“Gallery Place, Georgetown, Columbia Heights.
I know everybody here.
It’s good to be alive, he thinks.”

“You would think, living five minutes from the Capitol, I would be clamoring for my spot on the parade route. Not quite.”

Tonight marks the release of The Way We See It: Complete Coverage of the Nation’s Capital From the Inside Out, a highly-anticipated collection of writing by the students of Cardozo High School about life in the often misunderstood District. These are keenly-observed dispatches that will ring true for any local – battling tourists on the Metro, shrugging off a motorcade – but will also provoke and entertain with their honest reflections on what it means to be young and from D.C.

The collection is published by the Capitol Letters Writing Center, a nonprofit that runs writing workshops and tutoring for D.C public school students, and includes includes fiction, journalism, poetry, and essays, as well as a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winner and Cardozo graduate Edward P. Jones and an introduction from homegrown crime novelist George Pelecanos. The cover art is by Bird Machine’s Jay Ryan.

The Way We See It is available for sale at www.capitolletters.org, Busboys & Poets, and Politics & Prose.