Naomi Shihab Nye of San Antonio has been writing poems since she was six. She believes all people have a “poetry channel” inside whether they turn it on a lot or not. It’s there. And any one of us could write a book about our own family – stories, mysteries, questions unending. Her latest books are Grace Notes: Poems about Families and I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas.
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Naomi Shihab Nye
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Grace Notes: Poems about Families
National Book Award Finalist and former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye’s "Grace Notes: Poems about Families" celebrates family and community. This rich collection of one hundred never-before-published poems is also the poet’s most personal work to date. With poems about her own childhood and school years, her parents and grandparents, and the people who have touched and shaped her life in so many ways, this is an emotional and sparkling collection to savor, share, and read again and again.
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I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas
Struggling for 30 years with chronic illness at her ranch outside Uvalde, Texas, Ann Alejandro was a writer of transporting natural talent and prolificity. Though she would have loved to be widely read and appreciated, she was too modest to scale the walls of the publishing world. Thus her chosen form was the letter and her audience close friends and family, including the poet Naomi Shihab Nye and the essayist Marion Winik. For decades, her often lengthy missives continued to delight her correspondents, blending observation, storytelling, humor, praise, and accounts of her deep attachment to the land and animals that surrounded her in the rural Southwest.
Before Ann's death in 2019 at the age of 64, Naomi and Marion promised her they would pull together a book from thousands of pages left in their care. They selected the very best of Ann Alejandro, added commentary, and organized the material into chapters with titles like Faith, Motherhood, Land, Snakes, Pain, and Love.
"I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas" is an extraordinary collection of writing put together by two longtime literary friends in tribute to a third. It includes an introduction by Nye and and an afterword by Winik, as well as a photo gallery of Ann's life. It will delight and enrich readers for years to come.
