Take a look at those five covers up there. These are the five anthologies I worked on while living abroad. Two of them are from Bhutan and three are from Kazakhstan. I've worked on a lot of projects in my life, but these are the five books I'm most proud of, and I didn't even write them!
These books were completely written by my teen and pre-teen students in Kazakhstan and Bhutan. (For the first two, I even went on a country-wide book tour with my students, selling most of our books at Buddhist temples. But you can read about all that craziness on my Medium page.)
Anyway, I wanted to introduce each one in case anyone's interested. You'd be amazed at the amount of creativity (and weirdness) on display in these stories!
The first is We Are Bhutan, the result of my first teen creative-writing group. We even designed a little mascot to appear throughout the book, a Himalayan black bear.
Very quickly after that, my students released Scary Stories from Bhutan, a direct result of how many spooky stories I got during the first round. It was a genre that a lot of my students were interested in, which makes the (mostly-family-friendly) all-horror collection extra fun!
(We used a crane for the mascot in that one. I loved illustrating him in his various Daffy Duck-style freak-out poses.)
After those two books were out, my travels in Bhutan came to an end and I relocated to Kazakhstan. Once again, my students were giant globs of creativity, so of course I had to continue these anthologies.
This time, the participating writers were given pictures for inspiration, along with a one-hour time limit. It was structured as more of a competition, with various prizes for the winners, but the resultant stories were just as wild as before, if not more so.
The first was Crazy Stories from Kazakhstan, which had a couple stories that were surprisingly emotional. I was really impressed.
(A snow leopard as the mascot.)
We ditched the mascot for the next outing, Writers of Kazakhstan 2022, which included some really cool stuff. A lot of our writers used their stories to grapple with their post-pandemic traumas, resulting in a memorable collection.
And finally, our latest collection, Writers of Kazakhstan 2024. After being out of the country for nearly two years, I came back to attend this event. Such a great time, and even though the participating writers were no longer MY students, I think they did an awesome job.
I hope you check out these books. They were a ton of fun to make, and it's so cool that over 200 kids are now published authors! They worked hard and they earned it.
