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Fresh Ink: Stories from thirteen of the most recognizable diverse authors (L. Giles)

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Fresh Ink: Stories from thirteen of the most recognizable diverse authors (L. Giles)

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Praise for Fresh Ink:

"A powerful and varied collection deserving of shelf space in every library." -Booklist, Starred Review

"This compelling anthology is an excellent choice for YA collections." -SLJ, Starred Review

"The most profound strength of the collection, however, is the array of rich characters with whom readers will surely connect." -Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

"This beautiful, moving, and insightful collection is quintessentially American and a valuable addition to all middle and high school classrooms."

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

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Fresh Ink: 9781524766313 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Praise for Fresh Ink: "A powerful and varied collection deserving of shelf space in every library." -Booklist, Starred Review "This compelling anthology is an excellent choice for YA collections." -SLJ, Starred Review "The most profound strength of the collection, however, is the array of rich characters with whom readers will surely connect."

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Unbroken: 13 stories starring disabled teens (M. Nijkamp)

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Unbroken: 13 stories starring disabled teens (M. Nijkamp)

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These tales feature teens with different mental illnesses and physical, sensory, and intellectual disabilities, but all share common threads: no overcoming disability, magical healing, or disability-as-metaphor; just kids shaped by their bodies and minds, their experiences, and the worlds they inhabit. (...) For intersectional representations of disabled kids leading complex lives-sometimes painful, sometimes funny, never sentimentally inspirational-a vital collection.
- Kirkus, starred review

The stories feature wide variety and high quality, but most importantly, none of the teens at the center of the stories are defined by their disabilities. Teens disappointed by the lack of nuanced depictions of disability in YA fiction will cheer for these compassionate, engaging, and masterfully written stories.
- Booklist, starred review

13 fictional short stories written by authors with disabilities
- Publishers Weekly, starred review

Unbroken is a much needed short story collection featuring disabled teens as heroes of their own stories. (...) The anthology successfully subverts stereotypes and long-held literary tropes about characters with disabilities. (...) This strong assortment of stories will attract a large teen audience and should be in collections serving young adult readers.
- VOYA

Fans of every genre will find someone to root for in this collection focused on disabled heroes and heroines.
- Seventeen Magazine

There is something for everyone in this volume. VERDICT A great choice for all YA collections.
- School Library Journal

[A] gorgeous collection about disabled teenagers and their journeys through love, friendship, self-discovery, and more.
- Bustle

[A] much needed collection.
- Star Tribune

[A] necessary, groundbreaking book.
- Book Riot

The teenaged characters reflect diverse colors, genders, and orientations- without obscuring the realities of their disabilities.
- NYPL

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Unbroken: 13 stories starring disabled teens

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These tales feature teens with different mental illnesses and physical, sensory, and intellectual disabilities, but all share common threads: no overcoming disability, magical healing, or disability-as-metaphor; just kids shaped by their bodies and minds, their experiences, and the worlds they inhabit. (...)

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Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (I. Zoboi)

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Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (I. Zoboi)

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Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today-Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and Black in America. A selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List.

Black is...sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon, as written by Renée Watson.

Black is...three friends walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything, in a story by Jason Reynolds.

Black is...Nic Stone's high-class beauty dating a boy her momma would never approve of.

Black is...two girls kissing in Justina Ireland's story set in Maryland.
Contributors:
Justina Ireland
Varian Johnson
Rita Williams-Garcia
Dhonielle Clayton
Kekla Magoon
Leah Henderson
Tochi Onyebuchi
Jason Reynolds
Nic Stone
Liara Tamani
Renée Watson
Tracey Baptiste
Coe Booth
Brandy Colbert
Jay Coles
Ibi Zoboi
Lamar Giles
Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more-because there are countless ways to be Black enough.

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Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today-Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it's like to be young and Black in America. A selection of the

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Face Relations: 11 stories about seeing beyond color (M. Singer)

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Face Relations: 11 stories about seeing beyond color (M. Singer)

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I confess: I've been a Star Trek fan for years. I've watched every episode of every series, some more than once. The sight of the Enterprise, with its multiethnic, multiracial, multispecies crew, still fills me with hope.

But you don't have to be a Trekker to believe that we humans can learn to live with and value each other. One day I heard someone on the radio say that he felt "honored" to ride the New York City subways with people of so many heritages. I try to invoke that privilege even when I'm squished between hordes of commuters on the rush-hour Q train. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. My goal is to keep trying.

I believe we all should keep trying to acknowledge, appreciate, and celebrate our diversity. But I've lived long enough -- and in probably the most diverse city in the world -- to know that this is seldom easy. Every day we have to uncover, examine, and fight the prejudices we've acquired, usually from early childhood on. Anyone who thinks we've eliminated racism and bigotry in the twenty-first century is asleep at the wheel. Racism -- the widespread system of advantage based on race -- is, unfortunately, still with us. So is bigotry -- prejudice based on race, creed, sex, etc. We have to struggle daily against feelings of fear and powerlessness, inertia, group pressure, and the constant bombardment of negative stereotypes, both obvious and subtle, to change ourselves, and others, too. Which brings me to this book.

Face Relations: 11 Stories About Seeing Beyond Color is not a book about prejudice (although prejudice is most certainly an important part of this book). It is about the possibilities of embracing diversity. With naivete, ambivalence, intent, anger, fear, embarrassment, and joy, the characters in these stories tear down the barriers that separate us.

In Jess Mowry's "Phat Acceptance," meet Brandon, a guy with that cool white surfer-dude look -- even if he isn't a surfer -- whose first day in a new school is turned upside down by the arrival of the one, the only, the fattest black classmate he's ever seen. And there's Mitch, narrator of Joseph Bruchac's "Skins," a football player of Native American and Scandinavian heritage, whose strategy of "hanging back" is challenged by the two new kids in town: Randolph, clearly African-American, and Jimmy T, purely American Indian. Or are they?

Get to know DeMaris -- pining for her best friend Epiphany, the title character in Ellen Wittlinger's story -- who dares to ask: Why can't a white girl sit with the black kids in the cafeteria? In Noelle's school, some of the black kids aren't allowed to sit with the black kids. Sherri Winston, in her story "Snow," introduces us to this budding journalist whose fight against the mistreatment of Haitian students by fellow African-American classmates leads her to a dangerous clash with the school principal.

Kyoko Mori's protagonist in "Black and White" tells the story of an "outsider" from an immigrant's own perspective. Born in Japan and growing up in rural Wisconsin, Asako learns that being the misunderstood "foreigner" doesn't excuse her act of mean-spirited Halloween vandalism.

Then there are Jemma, also an immigrant, in Marina Budhos's "Gold," and Bianca, living amid immigrants, in M. E. Kerr's "Hearing Flower." One is biracial and poor, the other rich and white, but each has suffered the loss of a parent and each is in love with the "wrong" boy.

At least these boys are the right age. What are we to make of Myra with a thing for her math teacher, Rita Williams-Garcia's "Mr. Ruben." No one can tell what race Mr. Ruben is. But poor Myra, she just can't have a crush on the man unless he's black -- and she'll drive herself and her friend Dee crazy until she finds out if he is or not.

Myra's situation makes us laugh. PD's does not. He was a promising Latino trumpet player. Now, he's dead. But oh, what he's left behind! René Saldaña Jr.'s moving story "The Heartbeat of the Soul of the World" is about PD's legacy -- and the unifying power of music.

A very different soul hovers over Beth and Vonny in my own story "Negress" -- the ghost of Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, a woman exhibited as a sexual freak throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century. Will her spirit unite or divide these two very different best friends? What possibilities does she have in store for them?

In Naomi Shihab Nye's "Hum," Sami is haunted by spirits too -- spirits of the dead and the living he left behind in the Middle East. But he and his family are hopeful about their new life in Texas. And then comes the day that changes everything: September 11, 2001.

These characters' -- these writers' -- stories are troubled, sad, touching, funny, or fierce, but all are full of hope. And if hope really is, in Emily Dickinson's words, "the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all," may these stories supply some possible lyrics. May you hear their words and music long after you close this book.

Marilyn Singer

Copyright © 2004 by Marilyn Singer

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I confess: I've been a Star Trek fan for years. I've watched every episode of every series, some more than once. The sight of the Enterprise, with its multiethnic, multiracial, multispecies crew, still fills me with hope. But you don't have to be a Trekker to believe that we humans can learn to live with and value each other.

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All Out: The No Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages (S. Mitchell)

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All Out: The No Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages (S. Mitchell)

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(Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start The Conversation About Mental Health (K. Jensen)

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(Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start The Conversation About Mental Health (K. Jensen)

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(Don't) Call Me Crazy is a conversation starter and guide to better understanding the ways our mental health affects us every day. A diverse range of essays, art, and other creative work explore personal experiences with mental illness, how we do and do not talk about mental health, help for better understanding how every person's brain is wired differently, and what, exactly, might make someone "crazy." This highly designed, scrapbook-like guide provides an opportunity to get up close and personal with mental health.

Let's get talking.
Available everywhere. Reviews:
"Jensen has brought together sharp and vivid perspectives concerning mental-health challenges. Featuring writers such as Shaun David Hutchinson, Libba Bray, Adam Silvera and Esmé Weijun Wang, this book asks questions and provides real-life experiences and hope for the future." - The Washington Post

"A lively, compelling anthology [...] the raw, informal approach to the subject matter will highly appeal to young people who crave understanding and validation. A valuable addition to library collections and for use by school counselors. This highly readable and vital collection demonstrates the multiplicity of ways that mental health impacts individuals." - Kirkus Reviews

"Opening up about mental health is difficult but necessary, asserts the editor of this thought-provoking anthology. Libba Bray personifies her obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety, while Stephanie Kuehn describes life with misophonia. Adam Silvera dispels the myth that successful or cheerful individuals don't experience depression; Emery Lord seethes at the ignorant remarks about suicide she overhears at a Vincent van Gogh exhibit. Contributors also examine gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, as in Hannah Bae's exploration of her Korean family's reluctance to seek help for her mother's schizophrenia. The rare lackluster entry never detracts from the whole. As in Jensen's Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World, illustrations and a peppy design enhance this scrapbooklike volume. VERDICT Misconceptions about mental health still abound, making this honest yet hopeful title a vital selection for libraries." - STARRED review from School Library Journal
"Jensen (Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World, 2017) gathers together another varied, empowering collection of personal essays, poetry, artwork, and comics about the many ways people experience mental illness. Confessional and conversational, the contributions cover a wide array of conditions, treatments, and ways to manage symptoms, and while it can occasionally be a mixed bag, the best contributions are deeply resonant. Shaun David Hutchinson emphasizes that "Depression . . . may live in your skin, but it does not control you"; Emery Lord recounts visiting a Van Gogh exhibit during a depressive episode in a stirring, sharply funny essay; Hannah Bae describes how her troubled homelife contributed to her own disordered thinking; and Monique Bedard offers a moving prose poem about the pernicious, lasting effects of the systemic abuse of Native women. With this diverse array of contributors offering a stunning wealth of perspectives on mental health, teens looking for solidarity, comfort, or information will certainly be able to find something that speaks to them. Resources and further reading make this inviting, much-needed resource even richer."-Booklist Review
"This (crucially!) diverse essay collection spans race, gender, sexual orientation, career, and age to hopefully reduce the stigma around mental illness."
-Bustle

"This is a much-needed collection of writing about mental health and the impact it has . . . with mental health stigma unfortunately still being a serious problem, teens really need books like this right now."
-Cultured Vultures

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(Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start The Conversation About Mental Health

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(Don't) Call Me Crazy is a conversation starter and guide to better understanding the ways our mental health affects us every day. A diverse range of essays, art, and other creative work explore personal experiences with mental illness, how we do and do not talk about mental health, help for better understanding how every person's brain is wired differently, and what, exactly, might make someone "crazy."

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Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real about Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America (A. Reed)

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Our Stories, Our Voices: 21 YA Authors Get Real about Injustice, Empowerment, and Growing Up Female in America (A. Reed)

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Twenty-one prominent young adult authors from diverse backgrounds share personal essays.

Jaye Robin Brown, a white woman raised as a Southern belle, describes how her traditionally feminine gender presentation combined with the power of the male gaze interfered with her ability to recognize her sexuality and come out as queer. Brandy Colbert untangles the intersection between race and gender: As a high-achieving, middle-class black student in a mostly white area, she noticed history being taught in a way that allowed white girls to celebrate and proudly identify, in contrast to the little black history that was included. She saw a similar dynamic at work in the reactions white women she knew had to Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy. While there are no transgender or gender-nonconforming contributors, the authors otherwise come from a variety of different perspectives, including religious faith, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and immigration status. A number of the essays deal sensitively and vulnerably with subjects such as abuse, sexual assault, and racist behavior and violence. The anthology is successful in showcasing a wide array of topics, although some entries end with abrupt or seemingly anecdotal conclusions. Numerous authors focus on political topics through the lens of race, gender bias, and Islamophobia, and the fundamental message is one of growth and hope.

