Such can be the power of a teacher’s words. I was certain that all my Gen Ed students had their own Miss Laughlin who turned them off to the joys of reading and...
I don’t have a mom who fell in love how I was able to fall in love. My mother is a survivor in a way most Americans won’t ever understand. I am honored to be th...
The waiting was unnerving. Alli asked almost daily when Daddy would go to jail. For a second-grader, jail was something imagined from cartoons. We did little to...
This is how the Holocaust ended for me, a solitary Polish-Jew liberated by American soldiers from the infamous death camp Mauthausen. I was at the time an emaci...
Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, an elemental life not “frittered away by detail.” He wrote about the essentials of life, “I do believe in simpli...
Leaning Left, 2:1, millennials want America to be an “us” society. They call it socialism, but this is incorrect. They do not want state ownership and control o...
There were my mother’s stories, and there were my books. Books were imaginary but some books could be true; Betty’s stories were neither true nor not-true, they...
I rubbed the outside of my own hip, remembering what a kick from a steel-toed boot felt like when I was once curled up in a ball on the ground. I had old injuri...
His quiet Southern lilt didn’t match what he was saying. There should have been magnolia petals falling out of his mouth or some exhaustive yarn about his mothe...
If recovery means you are no longer sick, or even that you are simply functioning again, then perhaps I have recovered.
Ninety-one percent of domestic terrorists are white dudes, and they even manage to make up eleven percent of the jihadist terrorists overseas as well (yeah, whi...
I thought about Columbine. About thirteen dead, two killers, and me, seventeen-year-old me, crouched on the floor of the cafeteria while two of my friends gunne...
But then, there was the boy’s life at stake and the man was obviously breaking the law. I realized I had shot him, that the whole problem had fallen into my la...
I chucked the life of a CEO and civic leader to join the Mobile, Alabama police department. I was 50.
We are real people. We live in the aftermath of violence. We live with the consequences of too many guns and too few regulations. And the story doesn’t end the ...
"She confided that she’d actually been divorced twice. “Now I’ve switched to women,” she added, as if it were another accomplishment. I was suddenly aware of th...
She needed to know more about where I began: my past as a refugee child.
But I only knew the mechanics of sex, not its consequences. Who does at thirteen?
Soon enough it’s clear he’s hellbent on spreading the rumor he fucked you—or is it fact? You’re a 13-year-old freshman who drank a pint of Southern Comfort, bla...
[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]he Julie B Valentine Center is located out on the edge of town near trucking depots and ...
