In 2003, while attempting to block the demolition of a Palestinian family's home in the Gaza Strip, 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie was killed by an armored Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer. These books opens a window on the maturation of a young woman seeking to make the world a better place through social activism. The essays, poetry and drawings reveal Corrie going through the routine pangs of growing up, the development of her social consciousness and her love of language. Two events broadened Corrie's perspective beyond her childhood home of Olympia, Wash. A 1995 student exchange trip to Russia and the repercussions of 9/11 were formative events accelerating her desire to help those she felt were harmed by U. S foreign policy.

Endearing character player of film and TV also noted for his work as a serious and provocative playwright.  He made a brief but indelible first impression on screen playing Diane Keaton's ex-husband in Woody Allen's Manhattan whom the protagonist dismisses as a "homunculus".  Mr. Shawn scored a surprise art house hit with a thinly-veiled autobiographical turn in the Louis Malle-directed talkathon duet, My Dinner With Andre, which he co-wrote with fellow star Andre Gregory.

Shawn went on to become a movie fixture acting in as many as five films a year by the mid-1980s. He tended to appear in brief but memorable bits such as playing the radio superhero Masked Avenger in Allen's 1987 Radio Days.  He shone in a larger role that same year--the preposterous evil mastermind in Rob Reiner's engaging fairy tale, The Princess Bride.

Shawn's first produced play, Our Late Night, won him the 1975 OBIE Award for Best New Play.  He earned that honor again in 1986 for Aunt Dan and Lemon, and in 1991 for The Fever.  In 1996, The Designated Mourner premiered in London, starring Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson and directed by David Hare. That production was later filmed and released theatrically.

After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in Studio Art in 1990, Nancy Agabian moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote and presented the poems and solo performance texts collected in Princess Freak.  Her writing has also appeared in numerous anthologies.  With Ann Perich she formed the folk-punk duo Guitar Boy, their CD Freaks Like Me was released in 2000.  In that year she also received the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann fellowship to attend Columbia University’s writing program, from which she graduated in 2003.  Her master’s thesis, Me as Her Again, is a memoir that explores the influence of her Armenian-American family on her coming-of-age and will be published by Aunt Lute Books in 2008.  Since Dec. 2002, she has been coordinating Gartal, a literary reading series for Armenian-American writers at Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village.  In 2007, Ms. Agabian traveled to the Yerevan State University in Armenia where she conducted researched and lectured on the topic “Writing Armenia: Personal Stories” on a Fulbright Scholarship.  She currently teaches creative non-fiction writing at Queens College in NYC.