Advice and perspectives from diverse voices from which readers of all genders can benefit. (resources, about the authors) (Nonfiction essays. 14-adult)

Did you like this book?

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OUR STORIES, OUR VOICES | Kirkus Reviews

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Twenty-one prominent young adult authors from diverse backgrounds share personal essays. Jaye Robin Brown, a white woman raised as a Southern belle, describes how her traditionally feminine gender presentation combined with the power of the male gaze interfered with her ability to recognize her sexuality and come out as queer.

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Acclaimed authors Holly Black ( Ironside)and Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature: M.T. Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, John Green, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.

With illustrated interstitials from comic book artists Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'Malley, Geektastic covers all things geeky, from Klingons and Jedi Knights to fan fiction, theater geeks, and cosplayers. Whether you're a former, current, or future geek, or if you just want to get in touch with your inner geek, Geektastic will help you get your geek on!

Simultaneously addressing the isolation and loneliness that geeks can feel as well as the sense of camaraderie and community that can be found when one embraces a world or ideology in which he or she can completely invest, Geektastic is a completely dorky and utterly worthwhile read.

Obsessed with Star Wars, Star Trek, or Medieval role-playing? Then this book is for you. But even if you are not a Jedi aficionado, this book features more than twenty-five different authors, including Lisa Yee, Barry Lyga, David Levithan, Libba Bray, and many more. No matter who you were in high school, these stories will provide many nights of amusing nostalgia.

-Children's Literature

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Acclaimed authors Holly Black ( Ironside)and Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature: M.T. Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, John Green, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.

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Trevor Noah thinks we should all be young readers.

The comedian and "Daily Show" host's new book " It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" - a young adult adaptation of his 2016 autobiography - isn't watered down for younger bookworms.

Noah says besides tweaking some of the language and simplifying some of the stories told in the original, his memoir for young adults is largely the same.

"All I changed in the book was just how I described certain concepts, but I didn't try to talk down to younger readers because I didn't like being talked down to when I was young," he tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson.

Noah's young adult book aims to provide American kids with an intimate view of what it was like growing up in apartheid South Africa - and to present a deeply personal perspective of how racism shaped the way he saw himself.

He says he hopes American kids reading the book will understand that racism is "an all-too-common idea or a common theme that happens all around the world."

"I think sometimes it's nice to have perspective on these issues, just so that you understand that it's not a unique problem that one country deals with, but rather an idea that society as a whole deals with across borders," Noah says.

His childhood during and after apartheid South Africa shows how as a kid, Noah was grappling with coming to terms with who he was and who he wanted to become. Born to a black South African mother and a white European father, Noah says he felt defined by the government - "it was interesting being in a country where the law defined me as one race" - and by how others labeled him.

Noah says his book serves as a lesson to young readers: There's liberation in defining who you are on your own terms.

"For so long people wanted to define me as whatever they wanted to define me as. I think that clarity for me came from understanding my existence and then looking at the world around me," he says.
On why he thinks American kids should know about apartheid
"One thing I enjoyed when I was growing up in South Africa was in our schools, we learned about world history, so we learned about American history. We learned about French history. We learned about what happened in Russia. We learned about Europe. We learned about Africa. We learned about South Africa. And so for me, I think learning about history gives you some context. It gives you an idea of what the world was like. It also gives you an idea of where the world has gone to in comparison to the past. And so for me, if you read stories from South Africa, if you read about apartheid, you come to realize that racism or oppression aren't unique ideas to America."
On racism in America today
"I think it's unfortunately part of the fabric of the country. South Africa and America have very similar histories in that fundamentally, the beginnings of the countries as we know them, came from a place and a time when people had certain views about people of a different skin color. And so that has traveled through time and that has translated into laws and policies that have affected black people in America [and] black people in South Africa. So for me, what's always interesting is seeing what similarities there are, but then also noticing what differences there are.

"For me, the big difference in the past, you know, we have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and that's, in many ways, quelled any ideas that [apartheid] never happened or it wasn't as bad as it was laid out to be or was presented as. I think that does something for a nation. It puts you in a place where you can't be gaslighted at anymore, whereas in America, it does feel like this conversation about is there racism, as opposed to how do you begin moving forward as a nation to get rid of the racism that has in many ways defined how people react with one another across racial barriers in the U.S."
On whether racism in the U.S. has gotten worse over time
"I think some people will think it's gotten worse and I'm careful to jump to that assumption. I think we've gotten more access to information and so, you know, sometimes the curves of facts versus information can go against each other. I definitely think America has gotten better over time. For anybody to say that 2019's racism is as bad as 1960's racism, I think it is being a little disingenuous.

"I do think however, social media, camera phones, etc., have given us so much more access to these stories. Now you can watch a video of someone being berated by their boss and their bosses using the N-word in the office. You'd see an unarmed person being shot by a police officer. You would never see that before. It was a story where the police could present the facts however they wished and that would probably be the end of the conversation. So I think we live in a world where now we're getting information on a different scale and processing that information can often mean that even though the world may have gotten better gradually over time, we're now inundated with information that tells us otherwise."
On finding clarity on who he is
"I think as human beings we're always trying to find out who we are. I think sometimes the simplest distinctions to make of those that run along color lines because they fundamentally set you with the group and then you can go from there.

"It was just me understanding where I belonged and who I was, because in South Africa many people were faced with a choice. They could choose to aspire to a racial group that we were told was better than maybe the one we were. I think it was liberating for myself to realize that although the government had tried to define me as one race, I comfortably identified with and was a black person. It seems like an obvious thing maybe, but when you grow up in South Africa, you realize how complicated it could actually be."
On where he is now, personally and professionally, given his upbringing
"I like to think that I am the product of a world of impossibilities. You know, my mother is where she should have never been. I think my mother made greater leaps than I have ever made. It's just that her leaps were made within her world and so maybe don't seem as grand. But I think my family, myself, my country, we come from a place where we have achieved the impossible - a bloodless revolution, a shifting of power from a minority to a majority without there being a mass bloodletting - I think is a really impossible story to tell [and] one that hasn't really been replicated anywhere else. I've come from a world where anything is possible and so for myself, I never ever thought I'd be here because I didn't even know what here is. But I was lucky enough to grow up in a space where I was always told about what was possible. There's a beautiful quote that I read the other day which was, 'Would you rather know what is real or would you rather know what is possible?' And I think for me the latter informed how I lived my life."
On his responsibility to inform people through his Comedy Central late-night talk show, "The Daily Show"
"I think I have a responsibility to my audience as much as I have a responsibility to myself. And that's really how I try and create 'The Daily Show' is I try and be as informed as possible as a human being. And then the show would hopefully be a manifestation of that information.

"Also I live in a world where I'm lucky that I'm surrounded by so many individuals who are smarter than myself and so many individuals who push me to think beyond just what I know. When creating 'The Daily Show,' it's that. We're creating, what do we enjoy? We're creating a show that we want to talk about. It's not like in the office we're having conversations that aren't about what's on the air. We talk about politics. We talk about Trump. We talk about what's in the news. We talk about Brexit. We also talk about pop culture. We're talking about Nicki Minaj and then we'll talk about, you know, boxing fights and the NBA Finals. And for me, 'The Daily Show' should represent that. It should represent a conversation that people are having and hopefully we find an audience that shares all or some of those interests with us.

"And so for me, the obligation I have to my audience is to provide a show to them that I think is interesting, and for me, the news is interesting. Politics is interesting and it also has a lot of fodder to make comedy from. So it's the perfect space for us to be in."
by Trevor Noah
I grew up in South Africa during apartheid, which was awkward because I was raised in a mixed family, with me being the mixed one in the family. My mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, is black. My father, Robert, is white. Swiss German, to be precise. During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race. Needless to say, my parents committed that crime.

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix- and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.

There were mixed kids in South Africa nine months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach in Table Bay. Just like in America, the colonists here had their way with the native women, as colonists so often do. Unlike in America, where anyone with one drop of black blood automatically became black, in South Africa mixed people came to be classified as their own separate group, neither black nor white but what we call "colored." Colored people, black people, white people, and Indian people were forced to register their race with the government. Based on those classifications, millions of people were uprooted and relocated. Indian areas were segregated from colored areas, which were segregated from black areas-all of them segregated from white areas and separated from one another by buffer zones of empty land. Laws were passed prohibiting sex between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit sex between whites and all nonwhites.

The government went to insane lengths to try to enforce these new laws. The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison. If an interracial couple got caught, God help them. The police would kick down the door, drag the couple out, beat them, and arrest them. At least, that's what they did to the black person.

If you ask my mother whether she ever considered the ramifications of having a mixed child under apartheid, she will say no. She had a level of fearlessness that you have to possess to take on something like she did. If you stop to consider the ramifications, you'll never do anything. Still, it was a crazy, reckless thing to do. A million things had to go right for us to slip through the cracks the way we did for as long as we did.

Under apartheid, if you were a black man you worked on a farm or in a factory or in a mine. If you were a black woman, you worked in a factory or as a maid. Those were pretty much your only options. My mother didn't want to work in a factory. She was a horrible cook and never would have stood for some white lady telling her what to do all day. So, true to her nature, she found an option that was not among the ones presented to her: she took a secretarial course, a typing class. At the time, a black woman learning how to type was like a blind person learning how to drive. It's an admirable effort, but you're unlikely to ever be called upon to execute the task. By law, white-collar jobs and skilled-labor jobs were reserved for whites. Black people didn't work in offices. My mom, however, was a rebel, and, fortunately for her, her rebellion came along at the right moment.

In the early 1980s, the South African government began making minor reforms in an attempt to quell international protest over the atrocities and human rights abuses of apartheid. Among those reforms was the token hiring of black workers in low-level white-collar jobs. Like typists. Through an employment agency my mom got a job as a secretary at ICI, a multinational pharmaceutical company in Braamfontein, a suburb of Johannesburg.

When my mom started working, she still lived with my grandmother in Soweto, the township where the government had relocated my family decades before. But my mother was unhappy at home, and when she was twenty-two she ran away to live in downtown Johannesburg. There was only one problem: it was illegal for black people to live there.

The ultimate goal of apartheid was to make South Africa a white country, with every black person stripped of his or her citizenship and relocated to live in the homelands, the Bantustans, semisovereign black territories that were in reality puppet states of the government in Pretoria. But this so-called white country could not function without black labor to produce its wealth, which meant black people had to be allowed to live near white areas in townships, government-planned ghettos built to house black workers, like Soweto. The township was where you lived, but your status as a laborer was the only thing that permitted you to stay there. If your papers were revoked for any reason, you could be deported back to the homelands.

To leave the township for work in the city, or for any other reason, you had to carry a pass with your ID number; otherwise you could be arrested. There was also a curfew: after a certain hour, blacks had to be back home in the township or risk arrest. My mother didn't care. She was determined to never go home again. So she stayed in town, hiding and sleeping in public restrooms until she learned the rules of navigating the city from the other black women who had contrived to live there.

Many of these women were Xhosa. They spoke my mother's language and showed her how to survive. They taught her how to dress up in a pair of maid's overalls to move around the city without being questioned. They also introduced her to white men who were willing to rent out flats in town. A lot of these men were foreigners, Germans and Portuguese who didn't care about the law. Thanks to her job my mom had money to pay rent. She met a German fellow through one of her friends, and he agreed to let her a flat in his name. She moved in and bought a bunch of maid's overalls to wear. She was caught and arrested many times, for not having her ID on the way home from work, for being in a white area after hours. The penalty for violating the pass laws was thirty days in jail or a fine of fifty rand, nearly half her monthly salary. She would scrape together the money, pay the fine, and go right back about her business.

My mom's secret flat was in a neighborhood called Hillbrow. She lived in number 203. Down the corridor was a tall, brown-haired, brown-eyed Swiss German expat named Robert. He lived in 206. As a former trading colony, South Africa has always had a large expatriate community. People find their way here. Tons of Germans. Lots of Dutch. Hillbrow at the time was the Greenwich Village of South Africa. It was a thriving scene, cosmopolitan and liberal. There were galleries and underground theaters where artists and performers dared to speak up and criticize the government in front of integrated crowds. There were restaurants and nightclubs, a lot of them foreign-owned, that served a mixed clientele, black people who hated the status quo and white people who simply thought it ridiculous. These people would have secret get-togethers, too, usually in someone's flat or in empty basements that had been converted into clubs. Integration by its nature was a political act, but the get-togethers themselves weren't political at all. People would meet up and hang out, have parties.

My mom threw herself into that scene. She was always out at some club, some party, dancing, meeting people. She was a regular at the Hillbrow Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Africa at that time. It had a nightclub with a rotating dance floor on the top floor. It was an exhilarating time but still dangerous. Sometimes the restaurants and clubs would get shut down, sometimes not. Sometimes the performers and patrons would get arrested, sometimes not. It was a roll of the dice. My mother never knew whom to trust, who might turn her in to the police. Neighbors would report on one another.

