The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016
Page 42
On a Morning, Freeman’s
AAMINA AHMAD
July Sun, the Missouri Review
TAHMIMA ANAM
Garments, Freeman’s
PABLO CALVI
Secret Reserves, the Believer
TED CONOVER
Cattle Calls, Harper’s
PATRICK DACEY
Love, Women, the Paris Review
STEPHEN DUNN
Three Poems, the Paris Review
ALVARO ENRIGUE
El Vocho, the Believer
WILLIAM FINNEGAN
Off Diamond Head, The New Yorker
RIVKA GALCHEN
Usl at the Stadium, the New Yorker
JOHN GIBLER
The Disappeared, the California Sunday Magazine
AMANDA GOLDBLATT
The Era of Good Feelings, the Southern Review
SOPHIE GOLDSTEIN
The Oven, AdHouse Books
LEWIS HYDE
Forgetting Mississippi, Tin House
LUCY KNISLEY
Displacement, Fantagraphics
WILLIAM MALATINSKY
The Expatriates, American Short Fiction
THOMAS PIERCE
Tarantella, Zoetrope
ROBIN ROMM
What to Expect, the Missouri Review
Ars Parentis, ZYZZYVA
KATHERINE SCHIFANI
Cartography, Epiphany
MATTHEW SHAER
Whatsoever Things Are True, The Atavist
ADAM SHATZ
Magical Thinking About ISIS, the London Review of Books
SHUBHA SUNDER
The Footbridge, Michigan Quarterly Review
LISA WELLS
All Across the Desert Our Bread Is Blooming!, the Believer
About 826 National
Proceeds from this book benefit youth literacy
A PERCENTAGE OF the cover price ofthis book goes to 826 National, a network of seven youth tutoring, writing, and publishing centers in seven cities around the country.
Since the birth of 826 National in 2002, our goal has been to assist students ages 6-18 with their writing skills while helping teachers get their classes passionate about writing. We do this with a vast army of volunteers who donate their time so we can give as much one-on-one attention as possible to the students whose writing needs it. Our mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.
Through volunteer support, each of the eight 826 chapters—in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC—provides drop-in tutoring, class field trips, writing workshops, and in-schools programs, all free of charge, for students, classes, and schools. 826 centers are especially committed to supporting teachers, offering services and resources for English language learners, and publishing student work. Each of the 826 chapters works to produce professional-quality publications written entirely by young people, to forge relationships with teachers in order to create innovative workshops and lesson plans, to inspire students to write and appreciate the written word, and to rally thousands of enthusiastic volunteers to make it all happen. By offering all of our programming for free, we aim to serve families who cannot afford to pay for the level of personalized instruction their children receive through 826 chapters. The demand for 826 National’s services is tremendous. In 2015 we worked with more than 5,300 active volunteers and over 30,000 students nationally, hosted 674 field trips, completed 208 major inschool projects, offered 329 evening and weekend workshops, held over 1,300 after-school tutoring sessions, and produced nearly 900 student publications. At many of our centers, our field trips are fully booked almost a year in advance, teacher requests for in-school tutor support continue to rise, and the majority of our evening and weekend workshops have waitlists.
826 National volunteers are local community residents, professional writers, teachers, artists, college students, parents, bankers, lawyers, and retirees from a wide range of professions. These passionate individuals can be found at all of our centers after school, sitting side by side with our students, providing one-on-one attention. They can be found running our field trips, or helping an entire classroom of local students learn how to write a story.
Read on to learn more about each 826 National chapter, including 826 Valencia’s newest outpost in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.
826 VALENCIA
Named for the street address of the building it occupies in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, 826 Valencia opened on April 8, 2002, and consists of a writing lab, a street-front, student-friendly retail pirate store that partially funds its programs, and three satellite classrooms in local schools. 826 Valencia has developed programs that reach students at every possible opportunity—in school, after school, in the evenings, or on the weekends. Since its doors opened, over fifteen hundred volunteers—including published authors, magazine founders, SAT course instructors, documentary filmmakers, and other professionals—have donated their time to work with thousands of students.
