Our Worldview: We Are Who We Are

Acknowledgments In our Young Writers Publish program, 826NYC works with classes of students and teachers on creative writing projects around and beyond New York City. 11th grade students from the Bronx Academy for Software Engineering explored poetry across multiple forms, including centos, erasure poetry, metered poetry, and more. Our Worldview: We Are Who We Are is a compilation of the original work of these students.

A huge thank you to the 826NYC teaching artist, Daniel Jackson, for creating classrooms where students were able to play with language and line breaks, themes and settings. Your support, encouragement, and consistency helped our young writers tap into their imaginations and memories to produce such moving work, and your care in helping them brainstorm, write, and revise throughout this project was invaluable.

We are particularly grateful to BASE teachers Nikita Patel and Louis Reed for their vision and support of this project. Thank you for inviting us into your classrooms and working so closely on this project, for highlighting the brilliance and interests of your students at every turn, and being so generous with your time and enthusiasm. Your hard work and steadfast dedication to your students allows them to flourish as young writers and thinkers.

Thank you to our writing mentors, Dov Alpert, Arrianne Bautista, Olivia Ensley, Susan Evans, and Holly Settoon, for keeping up with these young writers and nurturing their growing texts.

At 826NYC we depend on the dedicated volunteer editing and design cohort that make our publications a reality. Thank you to Vanessa Friedman for overseeing the editing, proofreading, and design of this book. Thank you to Adi Kwiatek for designing such a beautiful book for our students. To copy editors and proofreaders Rakhee Bhatt, Kora Fillet, Tiana Moe, Dave Rublin, Carly Schnitzler, Lauren Stefaniak, Alyssa Thibodeau, and Stephanie Whetstone for their careful attention to each of the student’s pieces, thank you.

Very special thanks to BASE student artist Jerald Parten for the beautiful original artwork of a rose growing from concrete featured on 113