Bøger af Dennis Danziger

Put Down Your Pistol and Pick Up a Pen, The Story of a Teacher, a Tagger, and a 22-Year Prison Sentence is a co-authored memoir that follows the unusual friendship of John Rodriguez, a 17-year old tagger, and Dennis Danziger, his high school English teacher. When the teacher realizes that this tagger is a writing savant, he encourages him to pursue a college education. But that spring, John is involved in a bar fight that turns violent and is sentenced to a 22 years in prison. What follows is a story with echoes of Tuesdays with Morrie, with the teacher sending books and assignments to his once star student who finds redemption through his love of literature and literally writes his way out of prison to freedom.

Ghetto By the Sea is the second anthology in an annual series produced by the students of P.O.P.S. the Club, a club for those whose lives have been touched by prison. In short memoirs, poems, photographs and drawings, the students tell the stories of their lives--sometimes stories about how their lives have been touched by prison, often by the ways in which all kinds of losses change us, forever. Divided into ten sections--Who We Love, How We Live, What We Eat, When We Dream, Where Were From, Life at POPS, Why Were Here, Where We Stand, Friends of POPS, and Advice to Ninth Graders--the stories are interspersed with artwork by the students and pencil portraits of many POPS members.

The third anthology by the students of POPStheclub.com, Inc, a California-based nonprofit. POPStheclub.com, Inc. creates and supports clubs for high school students in California and beyond who have endured the pain of the prison system. For the most part these are the children, siblings and other loved ones of those who are or have been incarcerated. Too often any association with the criminal justice system leads people to silence. In POPS the Club, students find not only community, understanding and wisdom, but they discover that In telling their stories, they are able to untangle the web composed of stigma, sorrow and shame associated with incarceration, and they also inspire others to understand experiences and worlds too often hidden from our view. Their stories and artwork speaks to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, to all those who wonder what it would be like not to hide. Their honesty, clarity of vision, resilience and courage will inspire.

POPS the Club is a California-based nonprofit creating and supporting high school clubs for those young people whose lives have been touched by the Pain of the Prison System. In weekly club meetings, guided by teachers, writers, artists, activists, performers, and nonprofit leaders, club members tell their stories, write their stories, draw, paint and otherwise share their lives with each other, and with the larger community. The students publish their work on our website and in partner publications, and each year POPS the Club publishes an anthology of work generated by these powerful, wise young people who are telling us stories we all need to hear. Cracked Masks: With You and Without You is the fourth release by POPS the Club, another powerful compilation of work by students from schools across Los Angeles and as far away as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We also welcome the work by Friends of POPS, those who have visited our clubs as speakers, teachers, volunteers guides and observers, those who have stories to tell about the impact of incarceration on their lives, most ofen as the loved ones of the incarcerated.These are stories from the children, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, boyfriends and girlfriends of the incarcerated. These are stories readers seldom hear. These are stories vital to our understanding of our country, of who and what we are and how we live. Teachers who use these anthologies in their classrooms tell us their reluctant readers cannot stop reading, that often the POPS Anthologies are the books that introduce their students to the pleasures of reading.

POPS stands for Pain of the Prison System, and POPS the Club stands for transforming that pain into dignity, belonging, and freedom. POPS the Club creates and sustains a welcoming and loving community in high schools that foster and support teenagers with loved ones in prison. Their stories, poetry and artwork are achingly honest expressions of their experiences: What it is like to live in dangerous and desirous neighborhoods, to love people in prison and those who have been deported or have died, to feel invisible, unseen and unheard and impotent. It is through these stories that club members enhance their transformation, from impotent to important, from invisible to seen, from silent to strong and understood. In the Key of Love is POPS the Clubs fifth release (following Runaway Thoughts (2014); Ghetto By the Sea (2015); Before There Were Bars (2016) and Cracked Masks (2017)). These are stories from across the country, from Los Angeles, Belmont, Culver City, El Camino Real Charter, James Monroe, LA High School of the Arts, Lawndale, Santa Monica and Venice High Schools; from Baltimores Renaissance Academy; and from Harrisburgs Sci Tech and Steelton Highspire High Schools.