Most people wake up and never think about being murdered by someone they once loved. Tracy Allen most likely thought the same way until one fatal night Garland Allen, her ex-husband and the father of her two children, took her life. In this episode of Cold Justice, Kelly Siegler and Yolanda McClary uncover how the crime was solved, the typology of the crime and the motivation for the crime. As Wolf (2014) wrote in the episode, on May 18, 2001 in Altus, Oklahoma was the last time anyone saw or heard from 27-year-old Tracy Allen.
In the book Escaping Into the Night by D. Dina Friedman, Mrs. Rudowski, Halina’s mother is a victim because she was shot into a pit by the Nazis. When the Nazis were killing everyone in the ghetto, Batya found Halina sneaking around and told her that she saw what happened. Batya says, “they took my father and brothers; they took the men away and put them on a train. There was a deep pit. They told the women-
Trespass by Julia Alvarez is a short story that depicts the life of a young immigrant girl whose family has relocated from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey and the many emotions, trials, and tribulations that come with such a massive change. The oldest of four girls, Carla, seems to have the hardest time adapting to this new environment and circumstance. When their mother makes a typical Spanish dessert and inserts a candle to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the move to the States, she says, "Let us please go back home, please, She half prayed and half wished" (Alvarez 99). Aside from the anguish of leaving her extended family and the challenges of adjusting to a new neighborhood, school, and country, she has the strongest ties to the Dominican Republic and the most difficulty assimilating to English and American culture.
It was the summer of 1991 and Jaycee Dugard was facing the typical issues an eleven year old girl would. She had plans to go on a school field trip to a water park and wanted to ask her mother if she could shave her legs. However, she was never able to present the topic to her mother. On June tenth, she was kidnapped by Phillip and Nancy Garrido outside of her Lake Tahoe home, in central California, while she was walking to her bus stop. Dugard remained hopeful throughout her first days of abduction that she would return to her mother, step-father, and baby sister shortly, but the Garrido’s had a much different plan.
In the 1980’s, many Indio’s were sexually assaulted, tortured and killed during the Guatemalan civil war. Gabriela, the main character in “Tree Girl” by Ben Mikaelsen, is a survivor of the Guatemalan civil war. Gabriela, a 15-year-old girl living in a small Guatemalan canton, experienced unspeakable things such as the deaths of the people in her canton, the witnessing of the pueblo massacre, and the fear of being caught by soldiers on her journey to Mexico. There are many important lessons to learn from this book, including how hope allows you to see past hatred. As you read through the book you learn similar lessons to the extent of what Gabriela had learned.
Thoughts and messages about experience, struggle, and history are embodied throughout Amanda Gorman’s collection of poems titled Call Us What We Carry, composed in 2021. Written during such a pivotal time in history due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gorman’s poems highlight the extreme emotions and compelling experiences society faced as a whole during this period of such bleak isolation. The stories translated through her words transport us back to that time of quarantine and evoke a reflection on that era of isolation. Call Us What We Carry, Gorman’s lyrical collection of poetry consists of a multitude of pieces including poems titled Essex I and Essex II. Grief is the subject that establishes the intertextuality of these two works, although
The book So B It, by Sarah Weeks circles around a lucky 12 year old girl named Heidi. Heidi wants to take a risky journey going to Liberty, New York, to learn the truth and her history. This young girl lives with her mother, Mama, who only can speak 23 words, because of her mental disorder. Their neighbor, Bernadette tries to help them out but also suffers from her own condition, agoraphobia. It causes her to have anxiety or severe fear when leaving her own.
Diagnostic Writing Assessment “The Stolen Party” by Liliana Heker is a short story based of a girl whos the maid's daughter, Rosaura,who goes to a party where she thinks she's going there as a friend of a rich girl but later she finds out that she was only invited to be there as servant not as a friend. Rosaura at first refuse to believe this as her mother kept telling her that her friendship with Luciana was not real but fake. That they not saw her as a friend but as the maid's daughter. Later Rosaura goes through an embarrassment only to realize that her mother was right they only saw her as a servant but not as a friend.
Finding Peace in Terror “If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. But if you look at Christ, you’ll be at rest.” A quote by Corrie ten Boom, this is an important lesson learned in the Hiding Place.
The story “The Stolen Party” by Liliana Heker is a story about a girl named Rosaura who is “invited” to a birthday party, but discovers that she was only invited because she was the maid’s daughter. Rosaura comes into conflict with characters such as the girl with the bow, and although she only points out what we find out to be true later, this provokes Rosaura into kicking her in the shin.. At the end of the story Rosaura is presented with money instead of a gift, and then, only then, she realises that she was not a guest at all, but just a maid’s daughter. By the end of the story we understand that the theme is that if your expectations don’t match reality you will be disappointed, as Rosaura doesn’t realise till the end, even though it is
I have to say I love my job… and that job is to review books. However, this task can become difficult because sometimes I do not want to read books that are boring and do not grasp my attention. But a job is a job and I am required to review all types of books. Fortunately enough, the book I was asked to review was pretty interesting.
Fire is a fantasy novel by Kristin Cashore, the novel is about a girl named Fire who lives in the land of Dells. Fire is the last human monster, who is beautiful and amazingly talented. Fire is so beautiful that she has the ability to control human and animals minds when they are around her. When I read this novel, I felt anxious. I felt this because the story was so engaging that I began to feel connected to the characters.
On September 11, 2001, tragedy struck the city of New York. On that fateful day, two airplanes were hijacked by terrorists and flew straight into the twin towers. Each tower fell completely to the ground, taking thousands of lives with it and injuring thousands more. Not only did that day leave thousands of families without their loved ones, it also left an entire city and an entire country to deal with the aftermath of the destruction. Poet, Nancy Mercado, worries that one day people will forget that heartbreaking day.
The word “memoir” comes from the French word “memoire” meaning memory. Memory is the way people recall things good, bad, or indifferently. Memory can also affect the way people look at things and the decisions they make. In the memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson draws close attention to the way in which memories impact her life and the lives of others in good and bad ways. Woodson brings to life a couple of bad memories that largely affected her life.
Drawing on 1-3 poems from the course, outline the methods by which poets convey their form of protest. You might consider form, language, imagery, allusion, embodiment (if performed) or anything else you think is important. When examining Sarah Jones's ‘Your Revolution’, it is seen as having been inspired and intended to deflate common hip-hop hits of previous decades to show Jones’ dissent towards masculinist aspects of hip-hop. Jones can be seen through the poem as being eager to talk about her side to “embarrass her audience for listening to songs that objectify women as toys” (College of Charleston Blogs, 2013). In 2019, Jones told Washing Post, “I’m not attacking hip-hop.
