I Was There When Hope Was All We Had

By Kate Wright

This book is a collection of poetry from the 2016 8th grade class at Monarch Academy in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Our task was to create a poem about a topic that impacted us from our expedition, "Are You An Agent Of Change?" Students selected experiences from a variety of topics, including: the Industrial Revolution, The Holocaust, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Child Labor Movement. Many students wrote about the Holocaust because it struck them so much. As a class, we were fortunate enough to hear from speakers who survived the Holocaust. They came into our Humanities class and shared their struggles, their losses, and sometimes, their joy. We were also given the opportunity to speak with Carl Wilkens, the sole American who chose to remain in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. We heard his message to "Be An Upstander Not A Bystander." Then, we started to read different kinds of poetry and we learned about poetical devices like line breaks, repetition, metaphor, personification, and stanza structure. Finally, the 8th grade was tasked with writing poems. Hopefully, when you read this, you will want to learn more about these topics. This book is their struggles, their losses, their stories, and we want to honor their legacy with these poems.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1523431792
• ISBN13: 9781523431793
• Release Date: February 2016
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"