As an autistic man working in a non-STEM, empathy-driven field — a quality society often wrongly assumes autistic people lack — Eric Garcia recognized how little neurotypicals grasped autism’s diversity. … More He’s Not Broken
At 49, Greg Michie gave it all up. His tenure-track position. His flexible schedule. His unhurried lunch hour. (His lunch hour, period.) In 2012, as a citywide teacher’s strike loomed, Michie left the relative comforts of higher education. He returned to the undervalued but indispensable work of public school teaching in America. … More Relevance Rediscovered
As writer Bekah Brunstetter shows throughout her funny and moving play, The Cake, reconciling traditional roots with progressive values in a polarized world is wrenching work. And while no one should expect to abandon the things that sustain her — be it waffle fries, her faith or the person who has captured her heart — what should be expected, the play shows, is conversation, with a generous dash of understanding and more than a pinch of heart. … More Cake and Conversation
They elbow one another for space in his mind: young black teenagers and their worried mothers, old white supremacists and their nervous wives, skeptical lawyers, gravelly voiced journalists and a slave who mailed himself to freedom inside a box.
Mike Wiley not only plays them all on stage — often more than two dozen characters in a single performance, with no costume changes and few props — the documentary theater actor and playwright rehearses himself to sleep at night with their dialogue, their humanity and inhumanity, strumming through his head. … More Step Into Those Shoes
While they waited for Superior Court Judge Howard Manning to read the court’s finding — minutes that seemed almost as long as the six years Christine Mumma had worked to free Greg Taylor — Mumma became more convinced they had lost, while Taylor simply prayed that his heart would not give out. They waited together for a moment that had never before happened in the history of the judicial system, neither of them daring to believe. … More The Client She’ll Never Give Up On
For Andrea Bruce ’95, vision is everything. And at that moment, in June 2004, riding in a Humvee with soldiers from the U.S. Army 1st Infantry Division through the streets of Baquba, Iraq, she had lost it. Dark was all around her, and pieces of shrapnel flew from a roadside bomb that had exploded five … More World Witness: The Photography of Andrea Bruce
Beth McNichol 