By the time of the last New York Book Fair, held at Columbia University in ’87, I was collecting student writing on five inch floppy disks, publishing school site based magazines, and including students who had been kept outside of the mainstream. Waterways’ annual anthology, Streams, made its first appearance in Alternative Schools across the city.
Ten Penny Players brought the Waterways small press publishing project to New York City’s public schools. Limited editions were given away freely. Student authors received multiple copies. One of the authors, a teen parent living in a homeless shelter, told me it was the first book she ever owned.
We taught the students that books were good company. Books spoke to the writer in all of them. Their responses were inspiring. Students who had been written off as triage and failed by their schools wanted to write and be published. They were looking to Streams to find the most congenial way to articulate their experiences.
We began Streams as a means of inclusion. The Streams of individual voices came together to make an anthology. The students skills ranged from raw to refined. Their contributions ranged from derivative to original. Each school site was represented in the publication. We reached out to the many students with learning disabilities who were segregated from the general population, despite the passage of PL 94-142 that mandated inclusions of these youngsters.
Ten Penny Player’s Waterways Project invited students to participate at the New York Book Fair poetry readings at Columbia. And the small press poetry book fairs, we held along the waterfront was invited into New York City’s Alternative High Schools and Programs.
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