... the 30 minute interview as part of booktv's college series.

>> host: booktv is on the campus of duke university in durham north carolina where we are talking with professors and scholars about some of their books and now joining us here is deborah hicks. her book "the road out" a teacher's odyssey in poor america. deborah hicks what you do at duke first of all? >> guest: i have a couple of things that i do. i am part of their research into called social science research and that is a unit that is composed of people who're doing research in the social sciences and different disciplines. i do a lot of a lot of research and then i'm also a social entrepreneur so i direct a nonprofit the north carolina mountains called page, partnership for appalachian girls education in their work with appalachian girls in middle school and help them get educational opportunity and access. so i have a couple of different hats that i wear at duke

university and researcher and now social entrepreneur. >> host: social entrepreneur. is that a new term? >> guest: atingua's point -- coined by people like nicholas kristof but it's a widely used term for people like me who basically direct non-profits and do different things in the nonprofit sector. >> host: how did you get involved with appalachian girls in middle school in western north carolina? >> guest: that is a long story that i write about in "the road out." it begins with my own history. i grew up as an appalachian girl is a working-class girl in a tiny mill town in the mountains of north carolina. i was the first in my family to go to college which was a very big step for me. i ended up through a scholarship from a group called aauw getting a scholarship going to college and ended up finally after a lot of stumbles in a lot of falls going on and getting a bachelor's degree from harvard

and education. that long journey that i experience myself came back to my native souls which was north carolina and found this nonprofit called page and began working with appalachian girls out here. >> host: when you say you work with appalachian girls what do you do? >> guest: i teach, so i, be people that booked me on this nonprofit have created this out of school opportunity for girls in the most rural and remote parts of the appalachian mountains. they come to an intensive summer program. they have weekly meetings with volunteers and a person working with us in page and we offer these appalachian girls who otherwise don't have opportunities for summer learning, we offer them an intensive wonderful program in the summer. they come into our program from all over the mountains of north

carolina and madison county and they do digital letters he learning. they write and they read literature, and they get a really intensive summer learning experience through page the nonprofit that i direct. >> host: in "the road out" who are adrianna blair, mariah elizabeth shannon jessica and a leisha? >> guest: socom kartheiser seven very amazing and very special girls that i got to know when i was teaching in cincinnati. a mission that i have got my college degree and my bachelor's degree in end up getting a job in cincinnati ohio. there i discovered this pretty amazing neighborhood. it's a neighborhood of appalachian people in the inner city and it sort of goes back to america's history where you have people in the appalachian region

moving north to look for jobs in dayton and akron and those kinds of cities. so i was teaching in cincinnati and found out there was this appalachian community. i left there and said to the people at the public elementary school in this community called lower price he'll, would you all let me be a teacher in elementary school and teach kids i began teaching and got to know these seven girls blair mariah and so forth. at the time when i first met my students they were only in second grade. i followed these girls into third grade in fourth grade in midway through their fourth-grade year i said to these young girls, do you won't want to have a class of your own? they said yeah we will give us a try. i began meeting with these girls , seven of them in total. we met every week and during the

summer for four years of their lives. this became kind of an amazing experience for them and for me. having of class of our own where we studied and read literature and talked about stories and mostly i listen to the girls dreams about their lives and it was a place where they could dream and tell stories and read books. >> host: deborah hicks how are these seven girls similar to the outlook of life? >> guest: they are poor so they are among the very poorest of american children. i found out i left cincinnati in 2009, came back to north carolina as i said to found my nonprofit but as i was later to learn cincinnati in 2010 became the third worst city in the united states for child poverty in urban areas. only a third of detroit and i

think cleveland so this is one of the poorest cities in the u.s. for child poverty. part of that child poverty was appalachian poverty in the inner city so all these girls were poor. many of them had moms who had some drug issues and poor white america the drug problems tends to be centered around the abuse up for chris -- prescription painkillers likes oxycontin as an example of that. i found that many of my young students, some of them ate, nine or 10 years old had moms that were doing drugs and that was a common factor among the girls. >> host: how did that affect their outlook on life and their dreams as you said? >> guest: i think that many of these girls, i discovered as a teacher many of these girls