After thirteen years of programming in San Francisco’s Mission District, 826 Valencia opened a second writing and tutoring center to support San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The doors to the new center at 180 Golden Gate opened on May 19, 2016. The storefront, King Carl’s Emporium, is open for business every day. The Tenderloin is San Francisco’s most densely populated neighborhood, and the home of 4,000 of the city’s children. It has the second highest incidence of food stamp use in the city, with a median household income of $23,804. The 826 Valencia Tenderloin Center expects to serve at least 2,000 students a year and recruit 300 volunteers.
826 NYC
826NYC’s writing center opened its doors in September 2004. Since then its programs have offered over one thousand students opportunities to improve their writing and to work side by side with hundreds of community volunteers. 826NYC has also built a satellite tutoring center, created in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, which has introduced library programs to an entirely new community of students. During the school year, 826NYC offers homework help and writing instruction for students 6 to 18. Tutors assist with homework in every subject and lead students in writing and reading-based enrichment activities. The center also publishes a handful of books of student writing each year.
826 LA
826LA benefits greatly from the wealth of cultural and artistic resources in the Los Angeles area.
The center regularly presents a free workshop at the Armand Hammer Museum in which esteemed artists, writers, and performers teach their craft. 826LA has collaborated with the J. Paul Getty Museum to create Community Photoworks, a months-long program that taught seventh-graders the basics of photographic composition and analysis, sent them into Los Angeles with cameras, and then helped them polish artist statements. Since opening in March 2005, 826LA has provided thousands of hours of free one-on-one writing instruction, held summer camps for English language learners, given students sportswriting training in the Lakers’ press room, and published love poems written from the perspectives of leopards.
826 CHICAGO
826 Chicago opened its writing lab and after-school tutoring center in the West Town community of Chicago, in the Wicker Park neighborhood. The setting is both culturally lively and teeming with schools: within one mile, there are fifteen public schools serving more than sixteen thousand students. The center opened in December 2005 and now has over five hundred volunteers. Its programs, as at all the 826 chapters, are designed to be both challenging and enjoyable. Ultimately, the goal is to strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice.
826 MICHIGAN
826 Michigan opened its doors on June 1, 2005, on South State Street in Ann Arbor. In October of 2007 the operation moved downtown, to a new and improved location on Liberty Street. This move enabled the op
ening of Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair in May 2008.
The shop carries everything the robot owner might need, from positronic brains to grasping appendages to solar cells. 826 Michigan is the only 826 not named after a city because it serves students all over southeastern Michigan, hosting in-school residencies in Ypsilanti schools, and providing workshops for students in Detroit, Lincoln, and Willow Run school districts. The center also has a packed workshop schedule on site every semester, with offerings on making pop-up books, writing sonnets, creating screenplays, producing infomercials, and more.
826 BOSTON
826 Boston provides free writing and tutoring programs for Boston students ages 6 to 18, serving more than 3,500 students. The center is located in Roxbury’s Egleston Square—a culturally diverse community south of downtown that stretches into Jamaica Plain, Rox-bury, and Dorchester. 826 Boston maintains a network of more than 2,500 volunteers from the Boston community—including professional writers, artists, and teachers. More than 600 volunteers regularly devote their time and talents to its programs.
826 DC
826DC opened its doors to the city’s Columbia Heights neighborhood in October 2010. 826DC provides after-school tutoring, field trips, after-school workshops, in-school tutoring, help for English language learners, and assistance with the publication of student work. It also offers free admission to the Museum of Unnatural History, the center’s unique storefront. In 2011, 826 DC students read their poetry before President Barack Obama.
About ScholarMatch
Founded by author Dave Eggers, ScholarMatch began as a simple crowdfunding platform to help low-income students pay for college. In five short years ScholarMatch has grown into a full-service college-access organization, serving more than 500 students each year. We support students at our drop-in center, at local schools and organizations, and online through our crowdfunding platform and innovative resources like the ScholarMatcher—the first free college search tool built specifically with the needs of low-income students in mind.
Our mission is to make college possible for underserved youth by matching students with donors, resources, colleges, and professional networks. More than 80 percent of ScholarMatch students are the first in their families to go to college, and over 50 percent have family incomes of $25,000 or less. ScholarMatch students are bright, resilient young people who have overcome significant challenges, and maintain their determination to seek a better future through college.
