place where we could find a great opportunity – everything that Westchester was doing, whether it was its sending its competitive basketball team out to play or introducing its pupils to the enriched sciences curriculum – it was doing with a lot of heart.

Our best collaborations at Westchester had put us in regular contact with two English teachers who stood out: Jennifer Lisowski and Carolyn Stebbins. Each had a decade of teaching experience at the school under her belt, and each knew how powerful working with a community organization could be for freshmen and sophomores. We chose to begin writing with Ms. Lisowski and Ms. Stebbins’ kids in November. And under the guidance of 826LA Director of Education Julius Diaz Panoriñgan, we decided to make our tenth book a triumphant reflection of where we’re from.

Back in the fall, our two partner teachers were the first high school instructors to take a field trip to our new Time Travel Mart. We showed their 9th and 10th grade writers books made by kids just like them; we got them excited. And then we told them that we wanted to explore some critical questions with us:

• What are the strengths of Los Angeles, the city we call home?
• What are the things about LA that you see needing improvement?
• Where are our city’s hidden gems?
• How can we get this city ready for the year 2050?

  

  DeAnna Gravillis reminded us that words our student authors put into print today would stretch forward into the lives of others.

   

Our tutors had the entire winter to explore these questions with Ms. Lisowski and Ms. Stebbins, although we structured our work with classes so that their conversations channeled ideas into two main pieces of writing per kid. And this spring, we finally brought the fruits of that labor into the daylight. We’re proud to present Sun-Dried Sidewalks: Reflections on Community and Recommendations for a New Los Angeles. (It’s now available for purchase through our site and storefronts.)

Fabien, who wrote about budget cuts to district music programs, shares part of his story with Joel Arquillos.

May 30′s evening release event was magnificently attended: dozens of authors from Westchester and, this being a family-friendly and community-friendly affair, more family members than we could count. 826LA brought a few special guests of our own, too. Foremost among them were Executive Director Joel Arquillos, who emphasized how his personal experiences as a San Francisco classroom teacher gave him perspective on the transformational teaching impact of a project like a YABP … and Los Angeles entrepreneur DeAnna Gravillis, for a keynote speech that brought audience members to their feet. “You have greatness before you,” DeAnna emphasized to our LA student writers. When she told us that we would be proud of this publishing moment for the rest of our lives, she brought a packed auditorium at Loyola Marymount University to silence.

Sun-Dried Sidewalks is a book full of interactive opportunities that involve the reader, and it could never have come from any metropolis but ours. Even more importantly, it hits bookshelves at a time when Los Angeles is turning its attention to a conversation about what we want LA to be by the middle of the century. (It’s a conversation spearheaded by the Goldhirsh Foundation, whose support was integral to this year’s book.) We’re very proud of our authors, and we think you’ll be impressed by them too.

Youth Advisory Board students Briana and Menen flanked teachers, Ms. Stebbins and Lisowski, at a moment onstage.

826LA and our partners at Westchester Enriched Science Magnet hope you’ll start to explore Sun-Dried Sidewalks by looking at some of the gorgeous pictures from May’s event: the ones on this page, and the full assortment by Fernanda De Sa Schwartz right here.

Then, we hope you’ll get the book and read every story in it: from Our Bus by Aboderin Tontay Olukayode to C.O.M.P.T.O.N. by Quistopher Juan’ae Davis to Lives in Shopping Carts by Taylor Burke and about a hundred more.

And then we hope that you’ll start to think about the LA of your dreams … and that these revolutionary writers and thinkers from a very special corner of LA can inspire you to dream a little bigger by the time you’ve set their words down.

The runaway success of David’s Kickstarter campaign to fund a card game version of his Machine of Death anthology inspired him to give back—for every copy of the game purchased, $1 would be donated to 826LA. On Sunday night, he presented the 826LA staff with a comically-oversized check for $11,000!

The check was just one piece of a glorious evening of celebration—”This Is How You Die x 826LA,” a night of comedy held in our Mar Vista space featuring Jordan Morris, Zach Sherwin, iO West’s The Lusty Horde, and cartoonists Kevin McShane and Keith Knight.

As our personal thank you for all of the amazing things he’s done for us, 826LA presented David with his very own Employee of the Month plaque that will forever live in our Mar Vista Time Travel Mart. Mr. Malki, we salute you!

So began 9-year-old Sahan’s story, “T-Rex,” one of the tales published in She Was An Excellent Student, Mrs. Triceratops!—the last chapbook publication from the students in Mar Vista’s after-school tutoring for the 2012-13 academic year. Sahan is just one of 42 students published in the book, and those students and their families came out in full force last week to celebrate the release of this wonderful compendium.

Because this was not just a celebration of the book students had worked for weeks to write and publish, but the culmination of a school year’s worth of hard work on homework, reading, and writing at 826LA, the festivities were plentiful. Volunteer liaison-extraordinaire Lauren Humphrey pulled two raffle winners from our corps of volunteers who took home gift certificates for bowling, burgers, and soap from local Mar Vista businesses, and after a healthy earful of terrific and terrifying dinosaur tales from a book designed by volunteer David Malki, everyone enjoyed piles of food donated by our neighbors at The Curious Palate and the good people of our Parent Advisory Board.

There were hugs and smiles as we bid goodbye to yet another fantastic year of after-school tutoring, but we knew the good times weren’t over for long—a large number of our tutoring students will be returning in a few short weeks for our summer English Language Learner camp. We can’t wait to see all those chairs filled up once again.

Across town, a similar party happened that week for the families and extraordinary students who attend our program in Echo Park. One of the reasons to celebrate in May was the release of Echo Park’s newest chapbook, Nothing Touches the Ground, Everything is Free. You can find this book, like She Was An Excellent Students, Mrs. Triceratops! and many others, in the inventory of 826LA’s online Time Travel Mart.

Join us for an afternoon of storytelling, puppetry, and books. There will be activities in English and Spanish for students ages 4-10. Admission is free, but there are only enough spots for 25 kids!

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826LA y LA Librería te invitan al evento bilingüe: ¿Cómo se cuenta un cuento?

Acompáñanos en una tarde de cuenta-cuentos, títeres y libros. Habrá actividades en inglés y español para estudiantes de edades 4-10. Entrada gratuita. Espacio limitado a 25 niños.

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Join Nerdist Writers Panel creator and moderator Ben Blacker (co-creator of The Thrilling Adventure Hour) for an informal chat with some of the most influential and best creators and showrunners in TV.

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