SOCIO-EMOTIONAL AND ACADEMIC WELLNESS SERIES
Parents struggling with unresolved issues from the past, can make poor choices when raising their children. The joyful curiosity and emotional strength children need to succeed at academic learning while they enjoy social well-being get sabotaged. Teacher, parent and seminar facilitator Andrene Bonner responds to the requests for more from parents who want to know how to break the cycle of the past and get back in touch with their school age children. The first two book in the series, From a Teacher to Parents, offers moving, easy to remember and inspiring stories on parenting principles, emotional healing and school performance. Bonner’s stories help parents take a gentle, non-threatening look at their limiting beliefs and what they may have passed on to their children. With awareness, parents can correct their course and help their children develop more problem solving skills, courage, adaptability, self-discipline, self-care, even vocabulary, among other strengths. This book is a must for beside tables and long commutes. Learn how parents and teachers can work together consciously for children’s resilience and success.
I GOT THIS WORKBOOK: Affirmations for Teens to Relieve Stress and Create an Awesome School Year is a guide for students to discover their inner superhero, their inborn courage and strength. Its purpose is to help students practice positive self-talk, avoid overwhelm, relieve stress, maintain focus, accomplish daily tasks, take personal responsibility, discover their own unique learning styles, become skillful in the required subjects and make sense of the world. Each chapter in this book first lays the foundation by mirroring some key areas in the syllabus your teacher will give you on the first day of the school year. However, the book provides much more. There are three sections: Situations, Affirmations and Journal. The Situations are just some of the events and dilemmas that so many students face during the school year. The Affirmations help you best respond to these and other Situations. The Journal section provides the space for you to write about your feelings and list your To-Dos and accomplishments.

Olympic Gardens is the winner of the Tamarind Festival's 2009 Lorna Goodison Caribbean Award for Transformative Literature. The story is set in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1960s. It’s a bildungsroman novel in which the author frames the psychological, moral, and educational profile of its main protagonist, Roderick Brissett, against a political and cultural backdrop in a newly independent Caribbean nation. Its universal themes of abandonment, abuse, friendship, literacy, and hope are central to the work. Within the abyss of harsh realities, Roderick must find strength and seek some semblance of joy that will help him to survive, grow, and find his place in the world.

It is 1968. Kingston, in an emerging garrison community. Roderick Brissett, an abandoned, adolescent boy, finds himself marooned in a world of child labor and cruelty. His main nemesis, Aunt Hope threatens to destroy his youth. It would be his friend Chloe, herself an adolescent, who expands his world with the irresistible gift of books. Roderick finds other allies in the elders, Rastafarians and a Warner Woman. Will he unravel the painful family secrets that caused his mother's unthinkable actions? Will he build resilience or will he surrender to the lure of the dark streets of Kingston? A powerful examination of education, class, culture, kinship care and their effects on the adolescent.

No Life in Olympic Gardens Teaching Guide supplements the lessons a teacher intends for this novel. The guide will provide teachers with a roadmap for students to explore and gain knowledge about a culture, era, people’s hopes and dreams. We especially designed it to help the new teacher, paraprofessionals and co-teaching parents. It offers teachers the opportunity to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and social-emotional competencies in the classroom.

Long Walk to Cherry Gardens Teaching Guide is a chockfull of learning standards aligned lesson plans, assessments, vocabulary work, fiction and non-fiction reading and writing exercises. It offers teachers the opportunity to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and social-emotional competencies in the classroom.
P L A Y S & R O L E P L A Y I N G

Title Coming Soon
A Transatlantic Anthology
Drawing on the rich traditions of Yoruba cosmology, Andrene Bonner has written a memorable praise poem to honor First Lady Chirlane McCray de Blasio for the vital and uplifting work she has done and continues to do in New York. Bonner’s grounding of her poem in the persona of Oya, the Orisha of hurricanes and transformation, seems apt given the changes in early childhood and mental health education that McCray has overseen in some of the most troubled areas of the state. Woman in the Wind rightly uses the power of naming to confront the forces of ignorance that would erase Chirlane McCray de Blasio, from our collective memory and brings to the forefront the story of this freedom fighter who is worthy of our praise.
--Geoffrey Philp, author of Garvey’s Ghost
“Those who name have Power” Andrene Bonner. In Woman in the Wind: A Praisesong for First Lady Chirlane McCray, Andrene Bonner names African-American First Lady of New York, de Blasio, as Oya, goddess of the wind, goddess of the hurricane, goddess of sudden change. This righteous naming inspirits First Lady Chirlane with the ashe of transformation so necessary in this era. We need new definitions to help us navigate the changing terrain of textualities, gender identities, and geo-political complexities. Oya’s energies demand quick thinking and adaptation to instant and dramatic change if we are to survive the chaos and uncertainty that a hurricane brings. Bonner’s Praisesong to this powerful Black woman―whose very presence in the space she occupies so elegantly embodies radical transformation―is as courageous and beautiful as the woman whose praises it sings. Andrene Bonner’s poem ensures that Chirlane de Blasio’s legacy will live on for generations to come. In centering our African traditions, in centering woman, Andrene Bonner centers liberational poetics, centers diversity, centers the power of women to sustain and build each other against all odds. This is how we honor our ancestral traditions. This is how we honor the power of the feminine. This is how we show radical love to our own, to ourselves.
--Donna Aza Weir-Soley, author of The Woman Who Knew (Finishing Line Press) First Rain (Peepal Tree Press), Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings (University Press of Florida) and Co-editor (with Opal Palmer Adisa) of the anthology, Caribbean Erotic (Peepal Tree Press).

These poems are based on a series of telephone interviews I conducted with Ms. Lou starting in 1997 while I was living in Burbank, California. I said to her, “Miss Lou, I am writing a one-woman show that celebrates the lives of three outstanding Caribbean Women. May I include your story?” She laughed her head off then said, “Oh dear, that’s wonderful—but three? Do one at a time. Don’t take on too much you know.” She was funny and wise. Little did I know that her story alone, Laugh A Revolution, a play as well as a memoir would take me over five years.
Release Date: Winter 2022
Release Date: Winter 2022