Clara Wu and the Lunar New Year

By: Charlotte Lackney

https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/sites/sbs.com.au.topics/files/gettyimages-1352808853.jpg

Just in time for the Lunar New Year, long-time CambridgeEditors client Vincent Yee announces the release of the second book in the Clara Wu series, Clara Wu and the Jade Labyrinth. This immersive five-part fantasy series follows Clara Wu, a Chinese American teenager, who finds herself whisked away into a fantastical world to fight an evil Warlock in order to save Earth along with Sung Kim, Yuka Satoh, and Daniel Nguyen. Following the events of book one, Clara Wu and the Portal Book, book two sees the main characters returning to Azen to embark on another journey to save the Panda Kingdom and uncover the secrets of the Jade Labyrinth.

Clara Wu and the Jade Labyrinth was released on February 1^st, 2022, falling perfectly on the 2022 Lunar New Year. Yee expressed to CambridgeEditors the importance of overlapping the two events. As an Asian American author writing for better Asian American representation, his goal is for Asian Americans to be able to see themselves as the heroes in his stories and life beyond. It’s because of this goal that he celebrates the release of his newest installment in tandem with one of the most important celebrations in Asian culture.

Vincent Yee entrusted the Clara Wu Books with CambridgeEditors in 2021. One of our talented editors, Felicia Lee, worked with him closely as he wrote all five manuscripts in 2021. He is aiming to release the remaining three books in 2022.

Praise for Clara Wu and the Portal Book:

“An epic adventure book with Asian American representation! Even though the Clara Wu books are aimed at young adults, as an adult, I really enjoyed this book.” – Linda C., January 2022

“I love every moment of Clara’s adventures. She learns a lot about herself and her culture—it’s a great read!!” – Jean K., January 2022

“It’s an extremely good book. It’s a fantasy and a group of people in another realm. It’s a story that supports Asian Americans, too. All in one, I think you’ll enjoy it!” – Joseph C., January 2022

Both Clara Wu and the Portal Book and Clara Wu and the Jade Labyrinth are available for purchase on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.

MIT Bootcamps: A Desire for Impact

By: Charlotte Lackney

https://www.edx.org/course/product-and-service-creation-in-the-internet-age?index=undefined

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the foremost research-based universities in the world, playing a vital role in the development of technology and science. Among an impressive list of programs including computer science, mechanical engineering, physics, and aerospace engineering, there’s a rapidly growing entrepreneurship program called MIT Bootcamps. Founded by previous CambridgeEditors client Erdin Beshimov in 2014, the ten-week program is intended to bring entrepreneurs from all over the world together to coach them in the development of innovative ventures.

The structure of the program is built around “learning by doing”—having the students be an active part in their education. Innovation seminars are a major part of this program, in which the students can implement theory in interactive workshops to show them how to apply and use innovation tools taught to them in seminars. Seminar instructors span from MIT faculty to industry experts, allowing students to learn about the experiences of successful entrepreneurs and investors that have made the MIT innovation ecosystem prominent and lasting. Students are also given individual and team coaching sessions, providing them with an experienced professional to guide and support them throughout their time in the bootcamp.

Erdin Beshimov, a lecturer at MIT in subjects such as entrepreneurial creativity, believes that the foundation of effective educational programs is the combination of mastery and community. The two elements are essential to support one another in long-term ventures. The hope with the program, then, is to make a difference in the world through social impact. The students leave the program with the backing of a community that reaches many corners of the globe, providing support and inspiration through their entrepreneurial journey.

Beshimov is the recipient of the Patrick J. McGovern Entrepreneurship Award, Carol and Howard Anderson Fellowship, and the MIT Sloan Peer Recognition Award.

“We’ve now offered our bootcamps all over the world–in Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and Turkey–and have trained over 1,500 entrepreneurs from 100 countries and counting. I am particularly proud of our partnership with the MIT ReACT program through which we offer entrepreneurship education to refugees.” — Erdin Beshimov, 2021, IdeaMensch

Learn more about MIT Bootcamps by visiting their website.

