So, Book-in-a-Day is a program that I created in 2006. And I had been invited to a high school in Detroit, Michigan to help a group of students publish a book. Their English teacher had collected all of their poems and essays and articles over the year and she wanted to reward them with a book, and she knew that I had owned a publishing company and we were friends so I agreed to do it.
And what began as you have one week in the class transitioned to well, we only have time for one day. Can you come for one day? And here’s the catch, I don’t want you to do any of the publishing work. I want my students to do it. So, can you train them? She wanted me to train them on the job in one day. That’s impossible. And my answer to her was yes because I’m a say-yes person.
I love walking through doors, figuring out what’s on the other side, and making it work. And the first class at 8:30 came up with a title for the book and they designed the cover. The second class proofread the entire manuscript. The third class ordered a barcode and contacted a printer. By the end of the day these students had a PDF file that was pretty much complete and ready to be sent to a printer.
Three weeks later their paperback books came back and they had a big book signing. And I had this idea this is interesting. Maybe I should offer this to other schools. And so Book-in-a-Day was born, and over the course of the next nine years I got a call from a middle school maybe four years later and the middle school said, “Kwame, can you do it with my seventh-graders?” And of course I had only been doing it with high-schoolers. That’s impossible. And my answer was yes because I’m a say-yes person.
And these seventh-graders at Herndon Middle School called their book Winter Coat because they felt like poems comfort them and keep them warm. And so fast-forward about three years and I get a call from an elementary school in Canada, in Burlington, Canada. And the teacher’s like, “I teach fourth grade. Would you be interested in doing Book-in-a-Day?” And I said that will never work for elementary school students. Sorry. Yes.
And so over the course of nine years we did the program in 76 schools and we created probably about 7,000 student authors, 76 different books, paperback books. And so the idea was yeah, you get students excited about reading and writing by allowing them to take ownership of not only the writerly process but the publication process.
And then the other piece of it, which gets lost on people is that this notion that you can publish a book in a day. That’s the ultimate say-yes moment. If you can do that, then you need to think about the other things you want to do in this world, in this life. They are possible. They are possible. The program, Book-in-a-Day, is no longer.
However, we are partnering with Scholastic and the program is now turning into a kit, a system that more schools will have access to. It will be more affordable and it’s called Kwame Alexander’s Page-to-Stage Writing Workshop. And I love the first two words in the title.
