{"id":189,"date":"2011-12-05T13:11:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T13:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/?p=189"},"modified":"2011-12-12T01:30:12","modified_gmt":"2011-12-12T01:30:12","slug":"asl-and-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/2011\/12\/05\/asl-and-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"ASL and Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just received a lovely set of handmade thank you cards from the American School in London and I love them. One of them is blue, which makes them even better! I started working with ASL in 2007 and I&#8217;ve loved every minute, especially my stint as Bergeron Fellow in 2010 (I followed in a line of incredible fellows including Mimi Khalvati, William Fiennes, Billy Collins and Phillip Lopate!). But what I&#8217;m loving recently &#8211; apart from the honour of having my novel, <em>Tail of the Blue Bird<\/em>, added to the reading list for the African Literature class for the last two years &#8211; is the opportunity to go in to the school and speak to students about my work and African literature in general. This year I got to visit again, but the experience was different because the way the web works has changed; I saw blogs from the students before I went in and we had some twitter overlaps so I really felt like I had a connection with the classes before I went in. The discussions, as always, were great; there are some fantastic, bright kids hiding behind those walls. Not surprising though, considering the teachers they have &#8211; like Meghan Tally, who invites me to her African lit class every year! And that&#8217;s all this blog is, a celebration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just received a lovely set of handmade thank you cards from the American School in London and I love them. One of them is blue, which makes them even better! I started working with ASL in 2007 and I&#8217;ve loved every minute, especially my stint as Bergeron Fellow in 2010 (I followed in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/niiparkes.com\/open\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}