We the Dreamers: Young Authors Explore the American Dream

From 826 Valencia, the nonprofit tutoring center located in San Francisco, comes an anthology of essays about the American Dream by 51 students at John O’Connell High School. The American Dream is typically understood to be a promise of prosperity, equal opportunity, education, and ownership. To these young writers, it means a myriad of things as they recount stories about family, home, immigration, hardship, and their own hopes, as well as those of the generation that raised them. In this innovative publication, each student is given a space to tell his or her own story and, most importantly, to have those stories heard. The result is a collection of urgent young voices that is insightful, impassioned, surprising, complex, and of utmost importance to our understanding of what the American Dream means for their generation.