Hope College's NEA Big Read Lakeshore is a community-wide reading program held annually in November in collaboration with more than 50 community partners. The Lakeshore community gathers around a chosen book and uses shared reading, discussion, and exploration of its themes and topics as a springboard to learn from and listen to one another. Partial funding comes from the NEA Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. Each year, students in partner schools across West Michigan take part by creating artwork. One year, the selected books were Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise and Kevin Noble Maillard's Fry Bread, which helped focus learning on history, especially Native American history, and poetry or verse. The program emphasized questions of whose history is being told and who is telling it, and participants engaged with both authors, several experts from the local community and around the country, and one another through book discussion. Middle school students in Allegan explored personal identity through family heritage or traditions by researching their backgrounds and creating self-portraits with images of people and things that shaped who they are, and these portraits were displayed in the school and the Allegan District Library. At Black River Public Schools, students in an English 12 class created stop motion animation projects based on poems from the collection, presenting Joy Harjo's poetry in visual form.