Living alone in the city, not being trusted and not being able to trust, my mother started spending more and more time in the company of someone with whom she felt safe: the tall Swiss man down the corridor in 206. He was forty-six. She was twenty-four. He was quiet and reserved; she was wild and free. She would stop by his flat to chat; they'd go to underground get-togethers, go dancing at the nightclub with the rotating dance floor. Something clicked.

The fact that this man was prevented by law from having a family with my mother was part of the attraction. She wanted a child, not a man stepping in to run her life. For my father's part, I know that for a long time he kept saying no to fathering a child. Eventually he said yes.

Nine months after that yes, on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations-I was born a crime.
Excerpt copyright © 2019 by Trevor Noah. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Julia Corcoran produced this interview and edited it for broadcast with Kathleen McKenna. Serena McMahon adapted it for the web.

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Trevor Noah's Lesson To Young Readers: It's Freeing To Define Yourself On Your Own Terms

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Trevor Noah, host of "The Daily Show," has recently adapted his 2016 memoir about his childhood in South Africa.

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The Companion Book to New Kid

New York Times bestselling author Jerry Craft is back with the newest adventures of Jordan, Drew, Liam, and all the characters that fans first met in New Kid , winner of the Newbery Award and the Coretta Scott King Author Award! In this full-color contemporary graphic novel, the gang from Riverdale Academy Day is heading to Paris, for an international education like you've never seen before ...

Jordan, Drew, Liam, Maury, and their friends from Riverdale Academy Day School are heading out on a school trip to Paris. As an aspiring artist himself, Jordan can't wait to see all the amazing art in the famous City of Lights.

But when their trusted faculty guides are replaced at the last minute, the school trip takes an unexpected-and hilarious-turn. Especially when trying to find their way around a foreign city ends up being almost as tricky as navigating the same friendships, fears, and differences that they struggle with at home.

Will Jordan and his friends embrace being exposed to a new language, unfamiliar food, and a different culture? Or will they all end up feeling like the "new kid"?

The Companion Book to New Kid
New York Times bestselling author Jerry Craft returns with a companion book to New Kid, winner of the 2020 Newbery Medal, the Coretta Scott King Author Award, and the Kirkus Prize. This time, it's Jordan's friend Drew who takes center stage in another laugh-out-loud funny, powerful, and important story about being one of the few kids of color in a prestigious private school.
Eighth grader Drew Ellis is no stranger to the saying "You have to work twice as hard to be just as good." His grandmother has reminded him his entire life. But what if he works ten times as hard and still isn't afforded the same opportunities that his privileged classmates at the Riverdale Academy Day School take for granted?

To make matters worse, Drew begins to feel as if his good friend Liam might be one of those privileged kids. He wants to pretend like everything is fine, but it's hard not to withdraw, and even their mutual friend Jordan doesn't know how to keep the group together.

As the pressures mount, will Drew find a way to bridge the divide so he and his friends can truly accept each other? And most important, will he finally be able to accept himself?

New Kid, the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal, is now joined by Jerry Craft's powerful Class Act.

Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft.
Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade.

As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds-and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself?

Universal Pictures has acquired film rights to New Kid, with LeBron James' The Spring Hill Company on board to develop and produce. Craft will be an Executive Producer.

Winner of the 2020 Newbery Medal
Winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Book Awards Author Award
#1 New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers' Literature
Finalist for Audie Award - Middle Grade Book of the Year
San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller
NEIBA, NAIBA, MPIBA, NCIBA, SCIBA and PNBA Bestseller
Indie Bestseller for Early & Middle Grade Readers
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Middle Grade Books of 2019
New England Independent Booksellers Association Best Children's Book of 2019
New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association 2019 Book of the Year for Middle Readers
Top 10 Spring 2019 Indie Next List Pick
Amazon Best Book of the Month, Ages 9-12
2020 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Kids Nominee
2019 Harvey Award for Best Children's Book Nominee
One of Booklist's 2019 Top 10 Diverse Fiction for Youth
One of P ublishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Children's Books, Spring 2019
#1 Indie Comics & Graphic Works Bestseller
One of the Best Graphic Novels of 2019 - School Library Journal
One of the 5 Best Fiction Books of 2019 - Washington Post
One of the Best Graphic Novels of 2019 - Washington Post
2020 Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children - Honor Book
30 of the Most Influential Children's Books of All Time - Bookriot.com
One of the Best Books of the Year - Time.com
Best Books of 2019 - New York Public Library
Best Fiction for Older Readers of 2019 - Chicago Public Library
25 Best Children's Books of 2019 - New York Times
Best Multicultural Children's Books of 2019 - Center for the Study of Multicultural Children's Literature
The Best New Gift Books for Kids - Kirkus - Best Middle Grade Graphic Novels of 2019
100 Scope Notes Best Books of 2019
Shelf Awareness - Best Middle Grade Books of 2019
Today.com - Best Graphic Novels of 2019
2022 Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader's Choice
2022 Grand Canyon Reader Award (Arizona)
2022 Charlie May Simon Award (Arkansas)
2021 Nutmeg Book Award (Connecticut)
2020 Connecticut Book Awards (Connecticut)
Sunshine State Young Readers Award 2020-2021 (Florida)
2021 Nene Award (Hawaii)
2021 Rebecca Caudill Young Reader's Book Award (Illinois)
2021 Young Hoosier Book Award (Indiana)
2020-2021 Iowa Children's Choice Award (Iowa)
2021-2022 Louisiana Readers' Choice Awards (Louisiana)
2021 Maine Student Book Award (Maine)
2020 - 2021 Great Lakes Great Books Award (Michigan)
2021 Minnesota Youth Reading Award (Minnesota)
2019 - 2020 Great Stone Face Children's Book Award (New Hampshire)
2022 North Carolina Children's Book Award (North Carolina)
2021 Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Award (Pennsylvania)
2020-2021 Volunteer State Book Award (Tennessee)

Meet Connecticut-based children's book author and illustrator Jerry Craft. Mr. Craft explains how his identity as an African American man influences his work, and how he hopes young readers are affected by his books.

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Jerry Craft: Children's Book Author & Illustrator

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Welcome to the website of Jerry Craft, author and illustrator of 'New Kid' and Mama's Boyz. Read his bio, tour dates, and more.

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Being Latina and the struggles of the dualities of two worlds (C. Ortega-Lukas)

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Being Latina and the struggles of the dualities of two worlds (C. Ortega-Lukas)

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A few days ago, I attended a Zoom presentation organized by ASUN entitled "What does it mean to be Latinx?" Every time I witness the complexity of identities in the Latinx community in the United States, I am amazed. Amazed that we are always perceived as a homogenous group, when in reality, we couldn't come from more different backgrounds, and we couldn't have more different and complex identities. Also, the challenges we face are as different as each of our stories. So, in the spirit of Hispanic Heritage Month, please indulge me in letting me tell you my story.

There is a well-known character in Mexican history that invokes both love and condemnation from most Mexicans. Her name was Malintzin but history knows her as La Malinche. Her story is similar to that of U.S.A.'s Pocahontas; the beautiful indigenous woman who abandons her tribe to help the white man. (The legends omit how she became the property of such White men, but that's another story).

La Malinche was a Nahúatl woman who was given to Hernán Cortés as a slave. Due to her upperclass education, she spoke two languages, an ability that made her very useful to Hernán Cortés in communicating with the indigenous people as he went about conquering Mexico. On one hand, she was intelligent and, clearly, resilient. But on the other hand, she helped Cortés begin the Spanish colonization of the Nuevo Mundo. This duality is what gives her such a complex identity. And this duality is one that follows me.

When I was in high school, several of my classmates would sometimes call me Malinchista. As you can imagine, that was NOT a compliment. By definition, a Malinchista is "a person who denies her own cultural heritage by preferring foreign cultural expressions" (I'm not making it up; look it up).

In my early teens, I discovered American football. While switching channels on the television, I stumbled across a game being played in several feet of snow. I had never seen this! The game was being played in Minnesota. That year, the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl, and I became a die-hard fan of Roger Staubach and "America's Team." This marked the initiation of my love for all things American. I learned about Formula 1, Sports Illustrated and Tiger Beat. Yes, Tiger Beat introduced me to the American darlings of my generation. My bedroom walls were covered with pictures of American teen idols I had never seen before in my life (in the 1970s, Mexican TV programming didn't broadcast many American TV shows; I only remember Dallas and The Partridge Family, which of course, I loved).

I also loved English-language songs. I used to spend my money buying cancioneros, books similar in format and quality to comic books, for people who were learning to play the guitar. The cancioneros had the lyrics of the songs along with the music notes. I literally used these cancioneros to practice my English. I would translate each word of the songs, and then I would play the records over and over until I memorized the lyrics and could actually follow the singer pronouncing the words. Do you know how hard it is to sing at full speed: "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall?"

By the time I was in college, I had already spent time in the city of Dallas (and yes, I made the pilgrimage to Irving, Texas and the Cowboys' stadium) - and perfected my English. I started studying English when I entered first grade. By middle school, my parents were paying a private tutor. In Mexico, English was accepted as the lingua franca needed to succeed in the world, and my parents were going to make sure I learned it. (My dad had taught himself English, and he shared my enthusiasm for English language magazines, although not for the Dallas Cowboys.) Learning a second language allowed me to learn about, navigate and integrate into a different culture. And, unlike La Malinche, I did this of my own volition.

When I made the decision to come to the United States to study, my father told me, "If you ever decide this is not for you or things don't work out, come back home." But I was not turning back. In my mind, America was the best place in the whole world (my small world, at least). I had spent a semester in an exchange program at the University of Oklahoma, and I knew back then I belonged in the United States. One of the things that caught my attention early on was the fact that people could wear their pajamas to class (I know you've seen it), and nobody blinked an eye. One could wear her hair in blue spikes or wear slippers to the grocery store, and no one would say a thing. To me, that was amazing! People didn't bother you, judge you or care what you wore. I felt America was the place where not only public services worked, but where you could be yourself and you could be free to be whomever you wanted to be. There was a sense of freedom that was refreshing.

However, for a long time I felt like I didn't belong here, and I didn't belong in Mexico, either. Navigating two worlds was not precisely difficult but sometimes unsettling. You spend your time "live switching" from English to Spanish to Spanglish and back again. You mix Cholula with Five Guys hamburgers. You watch American soccer but listen to the Mexican commentators (otherwise it's like listening to golf announcers). And you truly think Mexican soccer fans are like the old Oakland Raiders fans, only worse. Women in Mexico are as rabid fans as many men, but, at least back in my day (I feel ancient now), you didn't see many women go to the stadiums. As a woman, I never felt safe. I only went to a match if my male friends went with me. This is one of the most striking differences between the U.S. and Mexico: American soccer fans are so mild-mannered in comparison!

Another striking difference I noticed when I first came to the U.S. was that I was not getting cat calls out when I was out walking in the streets. In Mexico, everywhere I went (since I was a preteen, for goodness' sake), I would be subjected to cat calls and whistles - and the harassment only got worse the older I got. My experience as a woman was of always being on high alert. But when I came to the U.S., I felt respected. I could exist without being harassed continually. Women here seemed to have a voice and the same opportunities as men to grow and pursue their dreams. I felt free to pursue a career and to not be expected to only dream of marrying and having children. Although, over the years, I've come to realize there still is much room for improvement.

Back in the 1500s La Malinche did what she could to survive (did I say historians think she died before she was 30?). History asked her to do a task she didn't want, and she did her best. I am sure she considered her options and bought time, respect and the right to live in the best way she could. She used her skills to earn a place in history, and although her role continues to be debated, I cannot blame her. Did I turn my back on my country? Or did I look for a better life? My circle of Latina friends in the U.S. is full of intelligent, professional women who left their countries and built a better life - a different life - here in the United States. They all miss their families, and they all support their biological families in many ways. What they can do from here, however, is more than they could have done had they stayed in their countries of origin.

Being Latina in America is both an honor and a challenge. We struggle with the dualities of our worlds. We struggle with the adjectives that define us. We are a complex mix of races, traditions and experiences. We care for our people, and we work tirelessly to do what must be done to help each other. The complexity of our identities can help us create a better world for all of us, a world where our differences are not viewed as a threat but as an asset. A world where we all thrive. ¡Sí, se puede!

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Being Latina and the struggle of the dualities of two worlds | University of Nevada, Reno

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A few days ago, I attended a Zoom presentation organized by ASUN entitled "What does it mean to be Latinx?" Every time I witness the complexity of identities in the Latinx community in the United States, I am amazed.

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To This Day: for the bullied and beautiful (S. Koyczan)

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To This Day: for the bullied and beautiful (S. Koyczan)

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"To This Day" ... for the bullied and beautiful | Shane Koyczan

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This Body, from the YA novel Watch Us Rise by Renee Watson and Ellen Hagan

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How one young reader found himself in a different kind of literature.

