Project Engage! An exciting new program comes to the Loft!

Photography - Graphic Design - Go Green/Community Art - Make Altered Books - Sculpture

If you are an ETHS student, join us this fall as we create art (no art experience necessary), explore ideas, and participate in community service. In these hands-on workshops, we will explore themes of community, growing up, dreams, and civic engagement while creating our own art (in the mediums listed above) and viewing selected pieces of American art. We will meet over the course of five sessions (pizza included!). You may participate in one, several, or all five. When the sessions conclude, participants and their families and friends will meet for a reception and viewing of the artwork, which will subsequently be part of a traveling exhibit.

If you are interested, email: Christie Chandler-Stahl, Project Director: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and/or sign up below. Earn up to 20 hours of community service by participating in the sessions!

Sunday, October 10, 3-5 p.m. Art: Photography. Theme: Growing Up. Register here.

Date TBA. Art: Go Green/Community Art. Theme: Community. 

Date TBA. Art: Altered Books. Theme: Dreams.

Date TBA. Art: Sculpture. Theme: Signs & Symbols.

Date TBA. Art: Graphic Design: Theme: Participation. 

Create - Explore - Participate!

Engage! Picturing America through Civic Engagement is a pilot program of the American Library Association targeting high school students through dynamic discussions that utilize the visual arts as springboards to civic engagement. Project funding is provided by the Searle Funds at the Chicago Community Trust and from the Terra Foundation for American Art. 

Mockingjay is here!

While you wait for your copy, or after you tear through the book and need something else to read, try this list of readalikes.

Survival...or not. That's what these thrilling titles, many set in dystopic societies, have in common; they explore survival in future worlds, past ones revisioned, prison-like settings, the wilderness, diabolical mazes, and cities submerged under water due to global warming. Escape, swim, or run for your life, make a stop at the Loft, and grab one of these books as if your life depended on it!

Thank you for your submissions to the Loft's 2010 summer reading program, which ended on July 31. The prize winners have been announced!

Congratulations to Isaac, the grand prize winner of the nook, an eReader, which is compatible with My Media Mall! Free downloadable eBooks are available to Evanston residents (with a library card) through My Media Mall, a service the Evanston Public Library uses. Look for some great YA eBooks in our Library Catalog, or browse them directly at My Media Mall.

• Read teen reviews, grades 6-7 here, and grades 8 & up here.

• View alternate book covers here. 
  

This just in!

It's Newsie again, this time announcing YALSA's Best Books for Young Adults! So many of our (TAB members, Loft Staff) favorites are also on this list, and I couldn't resist a photo-op with Marcelo, Katniss, Matt, Fire, Grace & Sam, Remy, Claudette Colvin, Jimmi, Tamika, & Fatima, and others I haven't yet come to know.

Among the list of stories is a reformed vampire support group, as well as an opportunity to fly genetically-engineered beasts, one of my dreams. On a more serious note, I've struggled with the horrors of war in several of the stories, from WW I, WW II, Vietnam & Iraq; and I've wrestled with prejudice in the Louisiana bayou and Montgomery, Alabama. I've laughed until my buttons (push pins) popped off and ran (waddled, really) as fast as my newsprint could take me from demons and zombies. So many great stories from which to choose!

I conclude this report as your humble snowman, and secretly await the opportunity for lips touching (see my bright pink duct tape lips), possibly even three times.