David Menasche, a teacher with stage 4 brain cancer, raised more than $26,000 on gofundme (a crowdfunding site) for a road trip to re-connect with 75 former students.
Menasche documented the 101-day cross-country journey in a memoir entitled The Priority List: A Teacher’s Final Quest to Discover Life’s Greatest Lessons. In an interview with the Broward/Palm Beach New Times, he revealed that “the purpose of the trip was to regain what brain cancer took from me. Basically, my classroom.”
Menasche met and signed up with a literary agent after one of his students wrote a Miami Herald piece about his traveling venture. Brandi Bowles of Foundry Literary + Media negotiated the deal. Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will release the book on January 14, 2014.