Review by Carol Ann Wilson

Published in The Awakenings Review, Fall 2025

Celebrating a life infused with nature, beauty and love, Mary Anna Scenga Kruch’s Grace Notes: a memoir in poetry & prose invites the reader to savor these elements of her world as one would a full-bodied Italian wine. It’s an easy invitation to accept as evocative imagery and layered insights tempt one from poem to poem, with narratives interspersed like supportive commas, and popular songs as section titles, their occasional lyrics providing emphasis.

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Published in bookscover2cover

For over forty years, you have been a teacher, high school principal, assistant principal, university instructor/visiting professor, and a consultant. What have you learned about the public school system in the U.S.?

Our system of compulsory schooling grew from the recognition that a healthy democracy depends on an educated public. An educated public is laudable and essential, and we still have work to do toward that end. What has struck me over the years is the unevenness of quality in schools across the country and, not uncommonly, within some school districts.

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Invited review published in bookscover2cover
“Even dawn begins before its beginning . . .” writes poet Claudia Rankine in “The White Lion.” It is a fitting early line in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a book comprising poetry, essays, fiction, photography, and a timeline that leads the reader through four hundred years of history, much of it rarely, if ever, told and through voices that seldom pierce the citadel of popular historical certainty.

This dawn features a ship, the White Lion, arriving at Point Comfort in the colony of Virginia in 1619, a year before the customary chronicling of the 1620 pilgrims’ landing at Jamestown. The timeline entry preceding the poem tells of the ship’s chained cargo of twenty to thirty captive Africans, who are traded to the colonists for supplies, “making them the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies that will become the United States.”

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