The picture book below was written to encourage young children to enjoy reading. I decided to use five- to seven-year-olds from the nearby Robert Taylor Public Housing Projects to illustrate the different verses. Because Chicago had an annual strike just about every year, when I began teaching at Farren next to the Robert Taylor Public Housing Projects (at the time, the largest public housing in the world), I established a not-for-profit, The RAMP (Reading and Math Program), so my students would not miss any school. After the strike ended, I decided to keep the program going as an academic after-school program, started writing grants, hired some local teenagers to help out, and discovered I had an aptitude for grant writing. The Geraldine Dodge Foundation paid me a thousand dollars for the manuscript and then sent me the entire press run.
Ken Satterfield, a librarian at the Missouri River Regional Library, has produced a recording of his expert reading of the book:
| Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Michael, I wonder whether anyone has approached you about “commercializing” your book by rendering its art “professionally” and publishing it anew in some children’s series or whatever. I myself am not familiar with such things, butI think your columnist colleagues Geoffrey & Christa Dean are – perhaps they can advise us.
ReplyDeleteLove, love, love this.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your most kind words.
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