Form II World Cultures Students Become Published Authors

Every year, our Form II students collaborate to create books that highlight the vast diversity of the Middle East. As their teachers, Mrs. Kori Brown and Dr. Amy Rottura, shared, "The students did all of the work: they created everything from the Amazon blurb to the cover design to the page layout to the back cover content to the stories inside."

The project serves as the culmination of their year-long exploration of our diverse and globalized world. At the start of the project, each student selected and researched a different ethnolinguistic or religious group and composed a historical fiction tale from the point of view of a person who identifies as that ethnicity or practices that religion.

They then worked together to compile a compendium of the stories so that the students could experience the actual book publication process. Each student practiced a "real-world" job: there were graphic designers (who created the cover and title page), layout designers (who created a unique page layout), publicists (who wrote the back cover material), a marketing team (who wrote the blurb for Amazon), general editors (who oversaw the production and composed the introduction), copy editors (who created a style guide for the authors to use while proofreading), and even a legal team (who crafted a mock intellectual property rights document for our work). The students also met with professionals in those fields so that they could get a sense of the real-world job that they were performing.

"This year's groups did a really outstanding job collaborating on this project, and they should be very proud of their accomplishments," wrote Mrs. Kori Brown and Dr. Amy Rottura.

The finished products were submitted and accepted for publication using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. The price covers only the production costs, with no royalties to the authors. The School will maintain a copy of each book and a record of it in our archives, but the books are also available for purchase on Amazon at the links below. 

Section 8-1: A Glimpse of the Middle East: The Fascinating Ethnic Groups of the Middle East
Section 8-2: Diverse Cultures of the Middle East: A Compendium
Section 8-3: Middle East Beliefs
Section 8-4: Tales of the Middle East
Section 8-5: Cultural and Religious Stories of the Middle East