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excerpt from Dear America: The Story of an Undocumented Citizen (J. A. Vargas)

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excerpt from Dear America: The Story of an Undocumented Citizen (J. A. Vargas)

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excerpt from Dear America (J. A. Vargas)

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We Should Hang Out Sometime (J. Sundquist)

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We Should Hang Out Sometime (J. Sundquist)

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A fondness for math plus a self-deprecating sense of humor equals Sundquist's memoir of dating and self-acceptance.

Who says you won't use math and science later in life? Reflecting on spending 25 years without a girlfriend, Paralympic skier Sundquist quirkily applies the scientific method to his attempts at dating from eighth grade to college. Was he rejected because he studied SAT words for fun? Or maybe because he accidentally chopped down a tree with his prosthesis? To test his hypotheses, he interviews each girl and reaches a startling, surprisingly emotional conclusion that gives new meaning to the phrase "It's not you, it's me." This is no dry dissection, however; as Sundquist notes, "fighting emotion with logic is like bringing a calculator to a knife fight." Nor does it fall into an overtly inspirational, relentlessly cheerful tone. Sundquist is a storyteller-flawed, wry, laid-back and sympathetic. Anyone who's felt awkward will alternately (or simultaneously) wince and burst out laughing at his earnest misadventures with stalkers, "Close Fast Dancing" and flow charts. Readers will learn about love, self-esteem and even Venn diagrams thanks to tongue-in-cheek visual aids ribbing everything from Sundquist's limb count to bad pickup lines, but above all, they'll be rooting for Sundquist to hang out with a girl.

Funny, sympathetic and poignant, Sundquist's memoir has a high probability of success. (Memoir. 13 & up)

Did you like this book?

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WE SHOULD HANG OUT SOMETIME | Kirkus Reviews

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A fondness for math plus a self-deprecating sense of humor equals Sundquist's memoir of dating and self-acceptance. Who says you won't use math and science later in life? Reflecting on spending 25 years without a girlfriend, Paralympic skier Sundquist quirkily applies the scientific method to his attempts at dating from eighth grade to college.

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What is a Personal Statement? (Prepscholar.com)

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What is a Personal Statement? (Prepscholar.com)

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In addition to standardized test scores and transcripts, a personal statement or essay is a required part of many college applications. The personal statement can be one of the most stressful parts of the application process because it's the most open ended.

In this guide, I'll answer the question, "What is a personal statement?" I'll talk through common college essay topics and what makes for an effective personal statement.

Even the terminology can be confusing if you aren't familiar with it, so let's start by defining some terms:

Personal statement - an essay you write to show a college admissions committee who you are and why you deserve to be admitted to their school. It's worth noting that, unlike "college essay," this term is used for application essays for graduate school as well.

College essay - basically the same as a personal statement. (I'll be using the terms interchangeably.)

Essay prompt - a question or statement that your college essay is meant to respond to.

Supplemental essay - an extra school or program specific essay beyond the basic personal statement.

Many colleges ask for only one essay. However, some schools do ask you to respond to multiple prompts or to provide supplemental essays in addition to a primary personal statement.

Either way, don't let it stress you out! This guide will cover everything you need to know about the different types of college essays and get you started thinking about how to write a great one:

Why colleges ask for an essay

What kinds of essay questions you'll see

What sets great essays apart

Tips for writing your own essay

Why Do Colleges Ask For an Essay?

There are a couple of reasons that colleges ask applicants to submit an essay, but the basic idea is that it gives them more information about you, especially who you are beyond grades and test scores.

#1: Insight Into Your Personality

The most important role of the essay is to give admissions committees a sense of your personality and what kind of addition you'd be to their school's community. Are you inquisitive? Ambitious? Caring? These kinds of qualities will have a profound impact on your college experience, but they're hard to determine based on a high school transcript.

Basically, the essay contextualizes your application and shows what kind of person you are outside of your grades and test scores. Imagine two students, Jane and Tim: they both have 3.5 GPAs and 1200s on the SAT. Jane lives in Colorado and is the captain of her track team, while Tim lives in Vermont and regularly contributes to the school paper, but they both want to be doctors and they both volunteer at the local hospital.

As similar as Jane and Tim seem on paper, in reality they're actually quite different, and their unique perspectives come through in their essays. Jane writes about how looking into her family history for a school project made her realize how the discovery of modern medical treatments like antibiotics and vaccines had changed the world and drove her to pursue a career as a medical researcher. Tim, on the other hand, recounts a story about how a kind doctor helped him overcome his fear of needles, an interaction that reminded him of the value of empathy and inspired him to become a family practitioner. These two students may seem outwardly similar but their motivations and personalities are very different.

Without an essay, your application is essentially a series of numbers: a GPA, SAT scores, the number of hours spent preparing for quiz bowl competitions. The personal statement is your chance to stand out as an individual.

#2: Evidence of Writing Skills

A secondary purpose of the essay is to serve as a writing sample and help colleges see that you have the skills needed to succeed in college classes. The personal statement is your best chance to show off your writing, so take the time to craft a piece you're really proud of.

That said, don't panic if you aren't a strong writer. Admissions officers aren't expecting you to write like Joan Didion; they just want to see that you can express your ideas clearly.

No matter what, your essay should absolutely not include any errors or typos.

#3: Explanation of Extenuating Circumstances

For some students, the essay is also a chance to explain factors affecting their high school record. Did your grades drop sophomore year because you were dealing with a family emergency? Did you miss out on extracurriculars junior year because of an extended medical absence? Colleges want to know if you struggled with a serious issue that affected your high school record, so make sure to indicate any relevant circumstances on your application.

Keep in mind that in some cases there will be a separate section for you to address these types of issues, as well as any black marks on your record like expulsions or criminal charges.

#4: Your Reasons for Applying to the School

Many colleges ask you to write an essay or paragraph about why you're applying to their school specifically. In asking these questions, admissions officers are trying to determine if you're genuinely excited about the school and whether you're likely to attend if accepted.

I'll talk more about this type of essay below.

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Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now:

What Kind of Questions Do Colleges Ask?

Thankfully, applications don't simply say "Please include an essay about yourself"-they include a question or prompt that you're asked to respond to. These prompts are generally pretty open ended and can be approached in a lot of different ways.

Nonetheless, most questions fall into a few main categories. Let's go through each common type of prompt, with examples from the Common Application, the University of California application, and a few individual schools.

Prompt Type 1: Your Personal History

This sort of question asks you to write about a formative experience, important event or key relationship from your life. Admissions officers want to understand what is important to you and how your background has shaped you as a person.

These questions are both common and tricky. The most common pitfall students fall into is trying to tell their entire life stories - it's better to focus in on a very specific point in time and explain why it was meaningful to you.

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative side.

Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the classroom.

Prompt Type 2:Facing a Problem

A lot of prompts deal with how you solve problems or how you cope with failure. College can be difficult, both personally and academically, and admissions committees want to see that you're equipped to face those challenges.

The key to these types of questions is to identify a real problem or failure (not a success in disguise) and show how you adapted and grew from addressing the issue.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma - anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

Prompt Type 3:Diversity

Most colleges are pretty diverse, with students from a wide range of backgrounds. Essay questions about diversity are designed to help admissions committees understand how you interact with people who are different from you.

In addressing these prompts, you want to show that you're capable of engaging with new ideas and relating to people who may have different beliefs than you.

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Successful students at Johns Hopkins make the biggest impact by collaborating with others, including peers, mentors, and professors. Talk about a time, in or outside the classroom, when you worked with others and what you learned from the experience.

Prompt Type 4:Your Future Goals

This type of prompt asks about what you want to do in the future: sometimes simply what you'd like to study, sometimes longer term career goals. Colleges want to understand what you're interested in and how you plan to work towards your goals.

You'll mostly see these prompts if you're applying for a specialized program (like pre-med or architecture) or applying as a transfer student. Some schools also ask for supplementary essays along these lines.

What do you personally expect to get out of studying engineering or computer science in college?

Prompt Type 5: Why This School

The most common style of supplemental essay is the "Why us?" essay (although a few schools with their own application use this type of question as their main prompt). In these essays, you're meant to address the specific reasons you want to go to the school you're applying to.

Whatever you do, don't ever recycle these essays for more than one school.

What is it about Yale that has led you to apply?

There are thousands of universities and colleges. Please share with us why you are choosing to apply to Chapman.

What aspects of the Rice undergraduate experience inspired you to apply?

Prompt Type 6:Creative Prompts

More selective schools often have supplemental essays with stranger or more unique questions. University of Chicago is notorious for its weird prompts, but it's not the only school that will ask you to think outside the box in addressing its questions.

If there's a limited amount of matter in the universe, how can Olive Garden (along with other restaurants and their concepts of food infinity) offer truly unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks? Explain this using any method of analysis you wish-physics, biology, economics, history, theology... the options, as you can tell, are endless.

Whether you've built circuit boards or written slam poetry, created a community event or designed mixed media installations, tell us: What have you designed, invented, engineered, or produced? Or what do you hope to?

University of Chicago (Phil Roeder/Flickr)

What Makes a Strong Personal Statement?

Okay, so you're clear on what a college essay is, but you're still not sure how to write a good one. To help you get started, I'm going to explain the main things admissions officers look for in students' essays: an engaging perspective, genuine moments, and lively writing.

I've touched on these ideas already, but here I'll go into more depth about how the best essays stand out from the pack.

Showing Who You Are

A lot of students panic about finding a unique topic, and certainly writing about something unusual like a successful dating app you developed with your friends or your time working as a mall Santa can't hurt you. But what's really important isn't so much what you write about as how you write about it. You need to use your subject to show something deeper about yourself.

Look at the prompts above: you'll notice that they almost all ask you what you learned or how the experience affected you. Whatever topic you pick, you must be able to specifically address how or why it matters to you.

Say a student, Will, was writing about the mall Santa in response to Common App prompt number 2 (the one about failure): Will was a terrible mall Santa. He was way too skinny to be convincing and the kids would always step on his feet. He could easily write 600 very entertaining words describing this experience, but they wouldn't necessarily add up to an effective college essay.

To do that, he'll need to talk about his motivations and his feelings: why he took such a job in the first place and what he did (and didn't) get out of it. Maybe Will took the job because he needed to make some money to go on a school trip and it was the only one he could find. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for screaming children, he kept doing it because he knew if he persevered through the whole holiday season he would have enough money for his trip. Would you rather read "I failed at being a mall Santa" or "Failing as a mall Santa taught me how to persevere no matter what"? Admissions officers definitely prefer the latter.

Ultimately, the best topics are ones that allow you to explain something surprising about yourself.

Honesty

Since the main point of the essay is to give schools a sense of who you are, you have to open up enough to let them see your personality. Writing a good college essay means being honest about your feelings and experiences even when they aren't entirely positive.

In this context, honesty doesn't mean going on at length about the time you broke into the local pool at night and nearly got arrested, but it does mean acknowledging when something was difficult or upsetting for you. Think about the mall Santa example above. The essay won't work unless the writer genuinely acknowledges that he was a bad Santa and explains why.

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Even this little kid is a better Santa than Will was.
Eloquent Writing

As I mentioned above, colleges want to know that you are a strong enough writer to survive in college classes. Can you express your ideas clearly and concisely? Can you employ specific details appropriately and avoid cliches and generalizations? These kinds of skills will serve you well in college (and in life!).

Nonetheless, admissions officers recognize that different students have different strengths. They aren't looking for a poetic magnum opus from someone who wants to be a math major. (Honestly, they aren't expecting a masterwork from anyone, but the basic point stands.) Focus on making sure that your thoughts and personality come through, and don't worry about using fancy vocabulary or complex rhetorical devices.

Above all, make sure that you have zero grammar or spelling errors. Typos indicate carelessness, which will hurt your cause with admissions officers.

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Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.

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Top 5 Essay-Writing Tips

Now that you have a sense of what colleges are looking for, let's talk about how you can put this new knowledge into practice as you approach your own essay. Below, I've collected my five best tips from years as a college essay counselor.

#1: Start Early!

No matter how much you want to avoid writing your essay, don't leave it until the last minute. One of the most important parts of the essay writing process is editing, and editing takes a lot of time. You want to be able to put your draft in a drawer for a week and come back to it with fresh eyes. You don't want to be stuck with an essay you don't really like because you have to submit your application tomorrow.

You need plenty of time to experiment and rewrite, so I would recommend starting your essays at least two months before the application deadline. For most students, that means starting around Halloween, but if you're applying early you'll need to get going closer to Labor Day.

Of course, it's even better to get a head start and begin your planning earlier. Many students like to work on their essays over the summer when they have more free time, but you should keep in mind that each year's application isn't usually released until August or September. Essay questions often stay the same from year to year, however. If you are looking to get a jump on writing, you can try to confirm with the school (or the Common App) if the essay questions will be the same as the previous year's.

#2: Pick a Topic You're Genuinely Excited About

One of the biggest mistakes students make is trying to write what they think the committee wants to hear. The truth is that there's no "right answer" when it comes to college essays - the best topics aren't limited to specific categories like volunteer experiences or winning a tournament. Instead, they're topics that actually matter to the writer.

