I sat and watched in disbelief as the numbers rolled across the bottom of the dayroom tv. It was a late night in November 2016, and the guard on duty that night let me stay up late to watch the presidential race results. The other inmates in my dorm slept so soundly ar...

2020 has been exhausting, hasn’t it? 

Protests and pandemics; Murder hornets and threats of war. Hell, we’re barely into hurricane season, and every time I see a breaking news alert on TV now I sigh and think to myself, “WTF now?” Certainly, it’s been incredible to see...

What’s going on? Do you understand the times? When can we go back to normalcy? Some say that will never happen. Should we be afraid?

We are experiencing a breakdown in national and inter-personal civility. We are witnessing social unrest sweeping the country. We are shu...

In 1965 in Des Moines, Iowa, students at a local school sported armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The immediate response by the school district was to ban the armbands leading to the Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, in which the r...

In 1858, two years before becoming President, Abraham Lincoln lost the race to become the Senator from Illinois.  Still, in accepting his party’s nomination as their candidate, Lincoln spoke words that continue to resonate for us today: “A house divided against itself...

It’s been a while since the president has come to town. Sure, George W. Bush surveyed the damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike in 2008, buzzing around the island in Marine One to get a first-hand look at the destruction left in the wake of the category 4 storm. But for th...

This summer, with support from an Arts Respond project grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Galveston Arts Center developed a special workshop series for a deserving group of creative teens. The participants were five students in the youth art collective at...