Youngest Stars at the Dickens Universe!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Youngest Stars in the Dickens Universe : South LA teens take up scholarships-in-residence at Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California – August 7, 2015 – “Stars,” said Mary Ann Cabrales (18) momentarily stunned by the Santa Cruz evening sky after an evening lecture at this year’s weeklong Dickens Universe. Walking the redwood paths and sharing the company of over two hundred Victorian scholars and conference attendees were firsts for South LA teens, Cabrales, and her fellow scholar, Belen Espinosa (17), who both penned winning essays on this year’s novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, for an all-expenses paid trip to UCSC for five days in an alternate universe of 19th century scholarship.
“At the Dickens Universe, there's a sense of liberation to explore our imagination about the novel and what Dickens might have intended for us to see. And that’s the beauty of it,” said Mary Ann. The girls, both students at Foshay Learning Center (and USC NAI Scholars), represent their classmates, all having read this lesser known novel in their AP English classroom. Their work is a part of a new partnership with the Dickens Project, the scholarly consortium responsible for the conference and sponsoring scholarships for these teens and their teachers. “I love meeting such a diverse group” said Kate McFadden, Foshay and USC NAI teacher. “There are academics, librarians, manufacturers, professional fundraisers—all who have the same devotion and deep knowledge of all that is Dickens,” she said.
The new partnership funds this collaborative model for studying the novel by LAUSD students, purchasing books for Mary Ann and Belen's teacher, Jacqueline Barrios, who now teaches the Dickens Universe annual novel selections to her eighty high school seniors. “Students from our community need complex and challenging books to prepare them for complex, challenging lives. The dizzying world of change in the 19th century is a perfect mirror for their own times. Martin Chuzzlewit, the only Dickens novel that includes a transatlantic journey to America, makes a great parallel for the experience of crossing into new worlds, that first-generation college students face . . . that first-time of Dickens face,” said Barrios. Mary Ann and Belen are from USC’s neighboring South Los Angeles communities and will be first in their families to attend college. Along with their peers, Mary Ann and Belen tackled lessons on Dickensian syntax and the Industrial Revolution and even organized their own Dickens Day for their campus. Students developed their own essay focus: Mary Ann’s essay is titled Blind Devotion: Identity crises in devoted characters of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit and Belen Espinosa’s essay is titled Plot Twists: The Brutal Artistry of Deception in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit.
Inner-city students tacking hefty Victorian novels and writing about them gained the attention of the Dickens Project through the winning last year of the competition by two of their peers, Karen Molina and Kenia Coyoy, who beat out essays from all over the nation. The new grant hopes to cultivate the next generation of readers of Charles Dickens, and of readership in general, in keeping with the spirit of Dickens himself, whose innovations in serial publication helped popularize reading in unprecedented ways. Jon Varese, Director of Digital Initiatives for the Dickens Project, said that “the partnership is going to allow us to take the high school outreach work we've been doing for nearly a decade, and focus on urban and Title 1 school outreach.” The partnership launched with a $10,000 grant -- $5000 of which Varese raised through private sources, and the other $5000 coming in the form of a matching grants from the Adobe Corporation, the Salesforce.com Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. (The Philadelphia Dickens Fellowship, the oldest Dickens Fellowship in the United States, also provided a substantial donation.) “This partnership will not only have a huge impact on the lives of NAI scholarship recipients, but it will also transform the nature of the Dickens Universe itself. Our attendees -- many of them faithful to the Universe for over 30 years now -- are thrilled to embrace this new generation of Dickens scholars and enthusiasts," Varese said.
Contact:
Jacqueline Jean Barrios
310 720-0428
Foshay Learning Center
3752 S. Harvard Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
323-373-2700
University of Southern California
Neighborhood Academic Initiative
661 W. Jefferson Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
213-743-1591
For previous coverage of the study of Dickens by our students, please read the article in the Los Angeles Times, (http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-dickens-contest-20140817-story.html), or listen to the live NPR/AirTalk interview with Patt Morrison (http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2014/08/21/38981/south-l-a-high-school-grads-win-attendance-to-dick/). Our classroom study of the novel is also the subject of a mini-documentary that tracks their learning in the context of their own lives (http://youtu.be/9Qoilrlmw4U).
Founded in 1981 and headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, the Dickens Project is a research consortium of faculty and graduate students from major American and international universities. Member institutions include the University of Southern California, all the UC campuses, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and NYU, among others. For more, please go to
USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI) is a rigorous, seven-year pre-college enrichment program designed to prepare low-income neighborhood students for admission to a college or university. Those who complete the program, meet USC’s competitive admission requirements, and choose to attend USC are rewarded with a full 4.5-year financial package, minus loans. For more, please go to https://communities.usc.edu/college-access/nai/
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