City of Stairways is a field guide to San Francisco written by the students of WritersCorps, a program founded by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1994 to involve youth in creative writing.

In City of Stairways, San Francisco youth are your guides to bay area neighborhoods. Via their original poetry and photographs, combined with maps, WritersCorps apprentices conduct you through the bustling, incense-scented streets of Chinatown, shiver on the windy dunes at Ocean Beach, elude aggressive squirrels in Golden Gate Park, sneak down Balmy Alley and Clarion to check out the Mission's murals and climb the long stairs up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower.

Along the way, through verse and first-person narratives, these apprentices weigh the paradoxical truths of the beauty and dark histories of each of San Francisco's neighborhoods.

City of Stairways is your treasure map to a San Francisco seen though the eyes of young visionaries who are willing to give you a rare glimpse into what most passers-through pass right by.  With this book in your hands, there is no way you will get lost in San Francisco, but it will make you want to.

City of Stairways: A Poet's Field Guide to San Francisco
written by the students of WritersCorps
edited by Milta Ortiz
120pages/WritersCorps, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-888048-10-0

**All proceeds from the sale of City of Stairways go to free student programming at WritersCorps.

posted by LJ Moore   editor(dot)moore(at)gmail(dot)com