We need to come at this question not with a philosophy of America First, but Human Kind First. If the U.S. can spend billions on hard diplomacy - building walls, securing borders, hiring thousands of more border patrol agents, building ICE into a paramilitary force, deploying the National Guard, flying jets to Somalia to drop off immigrants from third countries...we can certainly afford soft diplomacy to not just disappear the symptoms, but to address the underlying diseases.

if I could go back in time, I would attend Mina’s wedding in December 2013, I would have paid the 500 cfa to ride on the back of a bedouin camel in Northern Togo on New Year’s Day in 2012, and I would have been more curious about my night guard Alphonse’s life. None of these choices would have changed my life in any significant way, but because they constitute moments of self-absorption and egocentrism I can never get back. 

Jauhar really takes us on a journey into his mind and doubts. I really did not think he was going to make it through the year. The whole process was a rollercoaster and I loved his fallibility and his insight into the profession.

In this queer re-imagining of the Garden of Eden, Eve finds herself confiding in Animal, a free spirited dancing anthropomorphic Spanish speaker, about her disenchantment with Adam.  It turns out she's not the first to feel that way. The appearance of Lilith into the garden turns the entire tale upside down as unexpected friendships are formed and complex relationships unveiled. Like Lilith, the devil Lucifer - call him Lucy - weighed down with daddy issues is trying to find

Presented as a reading at La Jolla Playhouse's Latinx New Play Festival, Novios explores the culture and relationships behind the scenes of a failing restaurant. Luiz is on the bottom of the social hierarchy where he washes dishes in Chef Gallo's kitchen surrounded by cooks and food runners cracking jokes with a biting machismo. When an openly flamboyant new dishwasher joins the staff, Luiz's secrets and everyone else's come to light as they fight to keep their failing restau

Analog Poet Blues is a poetry chapbook exploring connection in the digital age. Yeva Johnson expresses how loneliness and community are byproducts of a tech driven world. Recurring themes include the search for love and navigating queer love, finding one's voice, building a community, and uncovering self through the process.

First of all, anyone who thinks that a teacher can’t tell the difference between a seventh or tenth graders story about honor and a computer-generated story has never experienced the wonderful beauty of teenagers telling stories. There is a frankness, an imagination, a chaos to it, that puts the reader in the kid’s head, that shines a little flashlight into what makes that kid tick. A story about honor generated from a prompt looks pretty much the same - a boy or man in a tow

Josh and his twin brother Jordan love the game of basketball and they're good at it, which isn't surprising since their dad is a retired pro player. Unfortunately, when Jordan falls for a girl at school, Josh starts to feel like the third wheel and he doesn't handle it well.

"Boy, I love meeting people's moms. It's like reading an instruction manual as to why they're nuts." - Ted Lasso I was really looking...

Last school year, I was excited to introduce my seventh grade students to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Teaching at an all boys military academy, I had carefully selected texts that would give students a broad understanding of American society during different historical periods, while also giving them stories of young people whose lives or personalities they could relate to. I deliberately chose to balance the curriculum between male and female authors..

One of the facts we love to say about learning is that students learn better from teachers they like. This may very well be true. One thing no one says aloud is that teachers teach better when they like their students!

Arnold Spirit, who is known on the Reservation as Junior, decides to attend high school at the wealthier white school about 22 miles away from home. While many people on the Spokane Indian Reservation, including his best friend Rowdy see it as a betrayal, his older sister finds his courage to leave the Res an inspiration.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry tells the story of Cassie Logan and her family fighting for their land and dignity in the Jim Crow South. Cassie and her three brothers - Stacey, Christopher-John and Little Man - were raised to take pride in themselves, their families and education - so its a culture shock for them to go out into the world and discover that they're treated as less than because of their race. They don't take the ill-treatment quietly however...

Homegoing follows the story of two half-sisters and their descendants from the Gold Coast (Ghana) from the beginning of British colonialism and the slave trade to modern day. In Ghana, the protagonists hover on the edges of a family involved in the slave trade, while across the Atlantic their family members experience slavery and discrimination in a myriad of forms. Spanning a large breadth of human experiences, the characters retain a strong sense of themselves while facing

As a Californian who grew up in the border county of San Diego and now lives in the North San Diego city of Vista, which is approximately...

A young black man flees the south and moves to a big city in the North in the first half of the 1930s, where he becomes involved in a communist party or brotherhood. Yet, there is a striking difference between the story of the very real Wright and the main character in Invisible Man whose names the reader is never privy too - Wright sees what the white reader does not, whereas the modern white reader of the Invisible Man sees what the narrator does not.

When I first saw Latin History for Morons on Oceanside Theatre Company’s (OTC) 2025 season plans I was thrilled. Finally, a play that will reach out to San Diego’s North County Latinx community that I live in. The play’s star Rick Najera and director Herbert Siguenza have personalized Leguizamo’s history with up-to-the-moment jokes that hit home. Najera blends his own story seamlessly with Leguizamo’s so that it is difficult to remember where one’s tale ends and the other be

An intricately beautiful and compelling novel, Obasan begins with the death of the narrator Naomi Nakane’s Uncle. As an adult, Naomi had tried hard to separate herself from her childhood experience in Canada during World War II which she lived through, but didn’t necessarily understand as a child. Drawn back to her old family home to help put her Uncle to rest, Naomi is pushed by her Aunt Emily towards a deeper understanding of her family’s and the country’s history. 

This series of Bluesky Poems reflects on teaching "Farewell to Manzanar."

In Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Tayo's Laguna community seeks to help him heal from the PTSD that he, like many of his peers, has brought back with him from World War II. A story that echoes the familiar tales of alcohol abuse and struggles with racism and belonging encountered in Alexie's work, the overlap between the returned veterans' PTSD and the multi-generational trauma of reservation life and colonialism lays the cultural foundation for a plot that drew me in and l