Within minutes of stepping onto McGee Island off the coast of Maine for a writing residency, I learned through a phone call that my son, Manuel, my only child, had died. Dogged by alcohol, cough syrup, schizophrenia and half-cured pneumonia — he left the hospital against medical advice — he succumbed in his room at
MoreBy age 5, Philadelphia native Tatyana Woodard knew she was different. Born with a male body, she felt like a girl. She preferred girls’ clothes and loved White Diamonds, her grandmother’s perfume. Over time, Woodard’s conviction and hidden stash of feminine outfits grew. “At 16, I was put out of my house due to my
MoreTasha Sammons and her son, S’vante, were expecting a cheerful dinner at their home in Olney on Father’s Day weekend five years ago. “S’vante was happy, waiting for his dad,” Sammons says. “But my husband, Ted, who’d had diabetes since age 9, never made it home. He had a heart attack and died [on the
MoreThe phone woke Jacqui Johnson, founder and clinical director of Sankofa Healing Studio, from a sound sleep. On the other end of the line, Tinika Hogan, recently released from prison, teetered on the brink of disaster. She was about to do something that would have gotten her kicked out of a halfway house, which could
MoreDuring her first class at the local Women Against Abuse shelter where she lived, the little girl stood distant and silent while The Clay Studio teaching artist Nitza Walesca Rosario made a pot. After a few weeks, however, the moist clay and the shapes it took wrought wonders in the child. “Working with clay is
MoreAsim King hopped off the 32 bus, beat the red light crossing Kelly Drive and fast-walked to the Cosmic Café at 1 Boathouse Row. “Got to be on time,” King said at the café, a bright place that brims with enticing aromas. Like 20 of the café’s 30 employees, King has a developmental disability. Disabled
MoreThe small light-brown button excavated in broiling August heat rests in the palm of Megan C. Kassabaum, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Weingarten Associate Curator for North America at the Penn Museum. Dug up from one of three small sites in the parking lot behind the Community Education Center
MoreOn a sunny afternoon in late spring, 27 sixth graders from Mount Airy’s Henry H. Houston Elementary School skipped and hooted their way to SEPTA’s Carpenter Train Station, as if already savoring the adventure of planting trees there. “We identified flowers and pollinators along the way,” says Christine Bush, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and
MoreThe late autumn wind began to bite during the 1838 Black Metropolis walking tour last year, but historian Michiko Quinones warmed the 10 participants with stories of riches, a riot and secret dealings in Philly’s antebellum Black community. “Some 20,000 Black people lived in Philadelphia in the late 1830s,” Quinones said. “The 1838 census showed
MoreThe big library — the size of several classrooms — in the Cook-Wissahickon School in Roxborough stands as a monument to activism. Closed for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the library now serves pre-kindergarteners through middle schoolers with story hours and a robust lending program that enrich the lives of students.
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