essentially were orphans. they became orphans to oxycontin and american poverty. so i was their teacher. we had our own class but our class became like a family to them. they became kind of like sisters yes it i was a teacher and i sometimes had to be teacher lee and stern and stuff but it became a family and it was very intimate. at 1.2 of the girls and one of them was layer and the other one was adrianna. they put their arms around one another and said we are sisters, we are sisters. we often began our class with a snack and food to get things going and stuff. i said to them girls, what makes you all sisters? was going on? they said we just figured out

both of our moms are out on the streets doing drugs so for them it was like we have become like this family. the class was their sisterhood. it was a sisterhood of girls. >> host: did their childhood what you are seeing in your classroom in cincinnati didn't reflect what you grew up with in western north carolina? >> guest: a little bit to some extent. i was a working-class girl. i didn't have opportunity and i didn't have access. no one in my family up into college and i was naïve how college works but the difference was i was working-class. my dad had a job. >> host: did he live with the family? >> guest: he did. >> host: is that rare? >> guest: i think was pretty common in those days and i think in rural appalachia as opposed to inner city like urban appalachian communities you did tend to have sort of families where you have a dad and mom in

the house. my dad was living in the house and had a job and that was different because the girls in cincinnati large sway their dads were out of the picture. they had biological debts obviously that they were not part of their everyday lives. their moms were starting to lose it because of the drug issue. so their families were just beginning to be ripped apart. what i saw in the appalachian communities in in cincinnati and other urban families that the grandmas kind of step in and start taking over and taking control of the family. in fact one of my students i read about her grandma was her central caretaker. that was really common. >> host: how did you get to college? >> guest: the one key word is education. i has to be very grateful for i

was as i mentioned a very naïve working-class girl. i was a little bit an anomaly because i loved books and i loved reading so i was kind of a bookish little girl. i think because of that i got a's and then i knew nothing about college. i didn't know how to get in, didn't know how to apply a, didn't know how to do the process. i got a letter in the mail that i've gotten a scholarship because this wonderful group of women the american association of university women i given a scholarship. >> host: how did you get elected? >> guest: i honestly can't remember. they probably heard about me through high school. i probably had someone say this girl, this kid can make it. i just got a letter saying i had gotten a scholarship to college so ended up being able to go off to college. once i got in and did so well because it was really easy for

me to excel and keep going and i want on to get a graduate degree. >> host: deborah hicks what was the hardest part of leaving your town, your naïveness as you say and coming into college? >> guest: i think the toughest thing is that once you leave, want to take the road out of the poor working class and you go elsewhere you have to give up part of your childhood identity and part of who you are. there's a process process of change that has to happen and to some extent it puts you at a certain a little bit of the distance from your childhood and your family and stuff. it's that part it's difficult and involves a change. for me that was great to coast i went on to college but then i have come back and i have helped my own people, the people who are my people, working-class

people. i feel like yeah i have had to give up some of who i was but now i can come back and help the people who are like me. >> host: were you treated with suspicion back home being the first to go to college? >> guest: i think that people like me who are kind of the fish who are working-class people think she's a little bit different. she's not exactly like everybody else around here. she's a little odd maybe. she's more into books than she is at that point in my life getting married or having babies or whatever. yeah you are a little bit different and are seen as different but locally that didn't stop me or hamper me or anything. >> host: your work in cincinnati which you write about

in "the road out" a teacher's odyssey in poor america was a sanction by the cincinnati public schools of this special class? >> guest: they were phenomenal and i have to say they were total colleagues, friends. they open their doors to me and to some extent i think they were a little bit baffled about what i was doing because i was having this class for girls and reading all this literature. i think they were just like well this is working out in the girls were thriving. i was trying to also at the same time bring back what i learned from the class to the other classrooms in cincinnati so i tried to get back to the school systems but they were absolutely welcoming and wonderful to me in every way. >> host: besides just having a class of seven what else did you bring differently into that classroom? >> i would say my own experience growing up i kind of knew where the girls were coming from so i was a difference teacher now sends and we also did something that was very unusual these days