"OK," you're thinking, "but what does she mean by 'a topic that matters to you'? Because to be perfectly honest, right now what really matters to me is that fall TV starts up this week, and I have a feeling I shouldn't write about that."

You're not wrong (although some great essays have been written about television). A great topic isn't just something that you're excited about or that you talk to your friends about; it's something that has had a real, describable effect on your perspective.

This doesn't mean that you should overemphasize how something absolutely changed your life, especially if it really didn't. Instead, try to be as specific and honest as you can about how the experience affected you, what it taught you, or what you got out of it.

Let's go back to the TV idea. Sure, writing an essay about how excited you are for the new season of The Vampire Diaries probably isn't the quickest way to get yourself into college, but you could write a solid essay (in response to the first type of prompt) about how SpongeBob SquarePants was an integral part of your childhood. However, it's not enough to just explain how much you loved SpongeBob - you must also explain why and how watching the show every day after school affected your life. For example, maybe it was a ritual you shared with your brother, which showed you how even seemingly silly pieces of pop culture can bring people together. Dig beneath the surface to show who you are and how you see the world.
As strange as it sounds, SpongeBob could make a great essay topic.
When you write about something you don't really care about, your writing will come out cliched and uninteresting, and you'll likely struggle to motivate. When you write about something that is genuinely important to you, on the other hand, you can make even the most ordinary experiences - learning to swim, eating a meal, or watching TV - engaging.

#3: Focus on Specifics

But how do you write an interesting essay? Focus.

Don't try to tell your entire life story, or even the story of an entire weekend; 500-650 words may seem like a lot, but you'll reach that limit quickly if you try to pack every single thing that has happened to you into your essay. If, on the other hand, you just touch on a wide range of topics, you'll end up with an essay that reads more like a resume.

Instead, narrow in on one specific event or idea and talk about it in more depth. The narrower your topic, the better. For example, writing about your role as Mercutio in your school's production of Romeo and Juliet is too general, but writing about opening night, when everything went wrong, could be a great topic.

Whatever your topic, use details to help draw the reader in and express your unique perspective, but keep in mind that you don't have to include every detail of what you did or thought - stick to the important and illustrative ones.

#4: Use Your Own Voice

College essays aren't academic assignments: you don't need to be super formal. Instead, try to be yourself. The best writing sounds like a more eloquent version of the way you talk.

Focus on using clear, simple language that effectively explains a point or evokes a feeling. To do so, avoid the urge to use fancy-sounding synonyms when you don't really know what they mean. Contractions are fine; slang, generally, is not. Don't hesitate to write in the first person.

A final note: you don't need to be relentlessly positive. It's okay to acknowledge that sometimes things don't go how you want - just show how you grew from that.

#5: Be Ruthless

Many students want to call it a day after writing a first draft, but editing is a key part of writing a truly great essay. To be clear, editing doesn't mean just making a few minor wording tweaks and cleaning up typos; it means reading your essay carefully and objectively and thinking about how you could improve it.

Ask yourself questions as you read: is the progression of the essay clear? Do you make a lot of vague, sweeping statements that could be replaced with more interesting specifics? Do your sentences flow together nicely? Do you show something about yourself beyond the surface level?
Ludwig/Flickr
You will have to delete and rewrite (potentially large) parts of your essay, and no matter how attached you feel to something you wrote, you might have to let it go. If you've ever heard the phrase "Kill your darlings," know that it is 100% applicable to college essay writing.

At some point, you might even need to rewrite the whole essay. Even though it's annoying, starting over is sometimes the best way to get an essay that you're really proud of.

What's Next?

Make sure to check out our other posts on college essays, including our step-by-step guide to how to write your college essay, our analysis of the Common App Prompts, and our collection of example essays.

If you're in need of guidance on other parts of the application process, take a look at our guides to choosing the right college for you, writing about extracurriculars, deciding to double major, and requesting teacher recommendations.

Last but not least, if you're planning on taking the SAT one last time, check out our ultimate guide to studying for the SAT and make sure you're as prepared as possible.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

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What Is a Personal Statement? Everything You Need to Know About the College Essay

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In addition to standardized test scores and transcripts, a personal statement or essay is a required part of many college applications. The personal statement can be one of the most stressful parts of the application process because it's the most open ended. In this guide, I'll answer the question, "What is a personal statement?"

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How dare the Sun Rise (S. Uwiringiyimana and A. Pesta)

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How dare the Sun Rise (S. Uwiringiyimana and A. Pesta)

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Junior Library Guild Selection * New York Public Library's Best Books for Teens * Goodreads Choice Awards Nonfiction Finalist * Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best Books for Teens: Nonfiction * 2018 Texas Topaz Nonfiction List * YALSA's 2018 Quick Picks List * Bank Street's 2018 Best Books of the Year
"This gut-wrenching, poetic memoir reminds us that no life story can be reduced to the word 'refugee.'" -New York Times Book Review "A critical piece of literature, contributing to the larger refugee narrative in a way that is complex and nuanced." -School Library Journal (starred review)
This profoundly moving memoir is the remarkable and inspiring true story of Sandra Uwiringiyimana, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who tells the tale of how she survived a massacre, immigrated to America, and overcame her trauma through art and activism.

Sandra was just ten years old when she found herself with a gun pointed at her head. She had watched as rebels gunned down her mother and six-year-old sister in a refugee camp. Remarkably, the rebel didn't pull the trigger, and Sandra escaped.

Thus began a new life for her and her surviving family members. With no home and no money, they struggled to stay alive. Eventually, through a United Nations refugee program, they moved to America, only to face yet another ethnic disconnect. Sandra may have crossed an ocean, but there was now a much wider divide she had to overcome. And it started with middle school in New York.

In this memoir, Sandra tells the story of her survival, of finding her place in a new country, of her hope for the future, and how she found a way to give voice to her people.

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Junior Library Guild Selection * New York Public Library's Best Books for Teens * Goodreads Choice Awards Nonfiction Finalist * Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best Books for Teens: Nonfiction * 2018 Texas Topaz Nonfiction List * YALSA's 2018 Quick Picks List * Bank Street's 2018 Be

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A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (J. Schmidt) 

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A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (J. Schmidt) 

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by Michael Bronski ; adapted by Richie Chevat ‧

An adaptation for teens of the adult title A Queer History of the United States (2011).

Divided into thematic sections, the text filters LGBTQIA+ history through key figures in each era from the 1500s to the present. Alongside watershed moments like the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the text brings to light less well-known people, places, and events: the 1625 free love colony of Merrymount, transgender Civil War hero Albert D.J. Cashier, and the 1951 founding of the Mattachine Society, to name a few. Throughout, the author and adapter take care to use accurate pronouns and avoid imposing contemporary terminology onto historical figures. In some cases, they quote primary sources to speculate about same-sex relationships while also reminding readers of past cultural differences in expressing strong affection between friends. Black-and-white illustrations or photos augment each chapter. Though it lacks the teen appeal and personable, conversational style of Sarah Prager's Queer, There, and Everywhere (2017), this textbook-level survey contains a surprising amount of depth. However, the mention of transgender movements and activism-in particular, contemporary issues-runs on the slim side. Whereas chapters are devoted to over 30 ethnically diverse gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer figures, some trans pioneers such as Christine Jorgensen and Holly Woodlawn are reduced to short sidebars.

Though not the most balanced, an enlightening look back for the queer future. (glossary, photo credits, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 14-18)

Did you like this book?

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A LIST OF THINGS THAT DIDN'T KILL ME | Kirkus Reviews

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by Michael Bronski ; adapted by Richie Chevat ‧ An adaptation for teens of the adult title A Queer History of the United States (2011). Divided into thematic sections, the text filters LGBTQIA+ history through key figures in each era from the 1500s to the present.

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About The Book

THE BELOVED #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER-FROM THE AUTHOR OF HANG THE MOON

The extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world's most gifted storytellers.
The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing-a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.

The memoir was also made into a major motion picture from Lionsgate in 2017 starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, and Naomi Watts.

Chapter 1: A Woman on the Street
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading.

Mom stood fifteen feet away. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and was picking through the trash while her dog, a black-and-white terrier mix, played at her feet. Mom's gestures were all familiar -- the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items of potential value that she'd hoisted out of the Dumpster, the way her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked. Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, but still she reminded me of the mom she'd been when I was a kid, swan-diving off cliffs and painting in the desert and reading Shakespeare aloud. Her cheekbones were still high and strong, but the skin was parched and ruddy from all those winters and summers exposed to the elements. To the people walking by, she probably looked like any of the thousands of homeless people in New York City.

It had been months since I laid eyes on Mom, and when she looked up, I was overcome with panic that she'd see me and call out my name, and that someone on the way to the same party would spot us together and Mom would introduce herself and my secret would be out.

I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue.

The taxi pulled up in front of my building, the doorman held the door for me, and the elevator man took me up to my floor. My husband was working late, as he did most nights, and the apartment was silent except for the click of my heels on the polished wood floor. I was still rattled from seeing Mom, the unexpectedness of coming across her, the sight of her rooting happily through the Dumpster. I put some Vivaldi on, hoping the music would settle me down.

I looked around the room. There were the turn-of-the-century bronze-and-silver vases and the old books with worn leather spines that I'd collected at flea markets. There were the Georgian maps I'd had framed, the Persian rugs, and the overstuffed leather armchair I liked to sink into at the end of the day. I'd tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the person I wanted to be would live. But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and Dad huddled on a sidewalk grate somewhere. I fretted about them, but I was embarrassed by them, too, and ashamed of myself for wearing pearls and living on Park Avenue while my parents were busy keeping warm and finding something to eat.

What could I do? I'd tried to help them countless times, but Dad would insist they didn't need anything, and Mom would ask for something silly, like a perfume atomizer or a membership in a health club. They said that they were living the way they wanted to.

After ducking down in the taxi so Mom wouldn't see me, I hated myself -- hated my antiques, my clothes, and my apartment. I had to do something, so I called a friend of Mom's and left a message. It was our system of staying in touch. It always took Mom a few days to get back to me, but when I heard from her, she sounded, as always, cheerful and casual, as though we'd had lunch the day before. I told her I wanted to see her and suggested she drop by the apartment, but she wanted to go to a restaurant. She loved eating out, so we agreed to meet for lunch at her favorite Chinese restaurant.

Mom was sitting at a booth, studying the menu, when I arrived. She'd made an effort to fix herself up. She wore a bulky gray sweater with only a few light stains, and black leather men's shoes. She'd washed her face, but her neck and temples were still dark with grime.

She waved enthusiastically when she saw me. "It's my baby girl!" she called out. I kissed her cheek. Mom had dumped all the plastic packets of soy sauce and duck sauce and hot-and-spicy mustard from the table into her purse. Now she emptied a wooden bowl of dried noodles into it as well. "A little snack for later on," she explained.

We ordered. Mom chose the Seafood Delight. "You know how I love my seafood," she said.

She started talking about Picasso. She'd seen a retrospective of his work and decided he was hugely overrated. All the cubist stuff was gimmicky, as far as she was concerned. He hadn't really done anything worthwhile after his Rose Period.

"I'm worried about you," I said. "Tell me what I can do to help."

Her smile faded. "What makes you think I need your help?"

"I'm not rich," I said. "But I have some money. Tell me what it is you need."

She thought for a moment. "I could use an electrolysis treatment."

"Be serious."

"I am serious. If a woman looks good, she feels good."

"Come on, Mom." I felt my shoulders tightening up, the way they invariably did during these conversations. "I'm talking about something that could help you change your life, make it better."

"You want to help me change my life?" Mom asked. "I'm fine. You're the one who needs help. Your values are all confused."

"Mom, I saw you picking through trash in the East Village a few days ago."

"Well, people in this country are too wasteful. It's my way of recycling." She took a bite of her Seafood Delight. "Why didn't you say hello?"

"I was too ashamed, Mom. I hid."

Mom pointed her chopsticks at me. "You see?" she said. "Right there. That's exactly what I'm saying. You're way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it."

"And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?"

"Just tell the truth," Mom said. "That's simple enough."

Copyright &copy; 2005 by Jeannette Walls

Reading Group Guide

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Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Though The Glass Castle is brimming with unforgettable stories, which scenes were the most memorable for you? Which were the most shocking, the most inspiring, the funniest?

2. Discuss the metaphor of a glass castle and what it signifies to Jeannette and her father. Why is it important that, just before leaving for New York, Jeannette tells her father that she doesn't believe he'll ever build it? (p. 238).

3. The first story Walls tells of her childhood is that of her burning herself severely at age three, and her father dramatically takes her from the hospital: "You're safe now" (p. 14). Why do you think she opens with that story, and how does it set the stage for the rest of the memoir?

4. Rex Walls often asked his children, "Have I ever let you down?" Why was this question (and the required "No, Dad" response) so important for him -- and for his kids? On what occasions did he actually come through for them?

5. Jeannette's mother insists that, no matter what, "life with your father was never boring" (p. 288). What kind of man was Rex Walls? What were his strengths and weaknesses, his flaws and contradictions?

