A United University Professions retiree and her University at Buffalo colleague are giving women around the world a chance to speak to first lady Michelle Obama through their book, Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady, which has just been published by the State University of New York Press.

Barbara A. Seals Nevergold, a retired UUP member of the Buffalo professional faculty, and her colleague, Peggy Brooks-Bertram, sent an Internet request in November seeking letters, poetry, recipes and good wishes from African-American women to Mrs. Obama. The co-authors hoped to get enough responses for a book, and ended up getting so many hundreds of contributions that they more than had their editing cut out for them. They ended up selecting 100 for publication.

"Throughout the election, it became apparent that African-Americans were becoming emotionally invested," said Nevergold, who also has been a lecturer with SUNY's Empire State College. "At the end of the election, I started to think, how can we as African-American women share with her our feelings about the new role she's going to take?"

Nevergold and Brooks-Bertram are both senior educational specialists at UBuffalo, and co-founders of the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women on the Buffalo campus. The institute conducts research and has published several books on early African-American communities in Buffalo and other parts of the United States that have previously received little attention from historians and sociologists.

Philip Rumore, president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation, said the union has distributed a copy to each library in the Buffalo school system.

"I think everyone should read this book; it's a wonderful snapshot of a very historic time," Rumore said. The Uncrowned Queens Institute, he added, has done an excellent job of capturing previously unheralded histories of communities of color in Buffalo.

The Web site for the Uncrowned Queens Institute at the University at Buffalo is at http://wings.buffalo.edu/uncrownedqueens/. Go, Tell Michelle is available through the SUNY Press Excelsior Editions — which specializes in books about New York — at http://www.sunypress.edu/. To read excerpts, or listen to an interview of the authors, go to www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99044712

— Darryl McGrath

Birthday Buddies

For 10 years, retirees from the Schenectady Federation of Teachers have brought cheer to students through the SFT Birthday Buddy program. Volunteers are assigned a K-2 class in the district to visit each month, with cupcakes, beverages and wishes for those students celebrating birthdays.
"The kids are marvelous," said SFT member Helen Trinci, a retiree who coordinates the program. While retirees' commitment is only 30 minutes per month, Trinci said, the program makes a substantial, positive impact on the children involved.

— SFT Pipeline