The Daughters of Shanti Bhavan

By: Charlotte Lackney

From India Life and Times magazine, January, 2018 edition. (see PDF: http://www.indialife.us/getPDFNews.php?pdf=108528_Abraham%20George.pdf

Looking for your next great Netflix binge? A quick, guaranteed one-day watch that’s bound to get your mind turning is Daughters of Destiny, a documentary mini-series. The four-part series was inspired by and filmed at Shanti Bhavan, a co-ed residential school in Tamil Nadu, India, founded by CambridgeEditors’ prior client Dr. Abraham George in 1997. The series follows the lives of five girls raised at Shanti Bhavan over seven years, focusing on their efforts to achieve individualization as well as carve a path to a better future for those who come after them. Daughters of Destiny, created by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, paints the true face of India’s poor and the level of dedication necessary to break the centuries-long cycle that entraps them.

Dr. George, who entrusted CambridgeEditors with his autobiography in 2019, established The George Foundation in 1995. The Foundation is a non-profit charitable trust with the intent to reduce injustices and inequalities in India. His work is the backbone of Shanti Bhavan Residential School, allowing the provision of world-class education and care to children from “untouchable” castes—any member of a wide range of low-caste Hindu groups and any person outside the caste system. As of 2017, the first four groups of students from Shanti Bhavan have graduated from college and are employed by global companies. As of 2021, six have been accepted into undergraduate programs at universities such as Dartmouth, Princeton, Duke, and Stanford. This is an unparalleled accomplishment in India’s history, one that Dr. George says will impact the country’s social climate twenty to twenty-five years down the line.

Since Daughters of Destiny’s release on Netflix in 2017 it has won Television Academy Honors in the Documentary category (2019) and was nominated for the Golden Trailer Award for Best Documentary (2018) and the IDA Award for Best Limited Series (2017).

“The actions of [Dr. George] have undoubtedly transformed the lives of hundreds of seriously disadvantaged children and their families. If that isn’t worth celebrating in this glorious fashion, then I don’t know what is.” – Julia Raeside, The Guardian

“I think [Dr. George] is a real visionary. I think the idea of dropping everything, leaving everything behind, you have to have a certain kind of confidence—a vision.” – Vanessa Roth, Director, Daughters of Destiny

Daughters of Destiny is available for streaming on Netflix.

Learn more about Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project by visiting their website.

Client Profile: Terry Williams

“To see the real city,” Terry Williams writes in the introduction to his Cosmopolitan Life series of urban, ethnographic works, “you must descend deep into the shadows, go into the bowels of the city and be guided through history, remembrance and the sensorium, capturing a mosaic of people and places.” In Williams’ latest book, Le Boogie Woogie: Inside and After-Hours Club, Williams takes on this task for his readers, combining ethnography, narrative storytelling, and research to intricately illustrate a world most of us have no access to. As a longtime editor for Willams, our founder and lead editor, Dr. Weiner, was invited to a reading and talk for Le Boogie Woogie hosted at the Harlem Arts Salon. 

According to his New School profile, Williams focuses are “teenage life and culture, drug abuse, crews and gangs, and violence and urban social policy,” and Le Boogie Woogie dives into those issues. “From the raunchy life of players, madams, hipsters, poets, musicians, voyeurs and others,” Williams writes, Le Boogie Woogie “is about and for people interested in the fast life of the city where cocaine use and sex are commonplace.”

“I am insatiably curious about the life of other people,” Williams said at the reading. “Some would say I’m nosy,” he joked. An article about the reading at the Harlem Arts Salon in Social Research Matters, ‘Terry Williams: The Cosmopolitan Life of an Urban Ethnographer’, explains how his work is largely unprecedented. “‘No study had been done on cocaine users in their natural setting or to describe users as they lived,’ he writes in the book’s introduction. Others told him it wasn’t a good idea, ‘…but my job as a researcher is to see if I can gain the trust and acceptance of people other than my kinfolk’” (Social Research Matters).

Le Boogie Woogie was the latest addition to Williams’ Cosmopolitan Life series. CambridgeEditors had the pleasure of working with Williams on two upcoming books of his, The Soft City: On Voyeurism and Engagement and The Vanishing Indian Upper Class which will be released in July of this year.

 

Author Spotlight: Susan Choi

Photo source: susanchoi.com

“It’s so hard to just decode the world. And when we’re teenagers, I think that we’re wildly improvising. We’re just sort of grabbing standards of judgment, we’re grabbing values out of the air, and hoping that they fit.” ­–From Alisa Chang’s interview with Susan Choi on All Things Considered

Susan Choi has emerged as one of the most inventive fiction writers of the last few years. Her latest novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, but Choi certainly isn’t a new author. Her first novel was published over 20 years ago, and her second novel was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. She has also written a collection of short stories, Wonderful Town: New York Stories, edited with David Remnick.

