An Extra-Special Summer with @CWPFairfield Teachers, Especially Those Returning from Last Year - Love Being Able to Celebrate Them

CWP-Fairfield Young Adult Literacy Labs and Teacher Institutes received a 2025 Divergent Award for Literacy Implementation. It was an honor to be sent the email acknowledging the nomination, and now it is time to share the award with each of the teachers who help make our literacy labs a success. One by one I'm putting the award into the hands of the educators and youth literacy leaders who have helped us to reach and publish thousands of young writers over the years. It is their dedication to the work that makes it all worthwhile.

And we all admit to each other, it's the summer work that rejuvenates us and makes us believe what is possible with kids and teaching, after a year of being let down and disappointed by the bureaucracies of our institutions. Here, we come to have fun, to read, to write, and to celebrate humanity.

My goal is to get the award into all the hands of the people (humans of our lil' corner of the National Writing Project network) to watch the smiles grow. 

These are dedicated, brilliant, creative, clever, and hardworking teachers who make the work so much fun - they restore the faith in the profession we all had when we first started out.

Day two of the youth work beings in about 3...2....1....