The American Immigration Council blog, “Teaching Immigration” includes a review of The Good Braider. The review offers a link to a lesson plan for educators teaching about the immigration and refugee experience. Here it is: A Land of Refuge or Refusal? Perspectives on the Refugee Experience in the United […]
Ms. Punwani’s 8th grade students have studied the detention of children crossing the border into Texas, displacement of refugees, and investigative journalism to explore issues of District of Columbia schools. An Open Book Foundation is a nonprofit literacy organization with a mission “to promote literacy among disadvantaged […]
Heather Flanders, ELL Specialist at Gorham High School in Maine sent me two stories. She wrote, “I hope you are as moved as I was,” and I was. The stories were written by her students Amna and Megan, their own visions of the next chapter in […]
I started a new page on this site called Ubuntu and it’s about class projects in which students have responded to The Good Braider. I’ve seen extraordinary teachers work with their students to deeply imagine Viola’s life. I am posting some of the stories I hear of how […]
Recorded Books will release The Good Braider read by Cherise Boothe in winter 2014. I know this audio version can be a boon for English language learners, enabling readers to read and listen simultaneously.
I met students at Oxford Hills High School in Maine in a program sponsored by the Norway Memorial Library. This student came to talk to me after my presentation about the young girl from Sudan who is the hero of my novel. I had talked to the students […]
I was invited to Bangor High School to do my sound slide show and reading called “Children of War.” I found myself in a fascinating city way up north on the Penobscot River, the former “lumber capital of the world.” The three log-drivers in the statue called “The […]
45 million people became displaced from their homes in 2012, Sasha Chanoff, director of Refuge Point, said on the radio show, “Here and Now.” “More than half of the refugees worldwide came from five countries, according to the UN: Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Syria.” A striking comment […]
Curious City has created a brand new Reader’s Guide to The Good Braider for the I‘m Your Neighbor book club happening in Portland, Maine this summer. For the pdf of the Reader’s Guide, click here. The Guide and the series of discussions invites readers to reflect not only […]
Portland, Maine celebrates nine books set in Maine’s “new arrival” communities with a 2013 city-wide read. Writers include South Sudanese memoirist, Aruna Kenyi in The Telling’s Room’s anthology I REMEMBER WARM RAIN. High school students who are named by the NAACP as Martin Luther King Jr. Fellows introduced each […]
katephoto.com
The Good Braider 