Supporting the teenagers past & present

From celebrating our formative years, recognizing local history, honoring achievements and identities to keeping people safe

High School.

Adolescence.

Our formative years.

Regardless of your high school experience— good, bad, indifferent; athletic or academic; rural or urban; etc.— these teenaged years play a huge role in making us who were are today.

My journalism career traces its roots to my seventh, eighth and ninth grade years when I worked on the middle school newspaper. The advisor for the newspaper club later started a sports weekly in our rural area and when he expanded it into a more traditional “good news” weekly, he hired me, as a high school student, to write a feature every week.

Coach of the Building by Julian Costa

This week, on Sunday, Julian Costa’s latest local history book and educator biography Coach of the Building officially releases. This full-color volume chronicles the legacy of educator Richard Carty who was an instrumental part of the construction and opening of East Stroudsburg North High School. That school celebrates its 25th Anniversary this summer. The book highlights Carty’s career and also records not only the steps it took to prepare the new school, but also the district’s experience of September 11, 2001.

For those of you not from the region, East Stroudsburg North High School serves the Monroe and Pike county area of the Pocono Mountains. East Stroudsburg Area School District, with the opening of East Stroudsburg North in Dingman’s Ferry, Pa., has two high schools. As the name suggests, these schools serve the area east of Stroudsburg.

The relationship of our high school experience to the people we become as adults has me thinking more about our teenaged selves.

Deadlights Launch Party Sunday

And teenagers often get a bad rap, so to speak. But one teenager who has impressed me start to finish with his skill, talent, passion and professionalism is Hugo Yelagin who will host a launch party for Deadlights, a cosmic horror novel which aims to bring hope to classic Lovecraft, Sunday June 1 at 4 p.m. at downtown Easton’s Book and Puppet Company.

Hugo has completed this debut work while still a high school student. Grabbing a copy of his book at the party would support Hugo and a really unique independent bookstore. If you haven’t visited Book and Puppet since their move last fall, you’ll be surprised to see some of the additions they have made in the new space. We would love to see you there.

The Ice House Queer Book Fair

Another huge part of the transition from adolescence to adulthood is exploring who we are. We learn how we as individuals differ from our families and friends, what we value and what we believe.

We explore and develop our identities and our sexuality in addition to all the other growing and learning we do at this time.

Parisian Phoenix will be joining the Queer Book Fair at the Ice House on Bethlehem’s Sand Island on Tuesday, June 10. We will bring our books with contributions from folks on difference places of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum — and look forward to the opportunity to discuss them and encourage others to share their experience via the written word.

Keeping Teens Safe

As I mentioned recently, I recently accepted Geraldine Donaher’s manuscript, Mouth Shut Head Down specifically because of all the reasons other publishers have rejected it. Geraldine wanted to create a young adult novel that would call attention to sex trafficking and help protect teenagers from traffickers who often enter their lives as “romeos.”

The book tackles a variety of heavy, social justice-type themes but maintains an air and attitude of hope and aims to educate parents and teenagers of the signs of trafficking. Geraldine has 20 years experience as a teacher and has interviewed trafficking survivors (in addition to a host of other research) so we hope you can help us make this book a success. Tentative release date is January 28, 2026— in time for Teen Dating Violence Prevention month.

Geraldine will be speaking at The Star Legacy Summit medical convention in June highlighting her first book, Still:

Nikki Welsh is a young religious sister who realizes she is in the wrong vocation. After six years, she leaves the convent and moves into an apartment in the Philadelphia area to start a new life. But all she believes to be true turns upside down when she gives birth to a stillborn son. PTSD fuels her nightmares. Is prayer powerful enough to help Nikki choose life over death?

To learn more or to purchase Still, visit Geraldine’s web site: geraldinedonaher.com.

Workshop: Storytelling as a First Draft

• THIS WEEK! At the Hellertown Library at 10:30 a.m. May 31, join oral storyteller and author Larry Sceurman and publisher Angel Ackerman for a short, interactive program on how to transform that story you’ve told for years into print. They will discuss deciding on your audience and format, and offer tips for transforming an oral story into formal writing. Even if you don’t think you’re a writer, this is a great way to preserve your personal and family history. Please pre-register for this free workshop: (610) 838-8381.

• Doylestown Bookshop has compiled its publicity for their next Local Author Spotlight, June 14 from 1 to 3 p.m. To read more about Larry Sceurman’s visit there, click here.

Larry Sceurman became an educator in his twenties, a storyteller in his fifties, a writer in his sixties, and a published author of nostalgic fiction and children’s stories in his seventies. He grew up in the Kaywin section of Bethlehem, Pa., in the 1950s and 1960s. In his early teens, he worked with his grandfather in a small auto body repair shop where he observed that stories were a big part of the human experience. This laid the groundwork for his historical fiction novella, The Death of Big Butch. He then taught auto body repair in a vocational program. During his teacher training, he learned that he had dyslexia which he believes made him a good listener.

Larry blends storytelling, writing, and reading in his dyslexia-friendly children’s book, Bookworm’s Magical Journey. He plans to release his second children’s book, which he also illustrated, this summer. From vocational teacher to storyteller and now author, Larry has learned and shared the value of stories. He mixes truth and fiction to produce enjoyable, thought-provoking snippets of life, as shown in the short story collection, Coffee in the Morning.

Larry is influenced by the writings of Laura E. Richards, John O’Connor, Richard Ford, Michael J. Meade, Richard Rohr, and Billy Collins. Larry’s titles are published by Lehigh Valley small press, Parisian Phoenix Publishing.

And don’t forget— Echo City Capers will have copies of their latest book, Tuli Finds a Circle at the Nazareth Historical Society annual craft fair on June 7. Angel, Joe and hopefully Larry will all be onsite for the Pocono Liar’s Club Book Expo on June 21. McKenna Graf, whose latest poetry book, The Depths, launches June 16, will be at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side Manhattan on June 24.

As always—

Angel

PS— I know in the photo above I look exhausted and sad. I was. I almost deleted this photo, but it’s a capture of a moment in time when I was struggling, and I like the light. And the fact that I was at Plants & Coffee in Easton about to meet a special writer.

I hope in coming weeks I will be able to announce a new project with this writer. Stay tuned!

Paid subscribers will receive a copy of the presentation from Hellertown Library next week.