Posts by Rodger Taylor

Teen Central at Grand Central Library partnered with Yianni Stamas and Lights, Camera, Read to create Digital Communication Arts projects aimed at bettering and bringing awareness to the New York City community and beyond. Teens and NYC youth participated in this year long program. We'd like to acknowledge the three Platinum Pia winners who also injected themselves into the life and culture at Teen Central.

Miguel Trelles, one of the hands behind the scenes of Festival Borimix, is the kind of New Yorker who gives you hope.

Welcome to our Books On Bullying reading list. It includes items from the Teen collection with some Adult titles and one very sentimental Children's favorite. We'd like this list to be as interactive as possible. Any good suggested additions will be considered and if appropriate added.

"Most schools have no idea what to do," says Ross Ellis, founder of Stomp Out Bullying.

The Teen Central DigiCommunication Arts Projects and Workshop, in partnership with Yianni Stamas and Lights Camera Read @ Grand Central Library has been growing and developing since last fall. Aiming to provide a space for youth to engage in public service while highlighting their talents and efforts — in essence promote yourself by helping others, our anti-bullying digital project began in the spring and gained a life of its own. Several teens produced and are producing work around this issue, which is in some way close to us all.

This April — Fred Jerome and I, authors of Einstein on Race & Racism (2005) went to Paris for the unveiling of the French edition of our book.

The title in French means Einstein - anti-racist - Quite fitting because our book focuses on Albert Einstein's little known anti-racism.

People are predicting all kinds of crazy things regarding the year 2012, including, of course, the end of the world. Someone I respect told me that a lot of this issue is tied to the Mayan calendar and tradition. He suggested a better way of looking at 2012 would be as a year of change — a shift of epochs, or as a world turning in a new direction— not the actual end of the world, but a new beginning instead.

In that same spirit... something new at Teen Central is our Online Art & Talent Show, featuring a few of our amazingly talented artists and talented talents from 2012!

Justin Tuck, who plays football for the New York Giants, is one of the top defensive linemen in the game and actually one of my favorite players. It's been a rough, injury plagued year for him on the football field, but the release of a children's book he wrote called Home-Field Advantage, illustrated by Leonardo Rodriguez, is one of the all-star moves he made this fall.

During the first part of the Writers' Club meeting on August 2, the question of reality and dreaming came up. Someone spoke about the feeling of waking up — perhaps coming out of a dream and having that disoriented feeling of not knowing quite where you are or where you were, or dreaming that you woke up from a dream only to be still dreaming. Reality can be complicated and so can dreaming, so here are some dreamy poems about what is real and what is not.

Thinking about politicians wasting money like it's a crime — are they trying to mess up the world on the peoples' dime? — folks out of work — solutions seem so easy — watching slimey rich men screw it up feels so sleazy — budget talk instead of creating jobs?  — feels like fodder for a blog —

Teen Central at Grand Central Library, located at 135 West 46th Street, presents two special programs this summer.

Harold Camping predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011. These are our responses:

Hi - The Writers' Club is assembling a newspaper/newsletter that we will distribute as widely as we can in the Grand Central Library and places where teens are.  We hope to have this project completed in the next few weeks and we plan to ask for writing contributions, opinions and feedback from teens throughout the city.  So look out for Teen Voices from Grand Central. In the meantime we have a few more and more colorful Haikus for you to digest along with a special photographic thanks to Crystal Odame in all colors.

A Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that has become popular in the U.S. In English Haikus are generally three line poems that have five syllables in the first verse, seven in the second and five in the third—we generally stuck to this form although since it's poetry, we allowed for some poetic license. In January and February as we negotiated our way around what seemed like non-stop snow, members of the Writers Club, inspired by cool scenes of the winter photography of Crystal Odame and the summer hot artwork of Romare Bearden, wrote some Haikus of many sorts and there are more on the Manga wall in Teen Central.

We are all moved by the horrific disasters, natural and man-made, that have occurred in Japan.  When we met on March 17th a cataclysmic nuclear meltdown seemed quite possible and maybe imminent.  It was non-stop on the news, in our minds and conversations.  Many of the people who come to Teen Central on a regular basis are Manga fanatics and they have strong feelings about Japan and the dynamic impact its' culture has on their lives.  Even those of us who are not that into Manga realize that Japan, though physically far away, is closely linked every day to our economy and society.

Writers' Club educator, mentor, writer and friend Lois Stavsky is curating an art exhibition at the Bronfman Center at NYU called Something’s Missing: Visions and Voices of Loss. Given the recent catastrophes in Japan and other places in the world, this event seems quite timely. At our March 9th meeting club writers focused on the theme of loss and who knows—some of our work may find a way into the show. Lois has shared, as a preview, two pieces of art that will appear in the exhibit. In between is a taste of what the Writers' Club produced when considering voicing visions of loss.

A special welcome to Lenny Collado one of our newer members and someone who is helping out a lot.  Lenny brought this poem to our April 29th meeting and shared it with us.  Can you guess the word he's referring to?

As winter kicks in, Teen Central and Grand Central's second Writers' Club newsletter is now available (PDF).  We decided to feature a poem written by Crystal Gomez at the November 26th meeting of the writers' club. She wrote this in response to M.C. K~Swift's exercise on "personification." (Personificaton could be defined as giving human qualities and/or making come alive objects that are not human or often not alive.) -- Crystal's personification pairs included: a lost cell phone; trusting games; joyful paper; a funny building and of course....

On Wednesday, November 10th, Teen Central's newly formed Writers' Club held its first meeting in Grand Central Library's second floor Community Room.

Hip-Hop artist and educator M.C. K~Swift introduced himself and then shared writings from his journal with the other members of the Writers' Club.