Nia Norris

"It’s important to me to paint people who look like the communities they are in," Austin “Auz” Miles says.
For Richmond-based artist Austin “Auz” Miles, the impact of her work is right there in the communities where she paints. It’s little girls walking by one of her murals and seeing themselves in the images, or people telling her that driving by a mural every day puts a smile on their faces.
Recently, Miles worked with Kristal Brown, a Virginia Commonwealth University doctoral student whose...

On February 9th, the Chicago Teacher’s Union posted the transcript of a speech that Seattle educator, Jesse Hagopian, gave at a panel on the ongoing controversy surrounding the teaching of critical race theory in schools. In this panel, he addressed the hypocrisy in the critics of CRT, noting that not teaching about race erases our country’s history.
Hagopian said, “The great paradox of these anti-CRT bans is that they are confirming the central claims of critical race theory — that racism is...

‍Navient recently agreed to cancel $1.7 billion in private student loan debt for borrowers who attended certain for-profit schools between 2002-2014, live in certain states, and were over seven months behind on their loan payments before July 31, 2021. Borrowers with federal student loans — Direct Loans, FFEL Loans, Parent PLUS Loans, consolidation loans — won’t have their debt eliminated.
Navient recently announced that as part of a settlement, it was writing off the balances for 66 thousand...

The tech nonprofit reduced the online application time for Minnesotans.
Applying for public assistance is difficult in most states, but Minnesota’s online application was particularly complicated until November of 2021, when a revamped version of the site went live for all benefits applicants in Minnesota. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) “food stamps,” housing support, child care assistance, and more, all had their own process, and could take up to two hours to complete. Each...

A memoir interrogating the ways in which living while Black in America is akin to being in an abusive relationship with a narcissist.
Drayton returned to her homeland of Tobago after becoming exhausted by the constant abuse she endured as a Black woman in the "United States of White America.” In this expansion of a New York Times article, the author describes a life rich in both experience and trauma, insightfully creating a conceit that runs throughout: America is a narcissist, and living in...

Worldreader is using their BookSmart app to help combat reading inequities in communities.
While book deserts in communities that are underserved and need reading support have always been an issue in the United States, the pandemic exacerbated this with the closure of schools and libraries. The nonprofit Worldreader saw an opportunity.
Though its BookSmart app was developed to provide young people in the developing world with free-ebooks, in 2020, the nonprofit decided to launch its programmi...

The Catchlight fellowship places journalists with local newsrooms to bring photojournalism back to reporting.
In 2018, a visual journalist named Yesica Prado was completing a master’s degree in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley when she realized that she could not afford the cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prado says, “I was living in different kinds of vehicles when I was going to school. First in a little vehicle, then in an artist’s studio, and then my boy...

Interview with Derecka Purnell for Kirkus Reviews about her book Becoming Abolitionists

Children’s and young adult writer Nic Stone has hit the mark again with her new middle-grade novel, Fast Pitch (Crown, Aug. 31). Following Stone’s 2020 novel, Clean Getaway, Fast Pitch tells the story of Shenice “Lightning” Lockwood’s race to win the championship for her fast-pitch softball league while being drawn to solve a family mystery that was uncovered in the middle of the season. The book combines frank, age-appropriate discussions of racism with positive representations and a loving ...

Nicole Kenney has always been surrounded by aunties. Kenney is a communications strategist in Philadelphia who has worked for large nonprofits like the NAACP, the Urban League of Philadelphia, and PECO, the local utility. In 2016, she made a documentary where she captured conversations that she had with her “aunties,” both biological and not. These conversations showed the lifeline aunties provided to a young, stressed-out millennial who was just trying to figure out life. When nonprofits and...

Jill Watson is an unpaid teaching assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology 1. An AI-based chatbot, she is an example of academia’s shift from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to individualized instruction. As such, the next generation workforce will be trained to adapt to the ever-changing role of technology in the workplace, with AI already being used by Tesla, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. But what happens to those already in the workplace?
AI is changing the way that we work and live...