because now we have a lot of pressure from accountability and get everyone ready to pass the state tests and urban poor settings like cincinnati that's tough for kids to do. it's tough for them to pass. instead of doing that we had literature and that is becoming more of an anomaly these days just to read literature and talk about literature and talk about literature and stories and talk about the stories of your own life. so that was different and it was a little bit different for me that i'm kind of an old-fashioned literature person. i like novels about characters and character driven novels and stuff like that. these girls, i tried to bring young adult fictions to these girls things were about them. >> host: such as? >> guest: a wonderful short

novel called to pull out of daisy or things about about the working class are appalachian girls about authors who would speak to their concerns. my students wanted nothing of that. they turned their noses up at that and said we don't want your kind. we do want your book. not me as a person but the books i was bringing in. it turned out their favorite book was horror fiction. >> host: like vampire? >> guest: some of that but one of my students blair it turned out she was by the age of nine and then also tend her favorite author with steve in came. they watched steven king on television and they read steven king and there i was trying to be this idealistic social justice teacher trying to change the world and chained them -- change them. i said we are going to to read

horror fiction and stuff and that was transformative for me and my students because they began becoming readers and really enjoying reading and loving it and stuff. eventually steven king read my memoir and wrote a very nice article about it. >> host: do you regret allowing the girls to read horror fiction? >> guest: not at all. we did not read steven king in my class. i did a bunch of research after i learned about this literate pass it -- passion of theirs and i found all these really wonderful stories and stuff for young kids for kids and i managed to create this whole curriculum around ghost stories and scary stories. silly kind of compromised that they still insisted their favorite author was always steven king and that was

interesting. >> host: how long did you have these girls and a special class? >> guest: we have the class for four years beginning and they were in third grade in going to the end of sixth grade and i made a decision at that point to come back to north carolina which is where i grew up and began to found my own nonprofit building on what i had learned from these girls. i had to leave and that was very tough because i left these girls when they were just entering adolescence. i kept up with them. i visited cincinnati and we kept in touch via e-mail and facebook and everything else and i went back and forth but i left when they were in sixth grade. >> host: do you regret that? or do you feel responsible? >> guest: i do feel sometimes think if i had stayed to contain the class. a number of them struggled when they entered adolescence. one of them became a young

teenage mom at the age of 16. she finished high school and is going onto study hairdressing and stuff so she has done really well but there was a time period when there are a number of my students struggling and i did feel guilty about that. i knew i did have to come back to my native state and do my work here is a social entrepreneur. it wasn't really a choice that i had. i mean i felt i had a calling to do this. >> host: how old are the seven girls now? >> guest: they are in their early 20s. >> host: very quickly a drama a snapshot. where she now? >> guest: adrianna finished high school and a very competitive private high school which he got into. she finished high school and went on to kind of like hairdressing, training program. >> host: she is a young mother. >> guest: she is a young mom. she has a beautiful little girl

and by every stretch she is doing quite well but there were some very rough patches. >> host: flair? blair? >> guest: blair is more difficult to talk about. blair was a student who reminded me the most of myself. very precocious. she was a steven king fan and when we began talking about steven king and her grandma who raised her grandma lily said that her vision was that blair would become a lawyer and she certainly have those talents. blair dropped out of school and she dropped out in ninth grade. she just couldn't finish high school and then she ended up cap trying and trying to go back and get her ged and wasn't able to do that so currently the last i checked in with her she was working the night cleaning job in an office building. something like a big urban

office building cleaning at night on the night shift. >> host: mariah? >> guest: mariah got married, divorced had another relationship and have two lovely children. finished high school and is trying to go back to college and become a nurse's assistant. has not quite gotten there yet. left her partner who is now a single mom raising these two beautiful children. she is doing pretty well. >> host: elizabeth? >> guest: elizabeth has struggled as well. elizabeth has a very young child. she had a baby a little over a year ago and has a fiancé. she almost finished high school, did not pass one section of her

science test. her science high school test and because of that was not allowed to finish high school and because of that she is a dropout. >> host: any plans to go back at this point? >> guest: i would love to go back and as soon as possible. i would love to go back at least once a year and am hoping to go back in the fall and visit cincinnati. i'm very busy. i run a nonprofit in the north carolina mountains and i have a position that duke so i'm just pretty busy but i try to keep up and visit as much as i can stay and stay in touch with the seven girls. >> host: and very quickly shannon, jessica and alicia? where are they today and there'll seven girls still in cincinnati? >> guest: elation is the one who has left cincinnati and she got married to a servicemen to a soldier in the army.

