In memory of Rev. Dr. Travis DuPriest (1944 – 2021)When I learned that Rev. Dr. DuPriest had died, I felt sorrow and that exquisite little spark of anguish that always flickers and stings when we look upon the distant past – the far away corners, the furthest past, the past when we, ourselves were newer, rawer, more innocent, more...
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Photo by Heather Gruber. My sister, in town from Chicago for the first time in two years, caught this moment I shared with my students during the Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy Commencement ceremony. We did what we’d been doing for a long time: we held each other up. Outside of pictures like this one, I snapped very few photographs during...
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Dear Graduating Class of 2021 (but quite specifically Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy graduating class of 2021), I see you. You are brilliant. I love you. Remember this: if you were my student, at any point, you are always my student. What that means is that I want to hear from you, hear about you, and that I will carry you always in the lake of my...
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Unthinkable. This is a word I have returned to often—in the past 15 months—when “unprecedented” just didn’t cut it. Let’s face it, if the empty ubiquity of the word “unprecedented” has taught us anything this year, it has taught us that the English language is still very much in its infancy. So I lean into “unthinkable.” Not even the inherently negative...
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Education has become a political flashpoint. The grownups are arguing; at the center of the argument lies the stinking, rotting carcass of American education. Last Friday, Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy (a place I’m proud to call home as an educator) held an all-school assembly that centered issues impacting Black, Indigenous and People of Color...
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