Overview

Poetry, commentary, and fifty bus-in-landscape/seascape photographs from fourteen years of driving the public school bus for thousands of kids. Reflections on young people and childhood: their innocence, humor, bravery, and losses; on pesticide use around their schools, on jobs, gender, poverty, and climate; on the immigrant agricultural community and the challenges they face today.

Full Product Details

9781944497125

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Kate Hitt's poems tell of life as a school bus driver in a California agricultural town. Driving a bus in all weathers is crazy dangerous. Protecting tiny girls while managing back talking teenage boys is a miracle. Double clutching a rumbling yellow bus, an act of skill. The folks in the yard are skeptical and seem to work against her, along with the smooth operation of the aging fleet. Somehow clouds of dust and pesticides are accepted in a town where struggling parents grow most of the strawberries in the U.S. The story, told in open and observant poems, reveals how Kate's daily journey with a busload of kids uncovers the strength of the child at work in her own psyche."" -Felicia Rice ""Kate, double clutching it down the rocky road of life. No hiding here, as you ride along in the cold mornings on the bus route. And so your heart will break in a number of places for the scared and lonely kids, the waiting abuelas, the first-dayers. Kate's own story parsed out, small bits close to the bone. Yet woven in effortlessly like her shifting gears along the coast. See her road stops and photos of the working fields. Appreciate her humor and wise kindness whilst wrangling with all sorts of dementors. Her true telling of loss and reconciliation. You'll be glad there is someone who cares enough to write such a gripping, insightful, troublesome, adventure travelogue around Monterey Bay's backroads in her big yellow school bus. Now the door is swung open for you: settle in on the old vinyl seats and be among 'the invisible glitter of their chatter.'"" -Jenny D'Angelo, author of ""Connect with Your Angels: A Guide for Everyone"" & new chapbook, ""Saved""

Author Information

Kate Hitt is a poet and writer who grew up in Virginia and Rome, Italy, and is a graduate of the University of Virginia. She moved to California in 1979 and became a printer. From 2005 up to 2019, Kate drove the big school bus for a large public school district around the Central Coast. As a letterpress printer, offset press operator, and book artist, she has created many broadsides and chapbooks, and has exhibited her art with the Printers Chappel of Santa Cruz. She has been a printshop owner, has sat on four nonprofit boards, and is a graduate of Leadership Santa Cruz. She retired from bus driving to Northern California and is still publishing trade edition literary books for friends.

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