It took lots of revision, but the kids we got to know through this project couldn’t be more exuberant about the arrival of this milestone. And the next time we convene our team of seventy-four authors, it will be happening in order to let them see the sum of their work: the proofread, published, powerful final version of our 2012 Young Authors’ Book Project, A Ring of Sunshine Around the Moon. You’ll be seeing a lot of it soon!

A Ring of Sunshine Around the Moon is full of amazing details. “Now that we’re older, we hardly even think about playing tag,” writes student author Evelyn, 16, in one of the forthcoming book’s sections on the mixed emotions of growing up. We’re excited that Evelyn herself and dozens upon dozens of her classmates have the chance to bring their perspective, problems, and wisdom to light. And we couldn’t be happier that we got to do this kind of edifying work at a school like ALC, where we found a gifted population of storytellers with some amazing potential to chronicle, explore, and serve their community through their writing.

The MCLC community has been busy doing all kinds of exciting things. Just yesterday, our Westside downstairs neighbors at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), which is committed to socially responsible art-making, brought together international muralist Judy Baca, the mayor of our city, and various talented artists (old and young) to unveil the newest creation from SPARC’s digital mural lab, a Miguel Contreras-inspired canvas called Gente del Maiz (Children of the Corn) on the east wall of the school cafeteria. We were delighted to watch a school where we’ve invested so much of our energy this year, smiling student faces lit up beneath the pictures, as our mayor honored the assembled individuals’ dedication to the future of Los Angeles. And when A Ring of Sunshine Around the Moon comes to bookshelves in its finished incarnation in just a few short weeks, we’ll be even happier to honor the Miguel Contreras community the 826LA way: with a book release party.

Challenging though the AP English Language Exam may be, and nervous as some of the AVCHS kids acted when they came to 826LA in Venice to work on two final free-response test prompts with tutors, we’re confident we’ve done great things for Daniela Kim’s motivated, high-performing group. We’ve heard basically the same from the school itself, actually. Our partner teacher was good enough to write this letter about halfway through the year:

With just days to go, Ánimo Venice Charter High School teens know they can stop by this office at 826LA to get even more help.

Hey Danny and Britt:

I just wanted to thank you guys for organizing everything and coming in to work with the kids. They really appreciated your help and I got a lot of positive feedback about their [February] experience. We’re looking forward to your visit again in March!

I’m amazed at how many tutors were able to come in. It was so awesome to have that much help! Please let them know how much we appreciated the time and energy they gave to our students.

I look forward to working with you again! I just wanted to say thank you!!!

 

Best,

Daniela

Not only did students focus on writing two college-level, timed essays with more than half a dozen adults today, these juniors and seniors also got a chance to say goodbye to some of the familiar volunteer faces who had guided their writing through 2011 and 2012. We’re glad these students know that 826LA’s after-school tutoring program, which operates in Venice and Echo Park, is still there for them in case they have an unexpected challenge on an assignment. And we hope that a couple of them, especially those who live right in Venice, can find time to participate in an 826LA-created workshop on weekend mornings or during the summer.

Good luck to all of our students taking 2012 AP Exams!

Teacher John Kannofsky, rear, queries a group of juniors and seniors about the Italian and Northern Renaissance. (Photo composites from the 1992 Los Angeles Riots serve as a backdrop.)

May is an eventful time around 826LA. Last week, we mentioned that Advanced Placement students from Ánimo Venice Charter High School had been partnering with 826LA’s staff and tutors throughout the year … and that the deadline for them to master their AP writing had finally arrived. It wasn’t until today that we started to really feel the pressure.

We’ve made working with Ánimo one of our priorities this year (along with a number of other local campuses like James A. Garfield High School and Theodore Roosevelt High School). We know that the AP Exams are arduous, and that Art History has a particularly thorny reputation. But we’re keeping our fingers crossed that between their own work ethics and the skills instilled in them over most of a year working with 826LA tutors, our students will have the tools to excel.

With their teacher John Kannofsky at the head of the group, here’s a slice of what was on our juniors’ and seniors’ plate today:

12:45 – 1:30pm – Connections: Students will create connections between themes and images.  Students will have a list of themes.

