Stevie Walker-Webb claims to be an accidental theater director. With an undergraduate degree in sociology, he originally considered a career in public service. But his love of theater—its own kind of public service—won out. At only 38, the Texas native is already an internationally celebrated director with an Obie Award and a Tony nomination under his belt.

In his first full year as Baltimore Center Stage’s new artistic director, Walker-Webb has launched an electrifying lineup of productions, including the theater’s two best-selling shows since the 2020 pandemic, and introduced innovative community outreach programs. He’s just getting started.

From your perspective, what makes a great theater experience?
Something between a raucous Southern Baptist church and an Orioles game. I want everyone to feel at home here, and I want everyone to have a good time. Even if we’re looking at something that has heavy subject matter, it can still be held with a kind of buoyancy. I like to say you get more a-has from ha-has. I’m here to laugh you into epiphany.

I’ve been at multiple performances this season, and I can attest that the BCS audiences are raucous. What are you putting in the water that’s making the audience engage like that?
That is the Chesapeake Bay, that’s what that is. I have worked pretty much everywhere, and it’s not like Baltimore. I’m talking to Broadway producers and saying, ‘This is where you want to try out your play. . . . If you want to know if a show is good or not, you need to play it in front of a Baltimore audience.’ We have truly diverse audiences here—and they talk back! We will not give you a standard standing ovation, which I love.

Are there other ways the culture of Baltimore influences your decisions as artistic director? This year, we launched Lab401. We got exactly 99 early-career or first-time local playwrights to apply. Three of them will spend an entire year in residency with us and my hope is to produce one of their plays. I want to launch local writers out of Baltimore. The stories that come out of this city are so rich and powerful and good. People just need to get access to that.

Activism has been an important part of your artistic practice. How is that influencing your work at BCS?
The reason why I wanted this job so badly is because, more than any theater in this country, BCS has a sustained and proven commitment to the community through its social programs. For 40 years, the Young Playwrights Festival has been providing a free playwriting program that goes into Title 1 schools across the city.

This year, we’re also launching the Juvenile Justice Drama Club, where we’ll be in residency at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center working with young people for a full year, and the hope is to create a pipeline for them to have paid internships at BCS. Using theater to improve, empower, and give back to the community—that’s really what I’m here for.

Until now, you’ve spent much of your directorial career traveling to produce a show, and then moving on to the next project somewhere else. So this must be really different for you, being rooted in one place, programming for a specific community long-term. It’s like you’re suddenly in a marriage with Baltimore.
Yeah, a marriage with a whole bunch of kids! As a traveling director, I would get to create these little culture pods, and then I would go away from them. Whereas now, I get to really grow one—and be grown by it. It’s not six weeks now. It’s six years, or 16 years. It’s however long I’m blessed to be in this position. The commitment to that is really scary, but also super exciting.

Is there one word that encapsulates your intention for your first full BCS season?
I’ll do three words: service, to our community. Joy, in how we work and what we offer. And connection. At some point, “universality” became this dirty word. We’ve become so obsessed with a fear of appropriation of each other’s cultures that we’ve lost our ability to celebrate what makes us similar, what makes us connected. If we can make people feel more connected to the theater, more connected to themselves, more connected to each other? I would sell both of my kidneys for that.

From 1991 to 2011, Superintendent Nancy Grasmick oversaw all the public schools in the state of Maryland and, for five consecutive years during that span, they ranked top in the nation. Yet when she retired, the Baltimore native, now 85, still had a gnawing feeling that she could have done more. That’s the thing about real leadership. It always strives to better itself.

To that end, three years ago, she founded the Dr. Nancy Grasmick Leadership Institute at her alma mater, Towson University, with the goal of nurturing competent, ethical, and civic-minded leadership across a variety of industries. It has since welcomed about 2,700 participants—from organizations like Under Armour, the nonprofit ShareBaby, and the Maryland Department of General Services—to its programs, which range from one-day events to months-long workshops.

