Writing Project Celebration

Our Writing Project received an NEH grant that we have been working on for a year. The grant technically ends tomorrow, and we have big plans for a celebration. Poet Richard Blanco will be giving a keynote speech tomorrow in person at our Spring Mini Conference. Today I wrote an introduction to our Digital Anthology which I have included here.

Our year-long project implementing the NEH grant has been truly amazing! We put together a cohort of 13 extraordinary educators, elementary through college, with diverse backgrounds. We came together for an intensive week-long Summer Institute and then continued with meetings and workshops throughout the year.

To understand the intent of the grant, here are a few lines from our proposal that really sum up the mission of this grant:

We believe that there is a power and value in the act of telling all family stories. Collectively, our stories make us who we are as a nation, whether they are of recent immigrants, or of families that have been here for generations. The acts of researching, collecting, and sharing our stories highlights both the strengths of our communities and the dangers of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other biases. Our stories constitute a way of building and strengthening our larger community. At a time when teachers have become uncertain about what may be taught in the classroom and how to bring in a diverse range of voices, the simple act of having students tell family stories provides a way in.

We have partnered with two incredible organizations – the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center (HMTC) in Glen Cove, as well as the Nassau County based Anti-Racism Project. The HMTC presented a workshop on “Lessons of Genocide,” and we heard a heart-rending presentation given by a daughter of a Holocaust survivor. We have had presenters from the Anti-Racism Project give workshops related to immigration and exploring identity. We spent our final day of the Summer Institute at the HMTC grounds, first touring the Memorial inside, and then spending time writing in the gardens with art and poetry prompts related to the Holocaust. 

Recently we held a book group discussion on How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith. We had a follow-up Zoom workshop with author Clint Smith which was a wonderful event.

Our final celebratory event is our Long Island Writing Project Spring Mini-Conference on March 31, 2023, with poet Richard Blanco as the keynote speaker. He read his poem “One Day” at Barack Obama’s second Presidential inauguration in 2013. He just recently received a National Humanities Medal at the White House, which honors people whose work has “deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities and broadened engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities subjects.”

We have read many excerpts and poems written by Richard Blanco, Amanda Gorman, Viola Davis, Ada Limon, Clint Smith, and many others. Through our readings, our rich conversations, and the sharing of our honest, often intense personal writing, we have grown together as a community, and we have extended that work into our classrooms, with our students. 

In this anthology, you will see writings from our educator cohort as well as classroom applications for this work with lesson plans and student writing. We are proud of the work we have done - reading, writing, and sharing so many meaningful and heartfelt stories related to identity and family history.