1:45 – 2:30pm – Multiple Choice Grab Bag: Students will choose multiple choice questions and try to answer them very quickly.

2:30 – 3:00pm – Prompt with Prompts: How to answer a prompt. Tutors will work with small groups on how to begin to answer a question.

3:05 – 3:30pm – The Night Before: How to prepare before an exam. Students and tutors will discuss how to prepare for a large exam.

All told, these students from Venice and beyond spent the better part of their day in the jail space of the Old Venice Police Station (now the venerable Social and Public Art Resource Center) for a last big push for test readiness.

826LA is the only organization in Los Angeles offering this brand of help to AP teachers, which puts all the more importance onthe support of volunteers like our own tutors from this morning (who have grown to know and love the Ánimo art historians). As we often mention, the 826LA year-round programs are always looking for tutors. Here’s how to become one of them.

The evening will be full of the happiest of Happy Hours, and will feature special musical guests Beggar and the Beast, The Fun Guns, and Golden!Age.

Admission is a suggestion donation of $5, with proceeds benefiting 826LA. You can find more information on CENTRAL’s website here.

Where & When
CENTRAL
1348 14th St.
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Monday, May 7, 8 PM

This month we enlisted the help of Lee-Roy Lahey, the mind behind artandstory.com (among other things), and asked him specifically to make his versatile and vivid works of comic art a part of the writing and learning process when Hammer kids joined us for a morning of fun. Lee-Roy is already familiar to some of our after-school tutoring students as the cover art guy behind our most recent chapbook, and his pen-on-page images are beloved of countless field trip kids who met him as an employee of Barnacle & Barnacle publishing during Storytelling & Bookmaking visits. Here at the Hammer, he was able to guide 826LA volunteers as an instructor while they helped almost two dozen kids translate their favorite genre into comics.

Needless to see, the students had a blast. Our tutors were instrumental in helping the audience understand the material and create some out-of-left-field characters, but all the unbridled enthusiasm came from the kids themselves. As our pictures from Sunday demonstrate, workshops offered through 826LA are a consistently work of art … and though no two workshops of ours are ever exactly alike, we can promise a continual parade of great tutors supplementing a healthy round of project-based learning each time.

You can take a look at the workshops that are a year-round component of 826LA free student programming in more detail here on our site.

Harbor students tackled spoken word with Michelle Labelle and considered returning to 826LA for more.

It’s hard to believe, but summer is knocking at the front door and doesn’t look like it’s going away. After hundreds of hours tutoring and enough books to fill at least a few carloads, we’ve realized that 826LA’s last programming week of the school year is within view.

That comes with all kinds of milestones, which we’re busy tallying and analyzing behind the scenes. But one thing we know as that we served more students in our field trips than ever before, and probably created some of the best stories ever since you can’t go wrong with titles like Golf Palace: The Adventure of Will & the Trolls, Skeleton Eric and Ellie the Vampire Dog, and The Dinosaur Situation. Aside from the mind-bending creativity, we impressed ourselves knowing that this was the first year in 826 history both Venice and Echo Park’s centers served over a hundred classrooms.

Writers have published a number of books in our Echo Park space, and it sometimes seems most of them are about zombies.

This busy week gave us plenty of new students to serve. On Monday and Tuesday, the Venice center opened its doors wide for some rambunctious 1st grade creative writers from KIPP Empower Academy from the Canterbury Knolls section of South Los Angeles. Meeting a new school, which is run based on the Knowledge Is Power Program philosophy that’s recently become part of the discussion on public education, we were impressed by the visiting staff’s discipline but even more impressed by the little geniuses who came up with a meltdown-prone character named Princess Chocolate. Then, Wednesday morning was an occasion for celebration in our Echo Park center: the Logan Street Elementary 2nd grade came to the room behind the Time Travel Mart, risking the ire of Mr. Barnacle, but somehow managed to please him and save everyone’s jobs!