Why did you want to start the institute?
When I decided to leave as state superintendent, even though our schools were top-notch in the nation, I felt that if I had the opportunity to really dig into my own leadership—exploring where I felt strong, where I felt vulnerable—I could have been better than I was. I also had an opportunity to observe leadership not just in education, but business, nonprofits, and government. When I retired, I found that we had a lagging group of leaders in many ways, and it wasn’t necessarily their fault. You can see leaders who are just sort of stuck, there’s no creativity, and when I looked at government, I was also concerned about the ethical dimension.

What’s unique about your programming?
No two leaders are exactly the same, because we’re different people. We have a cascade of programs…You decide what’s right for your company, or as an aspiring or current leader. We don’t want people to leave saying we’re just a facilitator of some of the tried-and-true philosophies about leadership. We want them to say, “Wow, that was really fantastic.”

What are the challenges leaders face today?
There are some ethical ones. Part of it is, if you work with people who are unethical, it influences you. Often, if you are not in the lead position, there’s an expectation that you’ll buy into unethical behavior. How do you deal with that? If we don’t have ethics as a core, I don’t think we have anything. The other thing is people don’t think they have the clout to make changes if they’re not at the top. How do you get your thoughts heard? What’s persuasive? [The answer is] presenting yourself as knowledgeable and confident and deeply believing in something. We had someone from Under Armour. For her capstone project with us, she looked at family-leave policies. As a result of her having the confidence to be bold and suggest changes, they’ve changed their program.

It’s not easy being a leader today. Like in classrooms, we see teacher shortages. How do you address that idea?
Well, first you acknowledge that it is difficult…Things are changing rapidly. Look at how AI is influencing every profession. But you find ways of coping, overcoming, and turning what’s been negative to a positive.

The search is on. Next month, Julia Marciari-Alexander will step down as executive director of The Walters Art Museum. On the eve of her arrival in 2013, the California native and San Diego Art Museum curator was described to The Sun as an “up-and-comer” with “a gift for making art engaging and accessible to the public.”

Now fast-forward nearly 12 years, as she ends her tenure in September to become president of the New York-based Kress Foundation, Marciari-Alexander leaves behind an impressive era as the first woman to helm the Mount Vernon institution. Under her direction, the museum launched innovative exhibits, shed light on the Walters family’s difficult history, navigated through COVID, and unionized its staff—with Marciari-Alexander becoming a pillar of the city’s arts scene along the way.

What role does The Walters play in the broader arts community?
The Walters has positioned itself as a steadfast leader when it comes to what role art, culture, and museums can play in creating great civic life, and great cities. I also think we have been a leader in being very intentional in building change for the institution, bringing what is a 90-year-old museum into a 21st-century conversation about why art and art museums matter in this moment of seismic societal change.

What are some of the ways you’ve done this within the museum?
We’re finally seeing the result of decades-long work of my predecessor and the preceding boards . . . just thinking differently about how we use the collections that we have to tell stories that are relevant to where we are today. And that work plays itself out in bringing different voices to the table, different ways of seeing and looking and displaying the art, and how we talk about the art, so that we can reveal the ways that humans relate to each other in their present moment, but also see how humans have related to each other through these wonderful objects of human creativity from across the globe and time.

Are there any exhibitions that encapsulate these efforts for you?
One of the biggest achievements was the complete refurbishment of the Hackerman House—looking at buildings not simply as receptacles for art but the largest and most complex objects that we steward. That project was a showcase for looking differently at how we tell the stories. So, telling the story of the [original] owners, who had two enslaved women living there, and then revealing the little history we have of Sybby Grant, the enslaved cook, and then commissioning a contemporary artist to engage in a conversation with a letter that is written by this woman who did basically invisible labor in this house. All of that comes together through art, and you make the invisible visible. How can we understand objects differently when we think about the context in which they are made, used, and handed down?

Do you have any museum favorites?
My current favorite place in the museum is Across Asia. Around my third week of work, I told some donors that I thought the Asian collection should go on the fourth floor, but museum time is like ocean liner time, not speed boat time—and that’s how you make change. I’m a fan of radical incrementalism, because otherwise, you’re just redecorating, and your house still is the same house. But having Across Asia up there just shows these objects in such a different way. . . . You can learn so much in every room, it bears going back over and over, and that’s our goal.