6. Discuss Rose Mary Walls. What did you think about her description of herself as an "excitement addict"? (p. 93).

7. Though it portrays an incredibly hardscrabble life, The Glass Castle is never sad or depressing. Discuss the tone of the book, and how do you think that Walls achieved that effect?

8 Describe Jeannette's relationship to her siblings and discuss the role they played in one another's lives.

9. In college, Jeannette is singled out by a professor for not understanding the plight of homeless people; instead of defending herself, she keeps quiet. Why do you think she does this?

10. The two major pieces of the memoir -- one half set in the desert and one half in West Virginia -- feel distinct. What effect did such a big move have on the family -- and on your reading of the story? How would you describe the shift in the book's tone?

11. Were you surprised to learn that, as adults, Jeannette and her siblings remained close to their parents? Why do you think this is?

12. What character traits -- both good and bad -- do you think that Jeannette inherited from her parents? And how do you think those traits shaped Jeannette's life?

13. For many reviewers and readers, the most extraordinary thing about The Glass Castle is that, despite everything, Jeannette Walls refuses to condemn her parents. Were you able to be equally nonjudgmental?

14. Like Mary Karr's Liars' Club and Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin', Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle tells the story of a wildly original (and wildly dysfunctional) family with humor and compassion. Were their other comparable memoirs that came to mind? What distinguishes this book?

About The Author

Jeannette Walls graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years. She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.

Raves and Reviews

"Jeannette Walls has carved a story with precision and grace out of one of the most chaotic, heartbreaking childhoods ever to be set down on the page. This deeply affecting memoir is a triumph in every possible way, and it does what all good books should: it affirms our faith in the human spirit."
-- Dani Shapiro, author of Family History

"The Glass Castle is the saga of the restless, indomitable Walls family, led by a grand eccentric and his tempestuous artist wife. Jeannette Walls has survived poverty, fires, and near starvation to triumph. She has written this amazing tale with honesty and love."
-- Patricia Bosworth, author of Anything Your Little Heart Desires and Diane Arbus: A Biography

"Just read the first pages of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and I defy you not to go on. It's funny and sad and quirky and loving. I was incredibly touched by it."
-- Dominick Dunne, author of The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper

Awards and Honors

PSLA Fiction List

ALA Alex Award

Pennsylvania School Librarian Association (PSLA) "Top Ten (Or So)" Young Adult Books

Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award

Virginia Readers' Choice Award List

ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults - Top Ten

Heather's Pick - Fiction

Resources and Downloads

Common Core Suggestion

Freshman Reading:

Michigan State University (2006/2007)

Bowling Green State University (2007/2008)

Marshall University (2007/2008)

Salisbury University (2007/2008)

Appalachian State University (2008/2009)

St. Edward's University (2008/2009)

Villanova University (2008/2009)

University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2009/2010)

Hendrix College (2010/2011)

Massasoit Community College (2010/2011)

Ball State University (2011/2012)

California State University, Northridge (2011/2012)

Michigan Tech University (2011/2012)

University of Akron (2011/2012)

Chaffey College (2012/2013)

Eastern Oregon University (2012/2013)

Indiana State University (2012/2013)

Meredith College (2012/2013)

University of Texas at San Antonio (2012/2013)

High Resolution Images

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The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls - THE BELOVED #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER-FROM THE AUTHOR OF HANG THE MOON The extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, "nothing sh...

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (I. Beah) 

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (I. Beah) 

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Mai Goda describes how changing her appearance affected the way that others perceived her identity and how she thought about herself:

"I need a change!"

And so on that single whim, I cut my long black hair, streaked it bright red, and, to top it off, pierced my eyebrow. I had gone from dork to punk in a week, and as trivial as it seems, this transformation has had a great effect on my life.

As long as I can remember, I had always been a good girl. In school, I got decent grades and never was in trouble. At home, I tried not to give my parents too much grief. But more than that, I had the "look" of a good girl. People always stereotyped me as a quiet, studious, Asian girl. Friends' parents often asked if I played the violin or the piano. "No, the flute," I'd say, and they would nod, not surprised. Walking around with my long black hair over my face, I hid behind my stereotype. I felt somewhat obliged to appease the stereotype imposed on me.

Needless to say, heads turned the day I walked into school sporting a new, short, bright red hairdo. I enjoyed the reaction and attention I received from my friends and teachers. I didn't listen to my friends' warnings about people seeing me differently, people who frowned on a "rebellious punkster." After all, I was still the same person inside, so why should this change matter? I soon found out how naive I was.

One day, I was late for school and needed a pass from my vice principal. I was met by a surprisingly stern look. Writing one, his voice and stare were cold and condescending. Mistaking me for "one of those punk delinquents," he left me with a warning: "Don't make a habit of it." Had I come to school late a week before, my vice principal would have said nothing. I was not used to this discriminating treatment, and I felt angry, embarrassed, and somewhat defeated. Now every time I go to the mall, suspicious eyes follow me. Store clerks keep a cautious watch. But the worst was yet to come.

It was the night of our music recital for advanced students. For weeks, I had prepared my piece, and I was excited. The room was packed with parents waiting to hear their children. But, as soon as I walked into the room, all attention was focused on my head. As I sat waiting my turn, I felt the critical eyes of the parents.

I performed well but felt awful. Afterward, I still saw those disapproving looks as they walked out with their children. I even overheard a friend being lectured on how she shouldn't color her hair or pierce her face to become a "punk like Mai." Once again, I was ready to go home feeling angry when my friend's father stopped me.

"You were very good tonight. At first I didn't recognize you," he said, looking at my head.

"Oh yes, I look very different from last time, don't I?"

"Well, you played even better than last year. Look forward to hearing you again."

I went home feeling good, as if I had finally won a battle. Now the stern look of the vice principal, the suspicious stares of the store clerks, and the disapproving eyes of my friends' mothers didn't bother me. I was still the same person inside, punk or not. There was nothing wrong with me; it was the other judgmental people who had the problem. I regained my confidence.

I still get looks and the stares, but it doesn't upset me. In a way, I traded in one stereotype for another, but this time I enjoy proving them wrong. People are surprised to see me getting good grades and applying to good colleges. They're surprised to hear me play the flute so well. And they are absolutely shocked to see me standing in front of the football field, red hair shining in the sun, conducting the marching band.

As for my red hair, I re-dye it occasionally to keep it bright, burning red. It seems to give me the power to fight against stereotypes forced on me and gives me the confidence that I never had before.

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Mai Goda describes how changing her appearance affected the way that others perceived her identity and how she thought about herself: "I need a change!" And so on that single whim, I cut my long black hair, streaked it bright red, and, to top it off, pierced my eyebrow.

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Reflections on two seasons of loss.

A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I'd lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

And then, mystifyingly, everything fell out of place. My first day in town, I left the keys to the truck on the counter of a coffee shop. The next day, I left the keys to the house in the front door. A few days after that, warming up in the midday sun at an outdoor café, I took off the long-sleeved shirt I'd been wearing, only to leave it hanging over the back of the chair when I headed home. When I returned to claim it, I discovered that I'd left my wallet behind as well. Prior to that summer, I should note, I had lost a wallet exactly once in my adult life: at gunpoint. Yet later that afternoon I stopped by a sporting-goods store to buy a lock for my new bike and left my wallet sitting next to the cash register.

I got the wallet back, but the next day I lost the bike lock. I'd just arrived home and removed it from its packaging when my phone rang; I stepped away to take the call, and when I returned, some time later, the lock had vanished. This was annoying, because I was planning to bike downtown that evening, to attend an event at Powell's, Portland's famous bookstore. Eventually, having spent an absurd amount of time looking for the lock and failing to find it, I gave up and drove the truck downtown instead. I parked, went to the event, hung around talking for a while afterward, browsed the bookshelves, walked outside into a lovely summer evening, and could not find the truck anywhere.

This was a serious feat, a real bar-raising of thing-losing, not only because in general it is difficult to lose a truck but also because the truck in question was enormous. The friend to whom it belonged once worked as an ambulance driver; oversized vehicles do not faze her. It had tires that came up to my midriff, an extended cab, and a bed big enough to haul cetaceans. Yet I'd somehow managed to misplace it in downtown Portland-a city, incidentally, that I know as well as any other on the planet. For the next forty-five minutes, as a cool blue night gradually lowered itself over downtown, I walked around looking for the truck, first on the street where I was sure I'd parked, then on the nearest cross streets, and then in a grid whose scale grew ever larger and more ludicrous.

Finally, I returned to the street where I'd started and noticed a small sign: " No Parking Anytime." Oh, shit. Feeling like the world's biggest idiot, and wondering how much it was going to cost to extricate a truck the size of Nevada from a tow lot, I called the Portland Police Department. The man who answered was wonderfully affable. "No, Ma'am," he veritably sang into the phone, "no pickup trucks from downtown this evening. Must be your lucky day!" Officer, you have no idea. Channelling the kind of advice one is often given as a child, I returned to the bookstore, calmed myself down with a cup of tea, collected my thoughts amid the latest literary débuts, and then, to the best of my ability, retraced the entire course of my evening, in the hope that doing so would knock loose some memory of how I got there. It did not. Back outside on the streets of Portland, I spun around as uselessly as a dowsing rod.

Seventy-five minutes later, I found the truck, in a perfectly legal parking space, on a block so unrelated to any reasonable route from my house to the bookstore that I seriously wondered if I'd driven there in some kind of fugue state. I climbed in, headed home, and, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, decided that I needed to call my sister as soon as I walked in the door. But I did not. I could not. My cell phone was back at Powell's, on a shelf with all the other New Arrivals.

My sister is a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., more conversant than most people in the mental processes involved in tracking and misplacing objects. That is not, however, why I wanted to talk to her about my newly acquired propensity for losing things. I wanted to talk to her because, true to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, she is the most scatterbrained person I've ever met.

There is a runner-up: my father. My family members, otherwise a fairly similar bunch, are curiously divided down the middle in this respect. On the spectrum of obsessively orderly to sublimely unconcerned with the everyday physical world, my father and my sister are-actually, they are nowhere. They can't even find the spectrum. My mother and I, meanwhile, are busy organizing it by size and color. I will never forget watching my mother try to adjust an ever so slightly askew picture frame-at the Cleveland Museum of Art. My father, by contrast, once spent an entire vacation wearing mismatched shoes, because he'd packed no others and discovered the mistake only when airport security asked him to remove them. My sister's best T.S.A. trick, meanwhile, involved borrowing her partner's laptop, then accidentally leaving it at an Alaska Airlines gate one week after 9/11, thereby almost shutting down the Oakland airport.

That's why I called her when I started uncharacteristically misplacing stuff myself. For one thing, I thought she might commiserate. For another, I thought she might help; given her extensive experience with losing things, I figured she must have developed a compensatory capacity for finding them. Once I recovered my phone and reached her, however, both hopes vanished as completely as the bike lock. My sister was gratifyingly astonished that I'd never lost my wallet before, but, as someone who typically has to reconstruct the entire contents of her own several times a year, she was not exactly sympathetic. "Call me," she said, "when they know your name at the D.M.V."

Nor did my sister have any good advice on how to find missing objects-although, in fairness, such advice is itself difficult to find. Plenty of parents, self-help gurus, and psychics will offer to assist you in finding lost stuff, but most of their suggestions are either obvious (calm down, clean up), suspect (the "eighteen-inch rule," whereby the majority of missing items are supposedly lurking less than two feet from where you first thought they would be), or New Agey. ("Picture a silvery cord reaching from your chest all the way out to your lost object.") Advice on how to find missing things also abounds online, but as a rule it is useful only in proportion to the strangeness of whatever you've lost. Thus, the Internet is middling on your lost credit card or Kindle, but edifying on your lost Roomba (look inside upholstered furniture), your lost marijuana (your high self probably hid it in a fit of paranoia; try your sock drawer), your lost drone (you'll need a specially designed G.P.S.), or your lost bitcoins (good luck with that). The same basic dynamic applies to the countless Web sites devoted to recovering lost pets, which are largely useless when it comes to your missing Lab mix but surprisingly helpful when it comes to your missing ball python. Such Web sites can also be counted on for excellent anecdotes, like the one about the cat that vanished in Nottinghamshire, England, and was found, fourteen months later, in a pet-food warehouse, twice its original size.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about lost entities and the Internet is that it has made many of them considerably easier to find: out-of-print books, elementary-school classmates, decades-old damning quotes by politicians. More generally, modern technology can sometimes help us find misplaced objects, as you know if you've ever had your girlfriend call your lost cell phone, or used that little button on your keys to make your Toyota Camry honk at you. Lately, we've seen a boom in technologies specifically designed to compensate for our tendency to lose stuff: Apple's Find My iPhone, for instance, and the proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled tracking devices that you can attach to everyday objects in order to summon them from the ether, like the Accio spell in the "Harry Potter" books.

