When Patrice Hutton, 37, was a student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, part of the program included teaching creative writing at various middle and elementary schools near the Homewood campus. As she traveled between schools, she noticed a real disparity between what was being taught at the more privileged Roland Park Elementary/Middle School and the under-financed Barclay School just a few blocks away.

She also noticed that schools in general were moving away from creative writing as they were forced to keep up with the No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasizes core curriculum subjects like math and science over the arts. Given that writing had provided such a strong outlet in her own life, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

In 2008, thanks largely to a grant from Open Society Institute–Baltimore, she created Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), an in-class program where students can express themselves through creative writing, from fiction to poetry to nonfiction. The program, which reaches approximately 140 students a year, has expanded over the years, and now includes writers’ workshops, mini retreats, and “write-ins,” as well as a summer camp.

The students also create zines, anthologies, and share some of their poetry on the back page of indie newspaper, the Baltimore Beat. We sat down with Hutton to discuss what she’s built.

Why do you think writing is so important for young people, particularly young people from underserved communities?
I think teaching students that their voice matters, that what they have to say is important, and that they can use their voice to advocate for themselves in their community is a building block of all other things. Something we talked about a lot in the beginning was, how can we use Writers in Baltimore Schools to teach students to access systems? Because, for more privileged, more resourced kids, it’s like, of course, you know you can email your college counselor or professor. But when you grow up as one of 38 kids in a Baltimore City school class, you’re just not used to being able to have that kind of access. We want kids to know that they can ask grown-ups for stuff and use their voices to speak up.

So much of WBS is allowing kids to see themselves as creators, as artists.
Yeah. And something we do is have the students write an Artist’s Statement. And that’s based on some research we read, which said that in low income school settings, if you give kids a chance to sort of affirm that they are artists, they are going to see themselves as artists [going forward]. Creative writing classes are notoriously emotionally fraught.

Are the students encouraged to critique each other?
In terms of peer editing and peer feedback, we build it gently. Different teachers use different terms like “glows and grows” or “compliment sandwiches,” that is, pointing out ways that your piece shines first and then ways to, you know, improve it. So in that case, they’re learning social skills as well as these writing skills.

Some of these kids are dealing with trauma at home and in their neighborhoods. How have you seen that manifest in the work?
You sort of get kids across the spectrum—kids who want to use writing as an outlet and kids who want it as an escape. And something we’ve been thoughtful about is making sure that each lesson can be approached from both angles, because we never want to force a kid to write about their trauma, but we do want to give them the space for that. For some kids, existing in that fantasy world, that’s what they want to be doing. In some cases, very intense things have come up, where I’m glad that we have this safe space. But if something really concerning comes up, we’ll elevate it to the classroom teacher because they know the kid better than we do.

Tell us about the sleepaway camp.
It started in 2012. It’s now held at Washington College in Chestertown. It’s really nice. The kids are getting that real college experience and the parents are often very sweetly grateful for that. But the kids, I mean, their reactions are the things that sustain me in the moments of work exhaustion, because I’ll think back to a kid who would say, “This is the best week.” Or, when we ask the kids, “What would you change about this?” they want it to change from one to two weeks, which we will hopefully do someday. One quote from a student that we use a lot [in promotional material] is, “At this camp I found my forever family.”

Can you share some of the Writers in Baltimore Schools success stories?
One of our alums, Bryonna Reed, graduated from Davidson College in the spring of 2020 and now she’s the new development director of the Baltimore Abortion Fund. Another one, Jamesha Caldwell, just finished her first year of law school at Penn State Dickinson. This girl got like 10 law school acceptances and this summer she’s interning for Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett on Capitol Hill. We have another kid, one from the very first workshop, who has become really big in the Baltimore drag scene. He’s performing all over. We have alumni doing some really cool stuff.

Tonee Lawson takes the phrase “knowledge is power” to heart. And she believes every kid deserves the same opportunity to be successful.

How to make that happen? In 2014, at age 27, she founded The Be. Organization to empower Baltimore’s youth to live above their socially imposed limitations, and, later, to achieve excellence in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

“The name The Be. is an open-ended statement that you have the opportunity to shape your future,” Lawson says. “You can be amazing—you can be anything you want to be. We come in and give you the enrichment, push you over the hump to make sure you’re not leaving any potential untapped.”

The Prince George’s County native never intended to enter the nonprofit world. It was a passion she first nurtured when she accompanied her grandmother on community service missions, then during her time at Towson University, when she served as program coordinator for her sorority’s Emerging Young Leaders Initiative.

However, as a self-professed science nerd with multiple degrees in molecular biology, biochemistry, and biotechnology, she always imagined her career taking place in a lab. And it did, originally—yet she was missing that social connection. As executive director of The Be., being able to use her STEM experience in an educational capacity is the best of both worlds. Operating out of various schools—though the goal is to have their own building in the near future—Lawson and a team of three staff members provide creative workshops, an enrichment curriculum, and youth conferences focused on life skills and STEM teachings.

“The kids are so filled with love, creativity, and resiliency. I end up learning more from them than they learn from me,” Lawson says. “They pour their heart into their work. They don’t know how talented they are until they’re challenged, until they have someone make real-world applications.”