With the support of donors, volunteers, schools, and community organizations, we ensure that college is possible for underserved students in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. To support a student’s college journey or learn more, visit scholarmatch.org.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.
About the Editor
RACHEL KUSHNER is the author of two novels, The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, both finalists for the National Book Award, as well as The Strange Case of Rachel K, a collection of short prose. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the Paris Review.
Footnotes
An Oral History of Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar
* Administrative detention is a system of incarceration without official charges used by occupying military forces.
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† The war in 1967 is known as the Six-Day War.
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‡ The Deheisheh refugee camp was established for 3,000 refugees in 1949 and is one of three refugee camps in the Bethlehem metropolitan area. Deheisheh is located just south of the city. Current estimates of the camp’s population range up to 16,000 persons living in an area that is roughly one square mile.
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§ Ramla is a city of 65,000 people in central Israel. Today the city is approximately 20 percent Muslim—most Arabs fled the city during the 1948 war.
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* Amman, the capital of neighboring Jordan, is a city of around 2 million residents. Amman grew rapidly with the influx of Palestinian refugees after 1967
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† In 1967, the Israelis seized the West Bank from Jordan, which had administered the region since 1948.
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‡ The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has provided services such as education and medical care to Palestinian refugees since 1949.
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* Rabbi Moshe Levinger was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and helped lead the movement to settle the West Bank after the Six-Day War. He was especially active in asserting settler presence around Hebron, a large West Bank city fifteen miles south of the Deheisheh camp.
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* After the Oslo Accords were put into full effect in 1995, Bethlehem was administered by the Palestinian Authority. Between 1967 and 1995, however, Israel maintained full control of the region and outlawed symbols of Palestinian nationalism such as flags.
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† The First Intifada was an uprising throughout the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli military occupation. It began in December 1987 and lasted until 1993. Intifada in Arabic means “to shake off.”
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‡ Al-Muskubiya (“the Russian Compound”) is a large compound in Jerusalem that was built in the nineteenth century to house an influx of Russian Orthodox pilgrims into the city during the time of Ottoman rule. Today, the compound houses Israeli police headquarters, criminal courts, and a prison and interrogation center.
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* Lea Tsemel is a prominent human rights lawyer in Israel.
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* Damun Prison is in northern Israel, near Haifa. The facilities were once used as a tobacco warehouse during the British Mandate, but they were converted to a prison by Israel in 1953. It houses up to 500 prisoners.
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* Now called Shikma Prison, the facility is a maximum-security prison just outside Ashkelon, a city of 115,000 people just north of the Gaza Strip. Shikma was built following the Six-Day War in 1967 as a lockup for security prisoners in the newly occupied Palestinian territories.
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* In 1986, the same year Abdelrahman was transferred to Shikma Prison, Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu was captured by Israeli intelligence officers in Rome and sentenced by military tribunal to Shikma for leaking details of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He spent eleven of his eighteen years in prison in solitary confinement.
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* Abdelrahman was arrested under suspicion of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
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† The Ktzi’ot Prison is a large, open-air prison camp in the vast Negev desert, located forty-five miles southwest of Be’er Sheva. Ktzi’ot was opened in 1988 and closed in 1995 after the end of the First Intifada, and then reopened in 2002 during the Second Intifada. According to Human Rights Watch, one out of every fifty West Bank and Gazan males over the age of sixteen was held at Ktzi’ot in 1990 during the middle of the First Intifada.
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* Hadassah Medical Center is a health care complex in Jerusalem.
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* The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group was founded in 1996 partly by members of the Palestinian Authority to record instances of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. B’Tselem was founded by Israeli citizens in 1989 to document human rights abuses in the occupied territories.
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* Burek is a tradition
al Turkish pastry stuffed with cheese, potatoes, or other fillings.
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† Ofer Prison is a large open-air prison near Ramallah. At the time of Abdelrahman’s arrest in 2003, there were approximately 1,000 Palestinian men and women serving administrative detention sentences.
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* The Palestinian Authority was chartered to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza following the Oslo Accords in 1993. As part of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security control in parts of the West Bank such as Bethlehem.
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* It is very difficult for any Palestinians who have spent time in prison to travel, and especially to get visas to the United States, even if they were held under administrative detention and never charged with a crime.