These tricks, while helpful, have their limitations. Your phone needs to be on and non-dead; your car needs to be within range; you need to have the foresight to stick a tracking device onto the particular thing you're going to lose before you've lost it. Moreover, as anyone who's ever owned a remote control can tell you, new technologies themselves are often infuriatingly unfindable, a problem made worse by the trend toward ever smaller gadgets. It is difficult to lose an Apple IIe, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cell phone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then, there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines. The only thing in the real or the digital world harder to keep track of than a password is the information required to retrieve it, which is why it is possible, as a grown adult, to find yourself caring about your first-grade teacher's pet iguana's maiden name.

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter's field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you'd someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering. Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. (These figures seem preposterous until you reflect on all those times you holler up the stairs to ask your partner if she's seen your jacket, or on how often you search the couch cushions for the pen you were just using, or on that daily almost-out-the-door flurry when you can't find your kid's lunchbox or your car keys.) Granted, you'll get many of those items back, but you'll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you'll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day. And there's the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.

Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for why we lose all this stuff-one scientific, the other psychoanalytic, both unsatisfying. According to the scientific account, losing things represents a failure of recollection or a failure of attention: either we can't retrieve a memory (of where we set down our wallet, say) or we didn't encode one in the first place. According to the psychoanalytic account, conversely, losing things represents a success -a deliberate sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires. In "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," Freud describes "the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives," including "the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from." Freud's colleague and contemporary Abraham Arden Brill put the matter more succinctly: "We never lose what we highly value."

As explanations go, the scientific one is persuasive but uninteresting. It sheds no light on how it feels to lose something, and provides only the most abstract and impractical notion of how not to do so. (Focus! And, while you're at it, rejigger your genes or circumstances to improve your memory.) The psychological account, by contrast, is interesting, entertaining, and theoretically helpful (Freud pointed out "the remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the motive for its being mislaid had expired") but, alas, untrue. The most charitable thing to be said about it is that it wildly overestimates our species: absent subconscious motives, apparently, we would never lose anything at all.

That is patently false-but, like many psychological claims, impossible to actually falsify. Maybe the doting mother who lost her toddler at the mall was secretly fed up with the demands of motherhood. Maybe my sister loses her wallet so often owing to a deep-seated discomfort with capitalism. Maybe the guy who left his "Hamilton" tickets in the taxi was a Jeffersonian at heart. Freud would stand by such propositions, and no doubt some losses really are occasioned by subconscious emotion, or at least can be convincingly explained that way after the fact. But experience tells us that such cases are unusual, if they exist at all. The better explanation, most of the time, is simply that life is complicated and minds are limited. We lose things because we are flawed; because we are human; because we have things to lose.

Of all the lost objects in literature, one of my favorites appears-or, rather, disappears-in Patti Smith's 2015 memoir, "M Train." Although that book is ultimately concerned with far more serious losses, Smith pauses midway through to describe the experience of losing a beloved black coat that a friend gave her, off his own back, on her fifty-seventh birthday. The coat wasn't much to look at-moth-eaten, coming apart at the seams, itself optimized for losing things by the gaping holes in each pocket-but, Smith writes, "Every time I put it on I felt like myself." Then came a particularly harsh winter, which required a warmer jacket, and by the time the air turned mild again the coat was nowhere to be seen.

When we lose something, our first reaction, naturally enough, is to want to know where it is. But behind that question about location lurks a question about causality: What happened to it? What agent or force made it disappear? Such questions matter because they can help direct our search. You will act differently if you think you left your coat in a taxi or believe you boxed it up and put it in the basement. Just as important, the answers can provide us with that much coveted condition known as closure. It is good to get your keys back, better still to understand how they wound up in your neighbor's recycling bin.

But questions about causality can also lead to trouble, because, in essence, they ask us to assign blame. Being human, we're often reluctant to assign it to ourselves-and when it comes to missing possessions it is always possible (and occasionally true) that someone else caused them to disappear. This is how a problem with an object turns into a problem with a person. You swear you left the bill sitting on the table for your wife to mail; your wife swears with equal vehemence that it was never there; soon enough, you have also both lost your tempers.

Another possibility, considerably less likely but equally self-sparing, is that your missing object engineered its own vanishing, alone or in conjunction with other occult forces. Beloved possessions like her black coat, Patti Smith suggests, are sometimes "drawn into that half-dimensional place where things just disappear." Such explanations are more common than you might think. Given enough time spent searching for something that was just there, even the most scientifically inclined person on the planet will start positing various highly improbable culprits: wormholes, aliens, goblins, ether.

That is an impressive act of outsourcing, given that nine times out of ten we are to blame for losing whatever it is that we can't find. In the micro-drama of loss, in other words, we are nearly always both villain and victim. That goes some way toward explaining why people often say that losing things drives them crazy. At best, our failure to locate something that we ourselves last handled suggests that our memory is shot; at worst, it calls into question the very nature and continuity of selfhood. (If you've ever lost something that you deliberately stashed away for safekeeping, you know that the resulting frustration stems not just from a failure of memory but from a failure of inference. As one astute Internet commentator asked, "Why is it so hard to think like myself?") Part of what makes loss such a surprisingly complicated phenomenon, then, is that it is inextricable from the extremely complicated phenomenon of human cognition.

This entanglement becomes more fraught as we grow older. Beyond a certain age, every act of losing gets subjected to an extra layer of scrutiny, in case what you have actually lost is your mind. Most such acts don't indicate pathology, of course, but real mental decline does manifest partly as an uptick in lost things. Dementia patients are prone to misplacing their belongings, and people with early-stage Alzheimer's often can't find objects because they have put them in unlikely locations; the eyeglasses end up in the oven, the dentures in the coffee can. Such losses sadden us because they presage larger ones-of autonomy, of intellectual capacity, ultimately of life itself.

No wonder losing things, even trivial things, can be so upsetting. Regardless of what goes missing, loss puts us in our place; it confronts us with lack of order and loss of control and the fleeting nature of existence. When Patti Smith gives up on finding her black coat, she imagines that, together with all of the world's other missing objects, it has gone to dwell in a place her husband liked to call the Valley of Lost Things. The shadow that is missing from that phrase darkens her memoir; in the course of it, Smith also describes losing her best friend, her brother, her mother, and that husband (at age forty-five, to heart failure).

On the face of it, such losses fit in poorly with lesser ones. It is one thing to lose a wedding ring, something else entirely to lose a spouse. This is the distinction Elizabeth Bishop illuminates, by pretending to elide it, in her villanelle "One Art," perhaps the most famous reckoning with loss in all of literature. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," she writes in the opening line; the trick is to begin with trivial losses, like door keys, and practice until you can handle those which are tragic. No one could take this suggestion seriously, and we aren't meant to do so. Through its content as well as its form, the poem ultimately concedes that all other losses pale beside the loss of a loved one.

Moreover, although Bishop doesn't make this point explicitly, death differs from other losses not only in degree but in kind. With objects, loss implies the possibility of recovery; in theory, at least, nearly every missing possession can be restored to its owner. That's why the defining emotion of losing things isn't frustration or panic or sadness but, paradoxically, hope. With people, by contrast, loss is not a transitional state but a terminal one. Outside of an afterlife, for those who believe in one, it leaves us with nothing to hope for and nothing to do. Death is loss without the possibility of being found.

My father, in addition to being scatterbrained and mismatched and menschy and brilliant, is dead. I lost him, as we say, in the third week of September, just before the autumn equinox. Since then, the days have darkened, and I, too, have been lost: adrift, disoriented, absent. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that I have been at a loss -a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.

Like death more generally, my father's was somehow both predictable and shocking. For nearly a decade, his health had been poor, almost impressively so. In addition to suffering from many of the usual complaints of contemporary aging (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease, congestive heart failure), he had endured illnesses unusual for any age and era: viral meningitis, West Nile encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder whose identity evaded the best doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. From there, the list spread outward in all directions of physiology and severity. He had fallen and torn a rotator cuff beyond recovery, and obliterated a patellar tendon by missing a step one Fourth of July. His breathing was often labored despite no evident respiratory problem; an errant nerve in his neck sometimes zapped him into temporary near-paralysis. He had terrible dental issues, like the impoverished child he had once been, and terrible gout, like the wealthy old potentate he cheerfully became.

He was, in short, a shambles. And yet, as the E.R. visits added up over the years, I gradually curbed my initial feelings of panic and dread-partly because no one can live in a state of crisis forever but also because, by and large, my father bore his infirmity with insouciance. ("Biopsy Thursday," he once wrote me about a problem with his carotid artery. "Have no idea when the autopsy will be and may not be informed of it.") More to the point, against considerable odds, he just kept on being alive. Intellectually, I knew that no one could manage such a serious disease burden forever. Yet the sheer number of times my father had courted death and then recovered had, perversely, made him seem indomitable.

As a result, I was not overly alarmed when my mother called one morning toward the end of the summer to say that my father had been hospitalized with a bout of atrial fibrillation. Nor was I surprised, when my partner and I got to town that night, to learn that his heart rhythm had stabilized. The doctors were keeping him in the hospital chiefly for observation, they told us, and also because his white-bloodcell count was mysteriously high. When my father related the chain of events to us-he had gone to a routine cardiology appointment, only to be shunted straight to the I.C.U.-he was jovial and accurate and eminently himself. He remained in good spirits the following day, although he was extremely garrulous, not in his usual effusive way but slightly manic, slightly off-a consequence, the doctors explained, of toxins building up in his bloodstream from temporary loss of kidney function. If it didn't resolve on its own in a day or two, they planned to give him a round of dialysis to clear it.

That was on a Wednesday. Over the next two days, the garrulousness declined into incoherence; then, on Saturday, my father lapsed into unresponsiveness. Somewhere below his silence lurked six languages, the result of being born in Tel Aviv to parents who had fled pogroms in Poland, relocating at age seven to Germany (an unusual reverse exodus for a family of Jews in 1948, precipitated by limited travel options and violence in what was then still Palestine), and arriving in the United States, on a refugee visa, at the age of twelve. English, French, German, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew: of these, my father acquired the first one last, and spoke it with Nabokovian fluency and panache. He loved to talk-I mean that he found just putting sentences together tremendously fun, although he also cherished conversation-and he talked his way into, out of, and through everything, including illness. During the years of medical crises, I had seen my father racked and raving with fever. I had seen him in a dozen kinds of pain. I had seen him hallucinating-sometimes while fully aware of it, discussing with us not only the mystery of his visions but also the mystery of cognition. I had seen him cast about in a mind temporarily compromised by illness and catch only strange, dark, pelagic creatures, unknown and fearsome to the rest of us. In all that time, under all those varied conditions, I had never known him to lack for words. But now, for five days, he held his silence. On the sixth, he lurched back into sound, but not into himself; there followed an awful night of struggle and agitation. After that, aside from a few scattered words, some mystifying, some seemingly lucid-"Hi!"; "Machu Picchu"; "I'm dying"-my father never spoke again.

Even so, for a while longer, he endured-I mean his him-ness, his Isaac-ness, that inexplicable, assertive bit of self in each of us. A few days before his death, having ignored every request made of him by a constant stream of medical professionals ("Mr. Schulz, can you wiggle your toes?" "Mr. Schulz, can you squeeze my hand?"), my father chose to respond to one final command: Mr. Schulz, we learned, could still stick out his tongue. His last voluntary movement, which he retained almost until the end, was the ability to kiss my mother. Whenever she leaned in close to brush his lips, he puckered up and returned the same brief, adoring gesture that I had seen all my days. In front of my sister and me, at least, it was my parents' hello and goodbye, their "Sweet dreams" and "I'm only teasing," their "I'm sorry" and "You're beautiful" and "I love you"-the basic punctuation mark of their common language, the sign and seal of fifty years of happiness.

One night, while that essence still persisted, we gathered around, my father's loved ones, and filled his silence with talk. I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his dying flame. The room we were in was a cube of white, lit up like the aisle of a grocery store, yet in my memory that night is as dark and vibrant as a Rembrandt painting. We talked only of love; there was nothing else to say. My father, mute but alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, eyes shining with tears. I had always dreaded seeing him cry, and rarely did, but for once I was grateful. It told me what I needed to know: for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood.

All this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet-and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave. We had by then spent two vertiginous, elongated, atemporal weeks in the I.C.U. At no point during that time did we have a diagnosis, still less a prognosis. At every point, we were besieged with new possibilities, new tests, new doctors, new hopes, new fears. Every night, we arrived home exhausted, many hours past dark, and talked through what had happened, as if doing so might guide us through the following day. Then we'd wake up and resume the routine of the parking garage and the elevator and the twenty-four-hour Au Bon Pain, only to discover that, beyond those, there was no routine at all, nothing to help us prepare or plan. It was like trying to dress every morning for the weather in a nation we'd never heard of.

