Suitcase Heart

Suitcase Heart features ten short stories written by Cree Toner over the last two years. At times uplifting and hopeful, at others heartbreaking and somber, Suitcase Heart encapsulates people who, though their circumstances may differ, share the common joy and pain of being alive.

"When a weary stranger arrives one day with nothing but a suitcase, his new neighbors ask nervous questions about who he is and where he comes from before they are challenged to decide between trusting the newcomer or taking the risk of not believing him"--

A funny, unapologetic play about the effects of society's objectification of women.

Imagine if going to school meant more than preparing kids for a test, teaching a canned curriculum, and training students for their future as workers. What if school were also about cultivating students to be caring, community-involved citizens and critical, creative thinkers who love to read? In Caring Hearts & Critical Minds, teacher-author Steven Wolk shows teachers how to help students become better readers as well as better people. I want [my students] to be thinkers and have rich conversations regarding critical issues in the text and be able to formulate opinions regarding these issues, says Leslie Rector, a sixth-grade teacher who collaborated with Wolk on some of the units featured in this book. Wolk demonstrates how to integrate inquiry learning, exciting and contemporary literature, and teaching for social responsibility across the curriculum. He takes teachers step-by-step through the process of designing an inquiry-based literature unit and then provides five full units used in real middle-grade classrooms. Featuring a remarkable range of recommended resources and hundreds of novels from across the literary genres, Caring Hearts & Critical Minds gives teachers a blueprint for creating dynamic units with rigorous lessons about topics kids care about'sfrom media and the environment to personal happiness and global poverty. Wolk shows teachers how to find stimulating, real-world complex texts called for in the Common Core State Standards and integrate them into literature units. I know from experience that a great book changes the reader, says Karen Tellez, an eighth-grade teacher featured in the book. For me, books have helped me escape, fall in love, recover from heartbreak, and have broken open my mind from the age of twelve. . . . I hope [my students] gain better reading comprehension, confidence as readers, connections to the characters and events, a curiosity for the world, and tolerance for others. Caring Hearts & Critical Minds shows teachers how to turn these hopes and goals into reality.

Mothering is messy. Our joy and hope in raising children doesn’t change the reality that being a mom can be frustrating, stressful, and tiring. But just as God is using us to shape our children, God is using our children and motherhood to shape us. In The Better Mom, author Ruth Schwenk, herself a mother of four children, encourages us with the good news that there is more to being a mom than the extremes of striving for perfection or simply embracing the mess. We don’t need to settle for surviving our kids’ childhood. We can grow through it. With refreshing and heartfelt honesty Ruth emboldens moms to: Find freedom and walk confidently in purpose Create a God-honoring home environment Overcome unhealthy and destructive emotions such as anger, anxiety, and more Avoid glorifying the mess of mom-ing or idolizing perfection Cultivate life-giving friendships At the heart of The Better Mom is the message that Jesus calls us to live not a weary life, but a worthy life. We don’t have to settle for either being apathetic or struggling to be perfect. Both visions of motherhood go too far. Ruth offers a better option. She says, “It’s okay to come as we are, but what we’re called to do and be is far too important to stay there! The way to becoming a better mom starts not with what we are doing, but with who God is inviting us to become."

Consisting of 214 poems and 79 poets, from over 23 African countries and the Diasporas, Best New African Poets 2015 Anthology: Poetry contains poems that deal with a panoply of issues, feelings, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, on identity, Africanness (Blackness, Whiteness, Arabic, Asian), culture, heritage, place, politics, (mis)governance, corruption, exile, loss, memory, spirituality, sex, gender, love, the individual and many others. It travels from Cape to Cairo, Monrovia to Nairobi, rooms in the beautiful Moroccan Sahara desert, pastoral idyllic Savannas, the rainy equatorial rainforests and then flies into the Diasporas as each poet speaks his/her own story of the Africa that she/he knows, dreams and envisions with protective pride and resolute dedication.

Memoirs of a Jewish woman, born in 1926 in Berlin. Pp. 1-42 describe her experiences during the Nazi period until, after the "Kristallnacht" pogrom, she was sent to Britain in a "Kindertransport." Her parents were deported to Theresienstadt, where her father died; her mother died in Auschwitz. After the war, she and her husband emigrated to the U.S.