Publishing Project
And This Is My Tale is a collection of oral histories collected by Arthur O. Eve HEOP and CSTEP students who are in their freshman year at New York University. The oral histories are of people from Albania, Pakistan, Germany, China, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Guyana, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Turkey, Rawanda, Haiti, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and throughout the United States. In the foreword of the book, Jacqueline Johnson, the instructor in whose class these oral histories were collected, notes that she sees “ these stories as New York stories...New York University’s stories...the Opportunity Programs at NYU’s stories.” She continues, “ I feel that these stories represent...this city, they represent this program and this institution...indeed they represent so much of all our hopes, desires and dreams.”
Maureen McDonough-Kolb, Assistant Director of the Opportunity Programs, writes in her afterword that, “Throughout And This Is My Tale, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, roommates, classmates suffer and rejoice. They meet impediments or failure, but still they do not give up. Each tale, essay, or poem portrays a part of someone’s life, reaching back into the past and forward into the future. As the story-tellers recount the decisions they make and the choices they are sometimes forced to make, they build a vibrant international world.”