Eventually, we decided that my father would not recover, and so, instead of continuing to try to stave off death, we unbarred the door and began to wait. To my surprise, I found it comforting to be with him during that time, to sit by his side and hold his hand and watch his chest rise and fall with a familiar little riffle of snore. It was not, as they say, unbearably sad; on the contrary, it was bearably sad-a tranquil, contemplative, lapping kind of sorrow. I thought, as it turns out mistakenly, that what I was doing during those days was making my peace with his death. I have learned since then that even one's unresponsive and dying father is, in some extremely salient way, still alive. And then, very early one morning, he was not.

What I remember best from those next hours is watching my mother cradle the top of my father's head in her hand. A wife holding her dead husband, without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return, just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time: it was the purest act of love I've ever seen. She looked bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He did not yet look dead. He looked like my father. I could not stop picturing the way he used to push his glasses up onto his forehead to read. It struck me, right before everything else struck me much harder, that I should set them by his bed in case he needed them.

So began my second, darker season of losing things. Three weeks after my father died, so did another family member, of cancer. Three weeks after that, my home-town baseball team lost the World Series-an outcome that wouldn't have affected me much if my father hadn't been such an ardent fan. One week later, Hillary Clinton, together with sixty-six million voters, lost the Presidential election.

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom this fall could I distinguish my distress over these later losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when, at the second funeral, the son of the deceased stood up to speak, I wept. Afterward, I couldn't shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop-that at any moment I would learn that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy.

For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of actual and anticipatory grief. I couldn't stop conjuring catastrophes, political and otherwise. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn't answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. "So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost," Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and, as much as my specific sadness, it was just that-the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering-that undid me.

Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed-the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written-I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.

Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized I didn't know how. I found some consolation in poetry, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write, not least because any piece I produced would be the first my father wouldn't see. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt easy and right (calling my mother and my sister, curling up with my partner, playing with the cats), but these alone could not occupy the days. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.

It was during this time that I began to go out looking for my father. Some days, I merely said to myself that I wanted to get out of the house; other days, I set about searching for him as deliberately as one would go look for a missing glove. Because I find peace and clarity in nature, I did this searching outdoors, sometimes while walking, sometimes while out on a run. I did not expect, of course, that along the way I would encounter my father again in his physical form. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence-his voice, his humor, his warmth, the perfect familiarity of our relationship.

I have subsequently learned, from the academic literature on grief, that this "searching behavior," as it is called, is common among the bereaved. The psychologist John Bowlby, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, regarded the second stage of grief, after numbness, as "yearning and searching." But I had never knowingly engaged in it before, because, in my experience, my dead had always come looking for me. After other people I'd loved had died, I had often felt them near me, sometimes heard their voices, and even, on a few exceedingly strange occasions, been jolted into the uncanny conviction that I had encountered them again in some altered but unmistakable form. (This, too, turns out to be common among the grieving. "I never thought Michiko would come back / after she died," the poet Jack Gilbert wrote of his wife in "Alone." "It is strange that she has returned / as somebody's dalmatian.")

These experiences, to be clear, do not comport with my understanding of death. I don't believe that our loved ones can commune with us from beyond the grave, any more than I believe that spouses occasionally reincarnate as Dalmatians. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all, and I had thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking I might find myself in my father's company again.

The first time, I turned around after five minutes; I have seldom tried anything that felt so futile. After he lost his wife, C. S. Lewis, who had likewise previously felt the dead to be near at hand, looked up at the night sky and, to his dismay, knew that he would never find her anywhere. "Is anything more certain," he wrote, in "A Grief Observed," "than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?" Between his late wife and himself, he felt only "the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero."

Thus do I feel about my father. "Lost" is precisely the right description for how I have experienced him since his death. I search for him constantly but can't find him anywhere. I try to sense some intimation of his presence and feel nothing. I listen for his voice but haven't heard it since those final times he used it in the hospital. Grieving him is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.

This was perhaps the most striking thing about my father's death and all that followed: how relevant the idea of loss felt, how it seemed at once so capacious and so accurate. And in fact, to my surprise, it was accurate. Until I looked it up, I'd assumed that, unless we were talking about phone chargers or car keys or cake recipes, we were using the word "lost" figuratively, even euphemistically-that we say "I lost my father" to soften the blow of death.

But that turns out not to be true. The verb "to lose" has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the "lorn" in forlorn. It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from a still more ancient word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, "to lose" acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century, we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and one another and has been steadily expanding ever since. In consequence, loss today is a supremely awkward category, bulging with everything from mittens to life savings to loved ones, forcing into relationship all kinds of wildly dissimilar experiences.

And yet, if anything, our problem is not that we put too many things into the category of loss but that we leave too many out. One night, during those weeks when I could find solace only in poetry, my partner read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" aloud to me. In it, Walt Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, exalting in all he sees. So expansive is his vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls but everyone else who makes the crossing: all those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, all those watching around him now, and all those who will be there watching after his death-which, in the poem, he doesn't so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. "Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt," he admonishes, kindly.

And, just like that, my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important thing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can't add up to a single moment of what it was like to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own. Like Whitman, his love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind-not just his family, whom he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.

It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too-our own ultimate unbeing-is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.

There's precious little solace for this, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.

All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. ♦

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Reflections on two seasons of loss. A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy.

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Writing the college application essay is a daunting task. One great way to get started is to read examples of successful essays. Reading sample college essays gives you great ideas and helps to illustrate what is expected from a good college essay. Check out these college essay examples for inspiration!

College Essay Example #1: A Tale of Two Cities
Prompt: Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
With moments to spare, I catch a glimpse of the boarding platform for my train. Like a captain frantically seeking port in a storm, I haul myself through the turbulent ocean of people, trying to avoid being stranded - or trampled - in the dustiest city in the world: Beijing, capital of both China and smog.

Luckily, I board my train with seconds to spare, and without being turned into a pancake - always a plus. The conductor welcomes me aboard. At last, it is time to return home to Shanghai.

It is the summer of 2012, and Shanghai isn't to be home for much longer. In another week I will cross the globe to start a new life in a foreign land called Charlotte.

Which is home? The place I am leaving or the place I am going? Arrival or departure? Like a compass with a broken magnetic strip, I can't decide my true North.

Unsettled, I turn to my ever-present book for comfort. Today it is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, already worn and slightly crumpled. They say the best books tell you what you already know, resonating with your own thoughts and emotions. As I read, it is as if the tempest of my thoughts is spelled out on paper. The overflowing sense of hyper-reality in Tim O'Brien's words of warfare spills into my world. His words somehow become my words, his memories become my memories. Despite the high speed of the bullet train, my mind is perfectly still - trapped between the narrative of the book and the narrative of my own life.

I feel like I should feel disturbed, but I'm not. I read the last page and close the book, staring out the window at the shining fish ponds and peaceful rice paddies. I feel like a speck of dust outside the train, floating, content and happy to be between destinations.

I am at home between worlds. I speak both English and Chinese: Chinese is for math, science, and process, but I prefer English for art, emotion, and description. America owns my childhood, filled with pine trees, blockbuster movies, and Lake Tahoe snow; China holds my adolescence, accompanied by industrial smog, expeditious mobility, and fast-paced social scenes.

We are drawing into Shanghai Hong Qiao station. My reverie isn't at an end, but I have the answer to my question. Home is neither arrival nor departure, neither America nor China. Home is the in-between, the cusp of transition - that is where I feel most content.
What works?
In our College Essay Clichés to Avoid post, we advised students against writing about moving to America from a foreign country. Too often, such essays are formulaic and uninspiring - after all, while it's certainly a challenge to learn a new language and culture, millions of people do it every day, so it simply isn't something that sets a student apart.

This essay is an example of how to tell the story of moving to America in a unique way. This student focused on a single question - where is home? - and showed the reader a lot about who he is as a person. Through this skillfully crafted essay, we learn that the student has led a very international life, the student has a way with words, the student loves literature, the student is bilingual, and the student is excited by change. The essay is a joy to read, sharing a detailed glimpse of the student's personality without feeling like it's trying to list positive personal qualities.

College Essay Example #2: "Most Original" Pumpkin
Prompt: Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
I won "Most Original" pumpkin at a Halloween party years ago. I have the "Most Original" award. It's a consolation prize. You can't be the best, or the prettiest, so you have to be "original." I've won the "Most Original" award a fair number of times. I was even named "Most Original" at a basketball awards banquet. What does that even mean? How can anybody be "Most Original" when she's playing basketball?

Recognizing the "Most Original" award for the pity-prize that it was, I grew increasingly hostile toward the very word "original." If you win this cursed award, everyone around you offers feigned sympathy or, even worse, insincere congratulations. Phrases like "oh, bummer" or well-intentioned but half-hearted "well, good for you" circle the recipient, creating a cyclone of regret from which the "winner" will never recover.

Okay, maybe I'm overreacting - but I cannot for the life of me understand that award. "Most Original" always let me down, and as a result, I hated to be original in any context. In my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, where normality was...well, the norm, I tried to be a typical student - absolutely, perfectly normal. I blended into crowds, the definition of typical. I became a person who refused to surprise people. Just another brick in the wall.

Dull.

And then I moved to Berkeley for six months. It's an odd, vibrant place with odd, vibrant people. Originality is celebrated there - not in the half-hearted "good for you" way, but in the full-throated "GOOD FOR YOU!" way. One of the first of my fellow students to befriend me wore corset tops and tutus and carried a parasol with which she punctuated her every utterance. Her best friend was a boy with purple hair who once wore a shirt with built in LED lights for Christmas. They were the most popular people in school, in direct contrast to all that was socially acceptable in New Haven. Our peers recognized them as being unique, but instead of ostracizing them or pitying them, the students in Berkeley celebrated them.

In Berkeley, I learned the value of originality: Those who celebrate their individuality are not only unique but strong. It takes great strength to defy the definitions of others, and because of that strength, those who create their own paths discover a different world than those who travel the same worn road.

I returned to New Haven a changed person. My appearance was certainly different - red streaks in my hair and a newfound fondness for tutus certainly made me stand out. But the change went deeper than that: I had embraced the idea of being myself, no matter what others thought was cool or "normal." Spending time in a place where "Most Original" was the highest compliment allowed me to explore myself without fear of being different or lesser, and I liked what I had found.

I'm still skeptical about the "Most Original" award. In the context of an award ceremony, it's still just a meaningless consolation prize. But I don't think of being "Most original" as an insult anymore - I wear it as a badge of honor, proof that I am myself and no one else.

A friend recently joked, "If there were a 'Quirkiest' award in the yearbook, you'd definitely win." We were standing outside of a classroom, and I was wearing a pair of gold, glittery shorts that definitely caught the eye. "Quirkiest?" I said. "How about 'Most Original.'"
What Works
This writer's style clearly shows off her sense of humor. If one of the purposes of a college essay is to make yourself come to life off the page, then this essay hits the mark. Far from seeming unfinished or unedited, the somewhat stream-of-consciousness style establishes a humorous and self-deprecating tone that makes the reader instantly like the applicant. More than anything else, it is this writing style that elevates what could have been a fairly superficial statement of personal growth into a truly informative story that showcases the author's personality.

College Essay Example #3: Baked with Love
Prompt: Describe a place or environment where you feel perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
The sweet smell of cinnamon resonated through the house. A wave of heat washed over my face as I opened the oven door to reveal my first batch of snickerdoodles. Small domes of sugary cookies shyly peeked from the edge of the door. I smiled as I thought about the joy these cookies would bring to my friends. They like to compare me to the witch in Hansel and Gretel, joking that I fatten children up and then forget to eat them. I don't particularly love being in the same company as an evil witch, but any rancor I might feel at this comparison is overwhelmed by my enjoyment of their anticipation of my baked goods.

There is something about the warmth of a kitchen filled with the buttery smell of pastry that evokes a feeling of utter relaxation. I find joy in sharing this warm and homey experience by showering the people around me with sweets. The smile that ticks up the corners of someone's mouth as they bite into my food gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment.

For as long as I can remember, baking has been an integral part of my life. Thanks to busy parents and hungry siblings, I was encouraged to cook from a relatively young age. Time spent in the kitchen naturally piqued my interest in baking, and that glimmer of interest blossomed into a heart-warming hobby that rejuvenates my stressful days, improves upon even the happiest moments, and brings joy to the people around me.

They say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. It has been my experience that the way to ANYONE'S heart is through the stomach. To me, food is not simply about sustenance. The time that I spend in my kitchen, the effort and care that I pour into my confectionary creations, is a labor of love that brings me just as much satisfaction as it does my hungry friends and family.
What Works?
This essay doesn't share many life-defining revelations; we learn, as a brief aside, that the author often cared for her younger siblings, but little beyond that. Yet despite its relative lack of major information, it reveals a lot about who the author is. We learn that the author knows how to turn a phrase, the author is a warm and caring person, the author has a sense of humor, and the author will bring us cookies if we admit her to our imaginary college. All in all, we see a student who is a skilled writer with a warm heart - positive traits, to be sure.

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Read These Top College Essay Examples | C2 Education

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Writing the college application essay is a daunting task. One great way to get started is to read examples of successful essays. Reading sample college essays gives you great ideas and helps to illustrate what is expected from a good college essay. Check out these college essay examples for inspiration!