High School Friday 2017

This is a great opportunity for high school students in Madison to experience a wide-range of book-related programming and see many of the exciting programs offered by Madison Public Library. A program-rich schedule is designed to engage students in the Wisconsin Common Core Standards within a dynamic learning environment. Through meaningful interaction with authors, poets, and peers, students will see themselves as active members of the Madison community. They will gain confidence, exposure, and insight while applying skills in reading, writing, language, speaking, and listening in the real world.  The focus of this year’s High School Friday is to highlight the diverse ways cultural programs encourage students to edify, educate, and explore.

Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and will be limited to 200 students. Register by emailing Conor Moran at cmoran@mplfoundation.org.

Giving Voice: First Wave Performance

Everyone will start together in the Community Room at Central Library for the Opening Session with spoken word artists from the UW-Madison. The presenters come from a variety of backgrounds and are participants in the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Learning Community, the first university program in the country centered on urban arts, spoken word and hip-hop culture. The program will include a mix of live spoken-word performance and dialogue between the presenters and the audience about the importance of personal expression, finding voice, and using a written or performance medium to build self- confidence, heal personal and societal wounds, and change oneself and the world for the better.

The First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Learning Community is a cutting-edge multicultural artistic program for incoming students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bringing together young artists and leaders from across the U.S and beyond, the First Wave Learning Community offers students the opportunity to live, study and create together in a close-knit, dynamic campus community. Administered by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI), the First Wave Learning Community is the first university program in the country centered on urban arts, spoken word and hip-hop culture. The inaugural First Wave cohort of fifteen students began their UW-Madison career in the Fall 2007 Semester and currently there are sixty spoken word and hip hop artists on full-tuition scholarship or that have graduated from the First Wave Program. 

About All-American Boys: A 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor book, and recipient of the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature. In this New York Times bestselling novel, two teens—one black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension. A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?

Jason Reynolds burst onto the writing scene in 2014 with the publication of When I Was the Greatest, which won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award. Since then he has written seven highly acclaimed novels for children and teens, including The Boy in the Black Suit (2015), All American Boys (2015), As Brave as You (2016), Ghost (2016), Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2017), Patina (2017), and Long Way Down (2017). A dynamic and compelling writer and speaker, in just four years he has become one of the brightest stars in the field of children’s and young adult literature.

About Echo After Echo: Debuting on the New York stage, Zara is unprepared – for Eli, the girl who makes the world glow; for Leopold, the director who wants perfection; and for death in the theater. Zara Evans has come to the Aurelia Theater, home to the visionary director Leopold Henneman, to play her dream role inEcho and Ariston, the Greek tragedy that taught her everything she knows about love. When the director asks Zara to promise that she will have no outside commitments, no distractions, it’s easy to say yes. But it’s hard not to be distracted when there’s a death at the theater – and then another –especially when Zara doesn’t know if they’re accidents, or murder, or a curse that always comes in threes. It’s hard not to be distracted when assistant lighting director Eli Vasquez, a girl made of tattoos and abrupt laughs and every form of light, looks at Zara. It’s hard not to fall in love. In heart-achingly beautiful prose, Amy Rose Capetta has spun a mystery and a love story into an impossible, inevitable whole – and cast lantern light on two girls, finding each other on a stage set for tragedy.

Amy Rose Capetta studied theater at the Stella Adler Studio as a teenager before spending four years in a Shakespeare troupe. Echo After Echo is her first book with Candlewick Press. Amy Rose Capetta lives in Vermont with her partner and their son.