That same morning in Venice, Wednesday, was field trip activity that was part of an all-day trip around the city for our longtime partner Port of Los Angeles High School. Sophomores from the local communities around San Pedro and Harbor City got to hop on a bus and visit the 826LA literary space just a few blocks from the beach first. Then, they hopped back on the bus and traveled far to the north, and Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural showed them around for a brief taste of life in the San Fernando Valley.

Teacher Pete Riehl preps sophomores to stop polishing and head to Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural.

When the POLAHS students were here in Venice, they got to work with performing poet Michelle “Freckles” Labelle on a spoken word activity. Michelle, whose volunteer activities with 826LA have included teaching writing to both middle and high school kids as well as after-school tutoring for local kids, brought each student present from a simple starting point (doing nature haikus) to a triumphant conclusion (ready to perform for an audience, poem of original work in hand).

"Under my shirt is my skin," a student reads at the end of a poetry activity at 826LA in Venice.

We let each of these visiting students know (as we let all visiting students in our centers know) that work with 826LA volunteers doesn’t have to end when the bus pulls into the parking lot. In fact, summer at 826LA is packed full of exciting writing programming, including a yearly run of spoken word poetry camp in both centers. If students are interested in exploring how language works, improving their college readiness, or just finding something fun to fill the dog days between the start and end of school, 826LA’s thoroughly-captivating workshops are open for online registration. With more classes being added to the lineup each week, it looks to be a summer of slam and so much more.

Originally from the East Coast world of New York (where she was born) and Massachusetts (where she attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to study English), DeAnna is a mother of two, former Def Jam Recordings employee, and entrepreneur with a plethora of experience in the advertising, entertainment, and graphic design industries. She is the CEO and founder of the Miracle Mile-based Evoke, Inc., an incubator for tech needs right here in Los Angeles that operates as a full service digital technology agency providing cutting edge transmedia solutions for the entertainment industry. Along with her husband, British-born design guru Kenny Gravillis, DeAnna has worked on campaigns for clients ranging from 20th Century Fox to A&E to HBO and she continues to manage Gravillis Inc. while living in the heart of Los Angeles.

All of us at 826LA, who consider ourselves committed to capturing students’ imagination through innovative work with media and social storytelling, look forward to having DeAnna’s input and leadership as we continue to grow the 826 family.

Classes like this one, led by English teacher Daniela Kim, are counting down days until testing separates the excellent from the pack.

The first AP Exams for 2012 are less than a week away, and our most college-focused students know it. We wouldn’t even be surprised if we didn’t see some of them around (they might be studying in seclusion). But there’s another AP matter on our minds, too: 826LA’s tutors are devoted to the needs of local schools, and that means helping make AP season a success.

Over the next week, we’ll be bringing in field trip classes from Ánimo Venice Charter High School and directing tutors to be there for all the things that students need in the eleventh hour of the AP year: asking review questions, strategizing for document-based questions, even figuring out a healthy breakfast for the morning of the test. We start Monday morning, when AVCHS’ mega-knowledgeable master of all things Art History, John Kannofsky, bring his AP Art History classroom to 826LA in Venice for five hours of cramming and discussion in the adjacent SPARC Gallery. We’ll cover everything from different column styles in the days of Antiquity to Bruegel the Elder to the foundations of Modernism.

Later in the week, Daniela Kim‘s AP English Language students will hurry over on a walking field trip to 826LA in order to get one last round of tutor feedback on their writing. When he or she sits down to take the AP English Language Exam, each student will have to postulate a thesis and form a convincing, well-organized argument about a totally unfamiliar topic. We think, though, that they’ll be ready to do just that … with the help of our volunteers.

Dead Author Readings are moderated monthly by H.G. Wells (Paul F. Tompkins).

This month, H.G. Wells will welcome The Brothers Grimm (Matt Gourley & Jeremy Carter) to the stage. Please don’t tell them that they are dead by now!

Tickets are $5, and all proceeds benefit 826LA. RSVP here.

Can’t catch the actual reading? Subscribe to the Dead Author Podcast to stay up to date on all that these dead authors have to say!

Where & When
Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre
5919 Franklin Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Friday, May 4, 6:30 PM