Trust Exercise is a must-read for anyone interested in a novel that can balance challenging subjects with entertainment value, but especially for any writer interested in social issues portrayed through narrative. Her novel begins in a performing arts high school, but midway through, breaks from a linear story structure by playing with the timeline. It’s been embraced as a #MeToo novel and lauded for its inventive structure that examines how stories are told, what happens when one’s life is written down, and how youth is remembered. Reading Trust Exercise makes the reader question who is narrating, and what voices can be trusted.

In 2019, not only did Choi publish Trust Exercise, she also released a children’s book. Readers can pick up a copy of Choi’s Camp Tiger along with their copy of Trust Exercises.

Trust Exercise has been optioned by Film Nation to be developed into a limited television series.

When Choi isn’t on her book tour, she teaches creative writing at Yale University and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Written by Isaac Ruben

Author Spotlight: Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, 85, on his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. Guy Mendes / Vox

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.” -from Wendell Berry’s Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays, 1993

Wendell Berry is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction, a poet, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer. He has written extensively about the practices of agriculture, and the impacts it has on consumers, animals, and the planet. As environmental consciousness grows, Berry’s writings reflect an urgent and raw call for action and reform.

Though Wendell Berry has gained more traction and attention in the past decade, he is no newcomer to advocating for his environmentalist beliefs through writing. His more recent works have come to reflect a current dissatisfaction with the political character of our nation, most prominently regarding America’s animal agriculture practices and harmful destruction. Despite his dissatisfaction with the current governing and operation of American, Berry’s writing paves a road towards hope for future generations. By advocating for more sustainable, less environmentally taxing practices, he is helping to reform the agricultural landscape of modern society. 

In the world of today’s climate crisis, Berry’s work urge readers to actively take charge and make change in their communities. Global change begins with individuals making a conscious effort to lessen their negative impact on the environment around them. Young activists today can look to Berry’s writings for non-violent, environmentalist prose, which urges readers to end the destruction of the Earth, animals, and human beings. Berry believes that once we have the knowledge to recognize wrong in the world around us, it is our moral duty to try and make change or find solutions to the issue- as demonstrates in his participation in the 2011 Kentuckians for the Commonwealth rally/sit-in to end mountaintop removal coal mining. In “The Peace of Wild Things”, Berry discusses the discomfort of industrialization, and the contrasting solitude and serenity found in nature:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Post written by Emily Bunn

Poet Spotlight: Evie Shockley

Photo credit: Stéphane Robolin and the Poetry Foundation

“It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may.” – “Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)”

So writes Evie Shockley, a poet from Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of three books titled A Half Red Sea, The New Black, and Semiautomatic and her monograph, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Shockley was recognized for her poetic efforts when she received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for her book The New Black, as well as the Holmes National Poetry Prize, both in 2012. A few years later, in 2018, she placed as a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the release of her most recent book, Semiautomatic. 

Semiautomatic recounts the experience of being black in America, police brutality, and racism, among other topics regarding the search for equality and justice. What makes this collection so unique is the unconventional attention to form and utilization of free verse. While her poems are often serious and saddening, the use of different poetic forms, such as unusual capitalization, repetition, rhyme scheme, and meter, is very playful. The writing exemplified in Semiautomatic is fierce, unabashed, and determined to make not only an impact but a concrete change in the world around her.

Another one of Shockley’s strengths is her keen eye for noticing the discrepancies and hidden nightmares of America’s operation. She often focuses her writing on topics that are considered taboo, or that are too painful to be spoken about aloud. One of the most heartwrenching and impactful pieces Shockley has published is “Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight).” In this poem, the issue of sex trafficking in America is analyzed. A startling comparison is made between the atrocities of past slaves, and today’s female sex trafficking victims in America. Quotations from political figures, sex trafficking victims, anti-human trafficking organization officials, and sex trafficking statistics are fluidly incorporated within her poem to aid her message. The author grapples with her own realizations about this toxic, violent underground industry simultaneously telling the story of a victim. At the culmination of the piece, Shockley self-referentially asks herself what she can do to help fight this issue, and by writing this poem, she has brought attention to this critical issue of today.

To read Evie Shockley’s “Sex Trafficking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the USA (or, The Nation’s Plague in Plain Sight)”, please the Poetry Foundation. 

