COMMUNITY PARTNERS

With its focus on writing, the Bronx Academy of Letters has always viewed partnerships as essential: New York City, our home base, is the capital of the written word, and we value dearly our relationships with magazines, publishing houses, arts groups, and individual writers. Our partnership with the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that has launched and supported more than twenty schools, helps us gain access to this world while simultaneously integrating the writing theme seamlessly into our school culture.

Teaching Partnership: Our oldest and in many ways strongest partnership is with Dreamyard, the arts-integration group. Since we opened in September 2003, Dreamyard teaching artists have joined us every Friday to coteach with our literature and history classes. The program has now expanded so that Dreamyard teaches drama to our ninth graders, painting to our tenth graders, and photography to our eleventh graders. Building on the success of this arrangement, we have worked with Dreamyard to create thriving after-school drama, art, and photography clubs. With our popular plays and now student art exhibits at Sotheby's, we were pleased to see the partnership grow beyond the classroom and expand into the culture of the school.

Partnerships with Community Organizations: Numerous organizations and individuals have formed partnerships with our school, including Barnes & Noble, Fordham University: Poets Out Loud, Columbia University, Aaron Davis Hall, Bowery Poetry Club, Inkwell Literary Management, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, The New Yorker, Penguin Books, Random House, Scribner, and News Corporation. Through the efforts of our office of student enrichment, Bronx Letters students have been placed in programs and internships at Write to Dance, the Anti-Defamation League, Children's Pressline, The Daily Princetonian Summer Journalism Program, Each One Teach One, Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, Global Teens, Maloney & Fox, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Hispanic Institute, the NYU Law Institute, Rocking the Boat, Summer Search, the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, the Museum of Natural History, and the Apollo Theater. Administrators from all of these programs have been instrumental in our children's growth and continue to work with us on a regular basis.

Partnerships with Individuals from the Community: The Bronx Academy of Letters has formed partnerships with many individuals including biographer Robert Caro, architecture critic Paul Goldberger, poets Bob Holman and Mark Svenvold, writers Kinshasha Conwill, Michael Cunningham, Martha McPhee, and Richard Price, professor and historian Mike Wallace, and journalists Catherine St. Louis and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Several dozen other novelists, poets, journalists, and editors have joined us at our regular writers' forum reading series and have expressed interest in continuing their relationship with the school.

Small School Partnerships: An Urban Assembly school, Bronx Letters is close partners with the entire Urban Assembly family. Additionally, our school has formed relationships with many schools in the New Visions small-schools movement as well as the larger community of Bronx public intermediate and secondary schools.