October 4, 2018
Hume, Locke, Rawls, and the Roots of Social Justice
In this time so full of social justice questions, I decided to go back to a grad school textbook, Social Justice (edited by Mathew Clayton and Andrew Williams), to get a […]
June 21, 2018
NO PERSON IS ILLEGAL
Just back from another late-night visit to the occupation of the Portland ICE building, I’m deeply impressed by how it continues to grow. There must be more than twice as […]
November 15, 2017
Christopher Soto on the June Jordan Teaching Corp
DM: Dr. Joshua Bennett and The Center for Justice at Columbia University have invited you to teach a community-based writing workshop that serves both the Columbia University student body and also members […]
September 15, 2017
Reading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark After Charlottesville
As someone who teaches literature post-Charlottesville (and everything else), I felt it was an important time to revisit Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination […]
July 4, 2017
Some Thoughts on Independence Day
Lately, for reasons I can’t really name, I’ve been reading about the Enlightenment in an old textbook that’s been lying around for years. It brings back the excitement of college […]
May 29, 2017
On Race and Recent Events
Some guys on the football team took one of their teammates—I’ll say his name was Ned—out to the field, got some medical tape out of the locker room, and […]
March 9, 2016
Poetry and Community: Events and Evidence
When we consider what enables a poem to endure, it’s easy to side with immediate fatalism and shoulder-shrugging, or opt for broad-brushed faith in long-term aesthetic exceptionalism and artistic meritocracy, without really considering the everyday […]
January 31, 2016
Crossing That Line
Yesterday afternoon was a day I’d been anticipating for almost a year — the high school students’ orientation for the joint Writers in Baltimore Schools and Johns Hopkins University Writing […]
May 15, 2015
Writing In and Speaking Out
Earlier this month, in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the community unrest and outcry that followed in Baltimore, Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), […]