Lawson lives for the moments she sees those connections happen—“You can see it in their eyes, like, ‘Oh, this is what my teacher was talking about.’”

The Food Playground is one initiative where these connections take place regularly. It takes science skills from school to create fun experiments in the kitchen, where the students make everything from ice cream to salad vinaigrettes. After participating in Be. programs, surveys show that student confidence and interest level in STEM careers “skyrocket.” It warms Lawson’s heart to hear from parents that The. Be programs have given their child a boost.

“There’s a girl who came to us as a shy sixth-grader and is now such a strong leader. It’s so exciting to see her blossom and open up, and to know we had a role to play in her growth,” Lawson says. “I see this growth all the time, and it keeps me going.”

By coupling social-emotional learning with STEM skills, Lawson hopes to give participants a leg up so that they’re well-rounded, exposed to new experiences, and able to create a path of long-term success. But Lawson’s ongoing commitment to bringing additional resources to her students has opened her eyes to the disparity that exists for Black-led organizations in the funding world.

“It’s tough to fight a battle of equity and have people understand that yes, Black kids can code, they can understand STEM, they deserve the same resources,” she says. “So many of our kids need laptops, they need Wi-Fi, those aren’t staples in every house. We’re not asking for handouts—just the same opportunity for them to be successful.”

A Baltimore public school teacher for more than two decades, Adam Schwartz has spent the past 16 years at Career Academy, a small, alternative high school serving 11th and 12th graders in one of the original Goucher College buildings in Lower Charles Village. His students are typically older teenagers who left school for one reason or another—a family crisis, pregnancy, or juvenile arrest have derailed some—but have decided to return to their education. (The Mayor’s Office of Employment Development, which partners with Career Academy, occupies two floors above the school.)

It’s their complex lives, challenges, and coming-of-age in Baltimore journeys that provide the inspiration for Schwartz’s tightly woven character studies in his debut collection this fall, The Rest of the World (Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2020 Prize for Fiction). Schwartz reveals the intense pressures this city exerts on many teens. His empathetic stories of young adults in crisis illuminate the longings of the city’s youth, too often forced to navigate complex moral choices.

The teenage protagonists in your stories grow up in unstable circumstances. They are tough, but tenderly drawn characters at the same time.
Growing up in Baltimore can toughen and harden children. To protect themselves, some kids develop quiet, hard exteriors meant to project power and, maybe, repel trouble. But, of course, behind these flattened affects are teenagers with the same essential needs and vulnerabilities and fears and dreams as any of us. At school, most kids relax their guardedness within a few days or so. But this act of masking important parts of themselves makes some kids compelling, complicated figures.

The language of Baltimore City teens in the book is spot on.
Thank you—kids are interesting. The experiences they share, both the struggles and the triumphs, stick in my head, their voices stay in my ear, the striving they do against steep challenges evokes my hopes for them, and there are days when I’m carrying their voices around with me.

As a white male, are you ever conflicted about writing about the lives of Black youth? If so, how do you resolve those conflicts?
Some readers might see me as an imposter who hasn’t earned the right to write about the experiences of my characters. I’m not deaf to these kinds of criticisms. I think a lot about whether I’ve trespassed by creating characters whose struggles cannot be disconnected from our country’s abominable legacy of racial injustice—injustices from which I’ve been spared. Artists who perpetuate stereotypes or exploit the traditions of a culture should be condemned. Those who borrow from the pain of another group’s oppression without empathy or understanding should be called out. I don’t think I’m doing those things. My hope is that my stories honor the strength, will, and essential goodness so many Baltimore teens have shown me over the years.

What draws you to write about the lives of Baltimore teenagers?
Picture a kid coming up in a Baltimore neighborhood that was redlined—a particularly vile form of economic exclusion that often doomed neighborhoods to socioeconomic decline. Now imagine this neighborhood has also been hurt by disinvestment and municipal neglect and, as a result, offers few job opportunities; [consider that] it’s been socially isolated from other parts of the city, subjected to the policies of mass incarceration and endured years of corrupt policing; finally, suppose this neighborhood is pathologized by the local media for the purpose of enticing viewers with lurid crime coverage. In a variety of ways, the effects of these deep structural injustices land at the feet of children. As a teacher and a writer, I long to transcribe the resilience and determination of teens who sometimes cope with catastrophic obstacles.

With tension across the nation continuing to mount—leading in many cases to chaos and violence in major cities—hundreds of Baltimoreans gathered downtown yesterday for a peaceful, youth-led demonstration demanding justice for George Floyd and all victims of police violence.

Beginning at the Baltimore Convention Center, organizers were determined to maintain order, calling upon those in the crowd to stop fellow protestors if they began to exhibit violent behaviors on what would be the third day of protests in the streets of Baltimore City.

From the intersection of Pratt and Sharp streets past City Hall, the Jones Falls Expressway, and the Baltimore City Correctional Center, masked protestors maintained their mission and peacefully expressed their anger and frustration over the lives lost at the hands of the police.