they moved away from cincinnati. she has a child. she is married and has her first child and shannon and jessica are both again struggled to finish high school and were not quite able to finish. shannon did not finish high school. she became pregnant in high school and had a baby that died soon after birth. i believe the baby was very premature and after that point we can sort of distancing herself from school and began to kind of fallback and dropped out of high school and jessica dropped out as well but has gone back to get her ged and further college studies and they think is engaged to be married. those girls are doing well in the context of their communities. i know they wouldn't be seen as a sort of like let's say a duke

context would not be seen as having gone far with their professional careers but have done extremely well given what they were up against which was a neighborhood of severe poverty and a serious drug problem. none of the seven girls have touch drugs and i think that is a huge thing in their favor that they have not gone the way of their moms. they said to themselves we want something better for our lives and we don't want to go there and they didn't. >> host: deborah hicks where where'd you think you are successful and where do you think you would do things differently? >> guest: i think we had an intimacy and we had a super successful class. we had seven girls who are attaching themselves to school,, loving literature and loving books, loving a school like experience and a teacher.

i think the biggest challenge i faced was just about the time that my class finished i had to leave to come back to my home state and found my nonprofit that i was thinking about funding. biggest difficult thing was not being of the finished the class when the girls turned adolescence and that is where i found that page that i made sure we were serving girls in the middle school years in trying to work with students and girls in the years when they are the most honorable and trying to define who they are and what they want to be in life. so that is something i learned from the class in cincinnati that i brought back with me to north carolina. >> host: if people are interested in your your nonprofit what's the web site? >> guest: its carolina page all one word.org.

>> host: page? >> guest: page just like the page of a book. it's for appalachian girls. you can find stuff on the web site. you can go to the page web site and watch digital stories and meet the girls and hear their voices and learn about their lives. we would love for people to check out the web site and meet these amazing appalachian girls. >> host: when you go back there and you involve these local girls are you treated again with suspicion as a harvard do-gooder in a sense? >> guest: in the mountains in madison county where page is located we have an expression. from here and not from here. you would obviously be a not from here. i am at this stage from here and not from here. i rented an old farmhouse in this community called spring creek farm out of madison

county. when i'm there at a farmhouse on the from here and when i go to the page program where we offer this program for appalachian girls we are kind of a not from here. i don't sound like that appalachian girl and i have become more of a professor and researcher in that kind of thing but there's a part of me that is always the from here. it doesn't leave you. you are always in the way the same girl that you were when you were a child. >> host: we have been talking with author and educational scholar deborah hicks about her book "the road out" a teacher's odyssey in poor america.

>> host: you are watching booktv on c-span2's. from time to time we go to universities throughout the country to talk with professors who are also authors about their books. today we are on duke university campus in durham north carolina and joining us is professor henry petroski. assessor petroski what do you do for a living besides teach at duke? what is your background? >> guest: my background is engineering, mostly academic but about 20 or 30 years ago i began to write about engineering, first essays but increasingly books. since then that has been my

principle occupation is to write about engineering and lecture on books about engineering and generally doing a lot of thinking about engineering. >> host: what is engineering? >> guest: that's a good question and that is what motivated my first book. i have taught engineering. i registered as an engineer and if the neighbor interviewer asked me i've really didn't have a good answer. i thought the best way to develop an answer would be to write a book. i found that writing is my best way of thinking and understanding. my first book the working title was what is engineering. i had to admit i didn't go into it with any preconceived definition or understanding. i really was confused and i found when i would pressure other engineers it's a very confusing subject. some people confuse it with

science and say engineering is just a branch of science or applied science but it's a lot more than that. one distinction between science and engineering is that science studies what is things at a party been invented and manufactured but engineering creates new things. engineering solves problems for which there is no solution. you can take off-the-shelf. engineering has a large element of creativity to it and that distinguishes engineering from science or technology as an abstract. engineering to me after writing the book if i had to give a single sentence definition i would say engineering is the ability -- the avoidance of failure. >> host: the avoidance of failure? bus people would say engineering is building things. >> guest: it is building things that we want those things to be successful. another would want want them not to fail.