ABOUT THE BOOK It is the early 1960s and the world is beginning to change, but not in Jackson, Mississippi. Old white families run the city from their farms, formerly called plantations. The Junior League is full of former debutantes who love nothing more than to gossip about what Jackie Kennedy is wearing, and about each other. The sole goal of every woman is to get married, which is the only real reason to go to college, and you're a spinster if you haven't landed a man by 23. Jim Crow Laws dictate all race relations, and the Civil Rights Movement hasn't taken hold here yet. Racial tensions are rising, but the black maids still go to work sitting in the back of the bus. White babies are raised by black women, and then taught to hate them by white parents who only come on the scene once the kids are potty trained. This is the setting for Kathryn Stockett's runaway 2009 hit novel, The Help. It tells the story of three women who dare to give a voice to the black maids of Jackson. Although the project is rife with danger, Skeeter Phelan, Aibileen Clark, and Minny Jackson compile a book of stories about working for white women told from the perspective of the black maids. MEET THE AUTHOR Lacey is a writer, traveler and lover of the arts. After graduating from the University of Virginia with a BA in Drama & the Studies of Women and Gender, the only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to travel. So, she embarked on a 10.5 month round-the-world trip. Lacey then traveled to Costa Rica where she spent one year teaching elementary school English in a small mountain town. Throughout her two years of travels, she has always kept a blog. In 2009, Lacey earned her MA in International Development and began working for the National Democratic Institute where she became the Citizen Participation Team's primary writer. After living and traveling in 26 different countries, she has settled down for awhile in Leadville, CO where she spends her days skiing, hiking, taking pictures and writing. Lacey loves writing about travel, gender issues, international development and the arts.

Rebecca Pelky's story-in-poems assembles the author's research into her Native and non-Native heritage in the land now known as Wisconsin. Through the poet's ancestors-and documented through text and image-this book relates narratives of people who converged on and impacted this space in myriad ways. Written in English and Mohegan, Through a Red Place reshapes itself from page to page, asking what it means to navigate place as both colonizer and colonized. These poems seek the interior and exterior lives of beloved people and places, interacting with archives and visuals to illustrate that what is past continually interrupts and reinscribes itself upon the present. This collection embodies a refusal to go missing despite what's buried, erased, or built over, much like the ancient mound now covered by an ammunition plant. An inventive collage of geography, history, myth, translation, lineage, erasure, journalism, and photography, Through a Red Place builds a map between distances and lost stories to unearth and honor the past.

Vol. for 1958 includes "Anthology of poems from the seventeen previously published Braithwaite anthologies."

Poems by Rebecca Pelky

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Help with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which is set in the United States of the 1960s when segregation and racism were rife. It centres around a white woman who decides to collect the testimonies of black maids to illustrate segregation, and of the two maids who risk their lives to help her with her project. The novel spent over two years on The New York Times Best Seller list and has been translated into over 40 different languages. Stockett grew up in Missippi and was very close to an African American domestic worker, and this relationship is thought to have inspired her popular debut novel. Find out everything you need to know about The Help in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you in your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

ABOUT THE BOOK Is it possible to be at peace while your country is at war? Today, the answer to that question often seems to be a decisive yes; while the United States is entangled in military conflicts in numerous far-away countries, the average American citizen is able to lead a largely untouched life. Except perhaps for the price of gas at the pump, itself more an economic than political ramification, we face few harsh reminders about the wars that are being fought in our name. This was not always the case. When John Knowles, author of A Separate Peace, sat down to write a novel inspired by his experiences as a high school student during World War II, he was reflecting on an era that demanded far more sacrifices from the average U.S. citizen. In addition to the food and fuel shortages that affected even the upper-class rungs of society that Knowles was part of, people were also forced to live with the war as an enormous psychological specter that was nearly impossible to ignore. Because of the novel’s frank and emotional portrayal of the way in which youths experienced World War II, A Separate Peace is considered a classic of modern American literature and is a staple of high school curriculums, still appearing regularly on bestseller lists, such as the January 23-29 2012 list in the Boston Globe. According to the Los Angeles Times, Knowles felt incredibly validated by the book’s popularity, explaining, “What touches me most, what pleases me most, is that people who are far removed from the world of prep schools love it.” The world depicted in the pages of this novel is based largely on the one Knowles himself knew as a teenager in the early 1940s. Devon, the fictional school attended by the books’ characters, is modeled closely after Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite college preparatory school in New Hampshire, where Knowles himself studied. Many of the historical details of the book—such as the apple harvesting, the shoveling work at the railroad, the absence of senior faculty, and the disappearance of maids from the campus—are ones Knowles experienced directly as a student. Howard T. Easton, a former instructor at Exeter, published a reflection about the school’s culture during the war in The Exonian, in which he recalls, “We all had to adapt to unusual circumstances, some of them quite trying.” In addition to being a faithful rendition of a particular historical time and place, A Separate Peace also offers readers a timeless depiction of friendship, the struggles of adolescence and the loss of innocence. Just as the main characters are unable to hide from the war, they are also unable to forestall the onset of adulthood, a transition that marks the end of the carefree, naïve happiness they knew as boys during the summer session. Each character grapples with these changes in his own way, but in the end, none of them is left unchanged.k EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Fifteen years after graduating from the Devon School, a college preparatory school for wealthy young boys, Gene Forrester returns to campus for the first time. There are two places in particular he aims to visit: a marble staircase in one of the school’s halls and a certain tree on the edge of the Devon River. Upon reaching the staircase in question, he notes with some foreboding that they appear to be particularly hard stairs, as generations of boys’ boots have barely made any indentation on the steps. Trudging through the rain across the muddy campus, Gene struggles to pick out the tree he’s in search of. When he does identify the tree, he notes with some relief that it seems smaller and less intimidating than he remembered. ...buy the book to continue reading!