Post written by Emily Bunn

CambridgeEditors’ Client Runs the London Marathon on Behalf of the Blind

Congratulations to Renata Beman, long-time CambridgeEditors client and advocate for the blind and other disabled people!

Renata successfully completed the London Marathon this past Sunday. Here is her account:

I made it !!! the marathon was last Sunday  the 28th of April, it was so so hard 47 KM,  26.5 miles took 6 plus hours…I never run in my life and there were only 10 people running for the blind.

I knew that when I reached the turn of mile 17 the veterans would be there waiting, as soon as the people from the office spotted me I could see in their faces, a mixture of happiness and disbelieve, they started shouting “Renata is coming” some blind veterans, especially the old ones were very emotional, crying, I had hugs, guide dogs jumping, kisses and a massive power up for the next very long 9.5 long miles.

When I crossed the final line at that point my legs were almost petrified as I have bad knees due to years of ballet, but what an epic feeling YES I did for the blind, it was unbelievable and epic!

I am super tired.

Renata

Get some rest, Renata. You’ve earned it.
 

Spotlight: The Hoochie Media Project

The Hoochie Media Project is an intersectional feminist media platform of which I am the Head and Editor-in-Chief. Hoochie is run entirely by Boston University students and seeks to empower student feminists across the globe through our blog, ‘zine, and Reader. Before I go on, let me give you a little background on who we are.

Merriam-Webster defines “hoochie” as slang that means, “a sexually promiscuous woman.” You might be wondering, how does this word have anything to do with feminism? Well, let me tell you: by reclaiming a word that was once derogatory, we change the meaning behind it. We take back the hate that was once used against us to fuel our power. This is what Hoochie is. It’s about being unapologetically bold and taking action to fuel positive changes.

Since 2007, Hoochie has grown into a collegiate collective for intersectional feminist students. Today, we curate a blog, with posts ranging from photography interviews, to R&B slam poetry, to inquiries into modern day love. Hoochie is an open book when it comes to writing and expression. As long as your topic relates to intersectional feminism, we’re happy to post it! We work with Boston University students primarily, but we also feature alumni writers and artists from other institutions.

We also publish the Hoochie Reader every spring. The Hoochie Reader is an anthology for student feminists around the world to submit critical essays, creative writing, and artwork for publication. The Hoochie Reader is recognized by the Library of Congress as a legitimate publication, which means that all of the students who contribute to the Reader become published writers and artists. The Reader is edited, designed, and assembled entirely by students. The Reader has published pieces from students across the nation and even the globe.

We are fast approaching the launch of the third issue of the Hoochie Reader in May. If you are a writer, editor, or someone in between, keep an eye out for our next issue, and follow us on social media. For more information, visit the Hoochie website.

Facebook: @hoochiefeminist
Twitter: @hoochiefeminist
Instagram: @hoochiefeminist

-Anne Jonas

Spotlight: “Drag” by Domenic D. Augustus and S.M. Dudley

Drag by Domenic D. Augustus and S.M., one of the many works edited by CambridgeEditors is August and Dudley’s first novel. The book follows the life of Vincent, a sociopathic man caught in the whirlwind of his own mental health and the vicissitudes of everyday life. We are transported to Everett, MA and glimpse the punch of Boston’s vernacular, imagery, and energy. Using third-person omniscient view, Augustus and Dudley capture the complexity of Vincent’s mind and give perspective to the multifaceted decisions surrounding thoughts of suicide, addiction, and the descent into madness.

Reading the book for the first time, I became completely invested in the characters’ lives and the life of Vincent. Because the book gives the reader an inside perspective into the thoughts, choices, and reasons behind forthcoming decisions, I sympathized deeply for Vincent, who was hastily characterized as a sociopath by those around him. I saw Vincent as someone who had been mischaracterized and dragged–– so to speak–– in the mud of the taboo surrounding mental health.

A line that Vincent repeats to himself throughout the book is “I am–– Numb.” I thought a lot about this remark and realized that maybe it wasn’t Vincent who was numb, but the people around him; if we do not reach out to those who are struggling with mental health issues, we prove ourselves numb to those we love. The book drives this point home by including the number to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in its epigraph at the beginning, coupled with a quote by Augustus himself: “I have made wrong decisions in my life, but when my world got me down what I finally did was write.”

I encourage all of you to read Drag, reach out to the people you love, and write if you are feeling down. Feel free to reach out to CambridgeEditors with your writing!

-Anne Jonas