Port Townsend faculty member Micheline Aharoninan Marcom has put her writing skills towards developing the following new site whose focus is on Social Justice as it pertains to unaccompanied Central American minors living in Oakland who came as part of the so-called “surge” on the US border in 2014. Click on the link below and you can hear podcasts and see videos, monologues, and photographs.
Micheline invites us to spread the word about this important work she is doing as a Writer in the World.  (Please feel free to re-post this information.) Read more of Micheline’s thoughts on this project in Seeking Asylum: 100,000 Stories on our MFA blog, The Writer in the World.
Description: The New American Story Project (NASP) is an oral-history based digital storytelling site where new Americans can tell their stories.The current NASP project, begun in the fall of 2015, Welcome Children, focuses on unaccompanied Central American minors living in Oakland who came as part of the so-called “surge” on the US border in 2014.
NASP allows the viewer to see and hear from some of the children who now live in the Bay Area via podcast clips, a short video, text monologues, and photographs.  The children tell their stories in their own words, and legal, social and policy experts provide background and perspective.
The goal of the project is to foster a greater understanding so that humane and substantive dialogue can occur around the complexities of migration, asylum and immigration law, safety, and human rights concerns for children. We are at the beginning of the project, we have interviewed a dozen children and ten others so far, and plan to keep going as the site continues to evolve.
www.newamericanstoryproject.org