We Will Be BOOKED This Summer @cwpfairfield (Thanks, @KwameAlexander) with 150+ Young People

200 Young Adult Literacy Labs and Invitational Leadership Institute stickers arrived in the mail yesterday (for books purchased this summer), to couple with the 200 parallel stickers that arrived last week for writers' notebooks. We are 7 days away from CWP-Fairfield's summer kick-off with 15 incredible educators, 30 relocated refugee and immigrant youth, and 120+ young writers embarking on Fairfield University's campus in a celebration of everything writing: Little Lab for Big Imaginations, Spoken Word Poetry, Novel-Writing, Digital Journalism, Project Citizen, Sports Writing, and The College Essay and Other Narratives. 17 teachers have been hired, as well, and we look forward to everything we can create.

Many of the labs will be using Kwame Alexander's Booked as their primary text (in collaboration with a YA course taught on our campus), while others (in collaboration with a Marriage and Family Therapy course) will read Katherine Applegate's Home of the Brave. This year, the teachers in the ILI will read both these texts with Kelly Gallagher's In The Best Interest of Students. We are definitely ready for the next five weeks of literacy love, literacy instruction, and literacy achievement.

We are also excited to partner with Weir Farm National Park for environmental writing and to collaborate with the artwork of Rick Shaefer's Refugee Trilogy. We hope to once again work with Fairfield University's Men's Basketball team and to have a busload of special guests visit our classrooms and celebrate teachers and young people who write.

I am forever thankful for the National Writing Project and their Supporting Effective Educator Leadership grant, local school districts for contributing to CWP's work, and of course the CWP-Fairfield family.

We gotta write! A'ight? The countdown to summer work can be made on two hands and I can't wait to introduce the teachers with the incredible young people. Wusah!