The Write Thing: Kwame Alexander Engages Students in Writing Workshop


Book Description

Imagine having a Newbery Medal-winning author in your classroom as an advisor and a friend, providing personal and practical advice on how to teach writing workshop in the modern-day classroom. With The Write Thing, you can do just that! Kwame Alexander is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Crossover. With more than 10 years of experience conducting writing workshops in schools, Alexander shows how to shake up the "traditional" writing workshop and make writing fun again! His magnetic personality, infectious enthusiasm, and love of teaching come through to inspire all students to write. The Write Thing teaches you how to move students step-by-step from ideas, to drafts, to finished works. Not only will you successfully motivate your students to write, you'll take that motivation one step further by providing guidance on how to create student-driven publications of their work. The confidence students will attain when they see their writing authentically published will be off the charts! The book has three parts: Writing, Publishing, and Presenting. The Writing section features Lessons in Action that teach students to produce writing that is worthy of being published. With a focus on poetry, Alexander's writing workshop uniquely meets the needs of reluctant writers. The Publishing section focuses on how to prepare and print digital and physical copies of students' work. The Presenting section provides suggestions to help students confidently present their poetry and other written pieces. Other exciting features include Kwame Time! videos for both teachers and students that bring Alexander into the classroom. Kwame's Quick Tips feature easy-to-implement ideas that have worked for Alexander. With an insightful foreword by author Kylene Beers, teacher success stories, and the most helpful appendix ever written, this essential resource will teach you how to tailor writing workshop to meet the particular needs of your students.




Do the Write Thing Challenge


Book Description

The "Do the Write Thing" program challenges students to reduce violence and its impact on their lives.All across America, students are rising to the challenge of doing something to end youth violence. The Do the Write Thing Challenge gives middle school students an opportunity to examine the impact of youth violence on their lives. Through classroom discussions and writings, students communicate what they think should be done to reduce youth violence. In addition, they make personal commitments to do something about this problem.




The Right Thing


Book Description

Annie Banks' life is in for a change when she agrees to go on a road trip to New Orleans with a childhood friend she hasn't seen in years. Original.




Saturday's Surprisingly Super-Duper Lesson


Book Description

It’s a lovely Saturday morning and Aish would rather be riding her bicycle than doing maths sums in a classroom. But when Aish's doodles come to life, Saturday’s lesson doesn’t seem so boring after all.




How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World


Book Description

Winner of the 2020 Epigram Books Fiction Prize When a renegade prophet vanishes in a cloud of pigeons in Kuala Lumpur, chorister and first witness Gabriel finds himself press-ganged into a wild road trip down the Malaysian coast. Meanwhile, in a sleepy town by the sea, Lydia traces the links between her late grandaunt’s eccentric lover and her involvement in the Communist Emergency. As Lydia and Gabriel enter a shadowy mythology of serpents, Sufi saints and plainclothes gods, they must grapple with the theologies and histories they once trusted, in a country more perilously punk than they’d ever conceived of. Reader Reviews: "A dizzying tale of saints, heists, maybe-queens." —The Straits Times "Quite the debut, accomplished, deft, unabashed and exuberant." —Asian Review of Books "Author Joshua Kam’s debut book brings Asian mythology to the forefront." —The Sun Daily Malaysian author blurs myths and truths as you escape on a wild road trip ... This whimsical, rollercoaster ride of a book also carries a tale of old and new Malaysia colliding, with various figures from local history, politics and folklore coming together in an epic quest for the soul of the nation. —newsday24.com "In essence, (the novel) acts as a love letter to Malaysian folklore and history, showcasing an impressive degree of representation and imagination that never feels shoehorned into the narrative." —Bakchormeeboy "What a trip! This 21st-century adventure quest with an Islamic saint also brings us on a madcap tour through a multitude of Malaysian mythologies— Malay epics, Taoist pantheons, WW2/Emergency/Merdeka heroics, and more. Even more vitally, it gives us hope amidst the dire news of our era— political corruption, environmental devastation and bigotry—reassuring us that the human/divine spirit still flourishes in the late-capitalist tropics, and is ultimately destined to triumph over evil. An absolute delight, and truly, deliciously Malaysian.” —Ng Yi-Sheng, award-winning author of Lion City “Borgesian, even Manichean in spirit, with almost reverent borrowings from Nusantara mythologies to Abrahamic religiosity, this novel is a wild ride from start to finish, riffing on Malayan history, politics and folklore in a surprisingly redemptive arc, while remaining deeply interrogative about what it means to keep true to goodness in the ever-changing face of evil.” —Cyril Wong, two-time Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of This Side of Heaven




The Good Guys


Book Description

The Good Guys is a tale of failure and redemption. Set in Singapore in the not-so-distant future, superheroes, born from a worldwide conflict called War of the Long Winter, save the day. But who will save them when they break? The Good Guys is Darren Chen, a third-year law undergraduate’s first novel. Deep beneath the Singapore General Hospital is The Vault—a hidden sanctuary for broken superheroes in need of a little time-out. Away from the eyes of the worshipping public, they take the sofa and have a dose of therapy. But when a death occurs, the facility is immediately locked down. Small-time superhero, Landslide, finds himself in a whodunnit, and realises that being cooped up underground amongst unstable superheroes with immense power is not the best place to be…




This Side of Heaven


Book Description

A comedian, a nun, a reality TV star and countless others meet in a Garden. This is not the start of a joke, but the beginnings of a parable. These denizens may be running out of time, even as it seems there is all the time in their Kafkaesque world. Reader Reviews: “With deceptive simplicity, the mutable voices combine in a tale both irresistible and haunting. Reading this story feels like witnessing a communion, or perhaps vivisection, of familiar states of being. Evocative and unforgettable.” —Shubigi Rao, author of Pulp “Wong pulls the rug from under us but leaves us still standing, albeit transported via his magic carpet ride to a new vantage point and offered a different perspective.” –KK Seet, author of Death Rites




My BFF Is an Alien


Book Description

Meet Abriana Yeo, 13, awkward and friendless. Meet Octavia Wu, a graceful teenage alien with superpowers. Forced to flee her home planet Viridis after an invasion by "The Others", another alien species, Octavia and her parents crash-land in the Singapore heartland. Pretending to be a foreign student, Octavia enters secondary one and befriends Abriana, who then helps her in her quest to find the Anteris, a missing element the alien family needs if they want to return to Viridis to help in the war effort. All the while, the two girls also need to navigate the intricate web of teenage drama at Bukit Timah Secondary Girls’ School (BTSGS), where mean girls thwart their search efforts every step of the way. Behind the adventure, mystery and sci-fi, this middle-grade novel also explores the pertinent issues that teenagers typically deal with in a local school setting—friendship, loyalty, CCAs, homework and bullies. There is also no shortage of excitement and intrigue in this sci-fi and adventure. This is the first in a four-book series, for children aged 10 and above.




Tiny Beautiful Things


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu Original series • The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this "wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review) book is a balm for everything life throws our way. Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.




Why I Write


Book Description

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times