January 20, 2025

Hello AACP Newsletter Blog Readers.

I hope your year is starting well.

For those of you that only read the newsletter online or have just discovered us, I’d like to highlight an up-coming poetry reading that we are co-hosting on January 26 at the San Mateo Main Library at 1pm.

I’ve described this event in multiple ways for our flyer, in an article for our January newsletter, in the editor’s message for the January newsletter, and now here in this blog.

In the previous descriptions I didn’t emphasize that we’re really hoping that audience members come up to read their poetry too. We’re especially hopeful that students make the effort to write a poem that fits our theme of “AAPI Poetry for Peace, Love, and Understanding” and then come to the event to read it.

This is a pretty broad theme, but here’s how I came up with the idea. When I saw another article about hate crime statistics against AAPIs and thought about it, I wondered what we could be doing to reduce such incidences. What were the reasons why people committed hate crimes? What could I say to these people if I had a chance to talk to them before they did their violent act? Why were they so angry? Were they, someone that they loved, or some group that they belonged to on the receiving end of bad acts? Did they not see their victims as being human like them? Are they receiving information that influences how they think and makes them even more hateful of “others”?

For those of you on the receiving end of hate, how are you coping? Are there things that we can do to help you? What can we do to help those in need?

As you can see, I have a lot of questions and this poetry event isn’t going to solve or answer any of them. But as I said in my editor’s message,

“Poetry can help people cope with a range of emotions and life situation. When shared in such an event as ours, poetry can help reduce isolation, improve mood, empower our voices, and awaken our senses to the world around us. Poetry is just what we may need at this time.”

But in order for the poetry event to have its maximum effect, it helps to write and read your poems.

So please come. We’d love to have you and please invite others too.

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Since my last blog entry on this page, we had written three other interesting articles. Please check out my year-end review of children’s books that we featured during 2024 in our newsletters. This is quite an undertaking for me each year. I try to make a point to read them all together to more accurately compare them. Still, it’s a little like comparing apples and oranges. These books can be quite different and may have value in a plethora of ways. I can honestly say that every year so far, I’ve read some books that really surprised me on how well I like them or didn’t like them. So do read this the latest favorites article.

That’s all the time I have for this entry.

Thanks for reading and take care.

Leonard Chan