Boy @ The Window
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Boy @ The Window

Boy @ The Window

by Donald Earl Collins

Overview

As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York in the 1980s, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past.

Boy @ The Window is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite—or because of—the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success—for a life worth living. Boy @ The Window is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940016741567
Publisher: Donald Earl Collins
Publication date: 06/18/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: NOOK Book
Pages: 384
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

I am a freelance and academic writer who has written on the topics of multiculturalism, education reform and African American identity for more than fifteen years. I have published articles in Black Issues in Higher Education, Gannett Suburban Newspapers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, History of Education Quarterly, The Washington Post, Teachers College Record, Academe Magazine, Radical Society and the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education. My publications include narrative profiles and stories, op-eds, book reviews, scholarly articles and feature articles, review entries and book chapters.

I am also the author of Fear of a "Black" America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (iUniverse.com, 2004), an in-depth response to the conservative movement's "Culture Wars" on all things "multicultural." The book is a combination of his personal vignettes with interviews and historical research to create a semi-scholarly, semi-narrative nonfiction story of African Americans and other groups of color coming to grips with their notions of multiculturalism in education and in their everyday lives.

Outside of my work as a writer, I've worked in academia and in the nonprofit world for more than fifteen years. I am an Adjunct Associate Professor with University of Maryland University College and have taught as an adjunct professor of African American History and American Education at Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, George Washington University, the University of the District of Columbia and Howard University. I have been a consultant with Educational Testing Service, American Institutes for Research and the Junior Statesmen Foundation. For more than four years I served as the Deputy Director of College Access and Success Initiatives with the Center for School and Community Services at Academy for Educational Development (AED - now FHI 360) in Washington, DC and New York City. I previously served as Assistant Director of the New Voices Fellowship Program at AED, a program for emerging leaders in the social justice field.

I have a Ph.D. in History from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Pittsburgh. I live in Silver Spring, Maryland with my wife and my son.

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