Category Archives: friends

Diane speaks out about her family’s deportation

Throughout my childhood I watched my parents try to become legal but to no avail. They lost their money to people they believed to be attorneys, but who ultimately never helped. That meant my childhood was haunted by the fear that they would be deported. If I didn’t see anyone when I walked in the door after school, I panicked.

And then one day, my fears were realized. I came home from school to an empty house. Lights were on and dinner had been started, but my family wasn’t there. Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.

Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me. No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.

My parents were deported” by Diane Guerrero in the LA Times

In 2013, breadlines that wrap around the block

Disgraceful:

In the 22 years that Swami Durga Das has managed New York’s River Fund Food Pantry, he has never seen hunger like this. Each Saturday, hundreds of hungry people descend on the pantry’s headquarters, an unassuming house on a residential block. The first people arrive around 2 am, forming a line that will wrap around the block before Das even opens his doors.

“Each week there’s new people,” Das told MSNBC.com. “The numbers have just skyrocketed.”

The new clients are diverse—working people, seniors, single mothers—but many of them share something in common: they represent the millions of Americans who fell victim to food insecurity when the Great Recession hit in 2009, but didn’t benefit from the economic recovery.

And the worst may be yet to come.

Food activists expect a “Hunger Cliff” on November 1, when automatic cuts to food stamp benefits will send a deluge of new hungry people to places like the River Fund Food Pantry, which are already strained.

via America’s New Hunger Crisis, Ned Resnikoff, MSNBC.com

Adult Contemporary @ Maplewood-South Orange Studio Tour

I’ll be showing some work tomorrow as part of the Adult Contemporary Lifestyle Collective at the Maplewood-South Orange Studio Tour. Swing by if you’re in town, have some refreshments, and check out a range of work by young artists raised in the Jersey suburbs who have either returned or never left.


Adult Contemporary Lifestyle Collective
South Orange-Maplewood Studio Tour
Sunday June 3, 11am – 5pm
122 Prospect Pl, South Orange, NJ

Live Tweets from Maplewood-South Orange BOE Meeting on De-Leveling

[For context, check out my last blog post on the issue; also Cris Thorne‘s excellent documentary-in-progress De-Leveling the System]

9:22 PM: Live tweet msosd BOE meeting: heart warming speeches in favor of educational equity. Yay!
[edit: transcript of Board of Ed member Bill Gaudelli’s excellent speech here]

10:03 PM: BOE member Gleason uses USA’s low PISA scores to defend leveled instruction; Finland scores highest in world & is committed to edu equality
[see: “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success” and “How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools“]

10:15 PM: Many community members speaking against proposal including real estate agent & board of trustees member. #movetomillburn

10:19 PM: Cool many community members in favor also speaking.

10:24 PM: Both sides of this agree can agree on one thing: 2 min is not enough for public comment.

10:32 PM: Gleason makes motion to break proposal into 3 pieces: IB middle school, middle school levelup, & chs level restructuring

10:33 PM: Vote 5-4 to separate the proposal.

10:34 PM: IB program passes unanimously

10:39 PM: Gleason trying to table proposal until there is a gifted and talented program; Daugherty disagrees, “don’t let perfect be enemy of good.”

10:40 PM: Middle school proposal passes 7:2!

10:41 PM: CHS proposal passes 8-1! #townpride

[As my friend Dan (who also stuck it out for the meeting) put it, now time for all the work!]