Adam Patric Miller: A Teacher’s End of the Year Reflection
I can choose to motivate students by manipulating their fear of grades or I can subvert their ideas about grades and inspire them to learn because a good human being becomes a better human being when they are learning for real.
Rachel Hadas: Pastorals
Its title is Red Comet, but the book itself is more like a long freight train, a slow train, a train crammed with information, a train that stops at every station, not to let anyone out but to take more in.
Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)
Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.
Sharon F. McDermott: How to Love a Transcendentalist
Walking across the quad, on my way to my first class, my senses swooned at the sight and scent of blossoms capping the apple trees with billowing clouds. Pink and white petals perfumed the air and spiraled down on breezy days. Bees hummed in the canopies; birds nested there.
Desne A. Crossley: A Wallflower and Her Mother
Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.
Don Krieger: Juneteenth at Carter-Howell-Strong Park in Tallahassee
Two-hundred forty years after America’s Independence Day: “… one in a thousand black men [in America] can expect to be killed by police.
Jim Daniels: Garbage Picking in the Nice Neighborhoods
On Wednesday nights, my brothers and I sometimes hiked a mile or so north further from Detroit, into the stretched world of Bigger—bigger lawns, cars, houses. Some neighborhoods even had … Continue reading
Desne A. Crossley: My Cousin’s Suicide
The first lesson in keeping secrets came in 1962, when I was eight.
William Trowbridge: Breakdown
The foreman led me into a cavernous room that took up most of the ground floor, where three huge machines unspooled 16-ton rolls of tin plate into sheets to be turned into cans. The machines resembled aircraft carriers, with ladders to the control towers.
R.S. Ramirez: Losing My Mother to Trump
Implicit, of course, was the narrative of us and them, of being a certain kind of immigrant compared to the rest. She blended in perfectly, and as her child, I did the same.
Claudia Lefko: Dear Refaat Alareer | A Letter of Gratitude
As per your wishes we’re striving to live—hopefully a deeper and more reflective life, including a life of action against the genocide in Palestine.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Hermanas
You’re the same, you two, J, my lover, said. Of course you feel an affinity. I stared at the Frida Kahlo self-portrait in his hands. Frida’s soulful sweetness stared back. You … Continue reading
Aliana Alexandra Coella Exclusa: Puerto Rico’s Resilient History Mirrors the Mangrove
Half of the world’s mangroves are in danger of disappearing. Ensuring their survival is essential to Caribbean resistance movements.
