Summer Brenner: My name is Summer Brenner and my book is Richmond Tales: Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle. I was motivated to write this book by a few reasons. I was doing literacy advocacy in Richmond, California, and this goes back quite a few years when Richmond was a very impoverished community and also a very violent community. It was also referred to as the murder capital of California. And of course there was a lot of youth affected by gangs and by street violence who were living in Richmond. So, as part of a coalition of literacy advocates, we were always looking for ways to attract kids to reading and to incentivize them to work in school and to think that they really had a future that wasn't on the street, but that was going to be at a college. In this literacy advocacy group, which is called West County Reads, made up of both advocates and librarians and some government people as well and some health people as well. We decided to look for a book that could actually be embraced by the entire community and a book that all kinds of people would want to read and enjoy together. And it would have some meaning because it could initiate a conversation about reading. And the only thing that could possibly accommodate this mission would be a book that had animals as characters, which was quite limiting as charming as those books can be and very meaningful to young children. It didn't really have the breadth that we were hoping for in terms of creating family reading, after school reading, a community book, so to speak. So a member of the community knew that I had written and published a youth novel about homelessness and he asked a light bulb question like, "Why don't you write the book?" And so that's really how it began is that I was able to get a very generous grant from the Creative Work Fund that underwrites artists to create original works of art in tandem with community. And this project fit perfectly with their guidelines. And I was just very fortunate to be awarded one of their grants that year. So I had a substantial amount of money to both finance my writing and research, but also the illustrator, the book designer and we were able to publish over 4,000 copies of this book and give them away for summer reading for summer 2010.

But that created this wildfire of interest in the book, and teachers who were giving the book out about a week before school stopped were reporting that the kids had already started reading it. They were discussing on the playground, just exactly what we wanted. We really wanted a wildfire. I mean, that's a terrible expression to use in California, but we really wanted to ignite this conversation among young people themselves, but in the community. And it ended up being the first All City, All Read book that Richmond ever had. And that was designated by the Mayor of Richmond, Gail McLaughlin.