Speaking of radical incrementalism, after a years-long process, employees at The Walters just voted to unionize. How does it feel to be here?
I have always valued putting the employees first and giving them the opportunity to vote for themselves [for or against unionization]. That was the goal the whole time, and I’m so happy that they did that, and that we are on the other side of that, and that we are now collective bargaining. I’m absolutely sure that, if it doesn’t finish with me, it will keep going and come to a good resolution.

Of course, during your tenure, you also had the pleasure of being dressed by Baltimore fashion designer Bishme Cromartie for a few galas. What was that like?
The first time, I was super star struck. He knew that he was going to be on that first Project Runway, but we couldn’t tell anybody, so it felt like I was wearing this giant secret. I really am a such a [big fan]. Not a Swiftie, but a Bishme-ie.

How would you describe the state of the Baltimore arts right now?Baltimore is one of the premier art and cultural scenes in America, if not the premier city for its size. . . . I will say, I think the future needs to be more truly collaborative, not just, “Hey, let’s do things alongside each other.” Museums have changed more in the last 10, maybe 15, certainly five years than the last before then. And that means that what we do and how we do it is ever more important, because if we don’t meet the moment, we are going to become irrelevant. We have the opportunity to create an even richer community relationship within in the ecosystem of the arts and cultural scene here.

Natasha Guynes’ story is unlike any you’ve heard. Addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine as a teenager, she turned to selling her body to support herself. Sober at age 21 through the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, she went to college and eventually landed a job in the office of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. After several years on Capitol Hill, Guynes left politics and founded HER Resiliency Center, which serves young women with similar complex trauma. In 2019, HER expanded its street outreach and services to Baltimore, and in December, opened a brick-and-mortar in Fells Point.

“We were in contact with more than 300 women in Baltimore in 2023,” says Guynes. “With a good portion, we’ve made an impact in their lives. With others, we’ve planted seeds.”

Can you tell us about the street outreach to women involved in sex work?
We cover five neighborhoods. They’re hidden in plain sight. We engage the women with snacks and hygiene and safety kits that we carry. But we talk to everybody. You don’t know who the gatekeepers are. We talk to business owners, the old lady walking by. If we’re buying tennis shoes for the homeless man at the bus stop, that’s another way to build trust in the community. On Fridays, we host a lunch at Sweet Hope Free Will Baptist Church in Park Heights.

In your experience, what is the turning point for these women?
At the church lunch, for example, we have an activity and the women engage each other. This is also where we can help them start to think about their next step, whether they want to go to substance-use treatment or not. Not that we want to see them have hard days, but on those hard days, where they’re just so tired, they can’t go another day, that’s when we’re like, “Well, we can help you get ready to go to treatment.”

Some of HER’s foundation is based on your A.A. experience?
That’s true. There’s a road map we provide through individual, intensive, holistic support, helping them achieve their own goals, mixed in with the community element, where they learn from other women who’ve been in similar circumstances and build positive relationships with each other. We’re not a social service agency. We also try to get women into high-caliber treatment, either a scholarship to Ashley Addiction Treatment, which costs about $32,000 for 28 days, or the Pinelands Recovery Center [in New Jersey]. We would want that for ourselves or our loved ones.

Can you share a success story?
Stephanie is very near and dear to me. I helped her get off the streets in 2021…Stephanie has three kids, and today, she’s able to show up in their lives. She volunteers at HER Resiliency. She works full-time at a local treatment center. Our peer relationships overlap, and we go to A.A. meetings, game nights, and baseball games together. She’s an active member of society and that’s what we want for every woman, to be a participating, active member of society, no longer hidden in plain sight.

From a young age, Angela Crenshaw heard the call of the wild. Growing up first in West Virginia, then Baltimore County, the now-41-year-old former Girl Scout fell in love with nature through the trees in her backyard, eventually earning a degree in environmental policy and landing a job with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Working her way up as a park ranger, she spent time in several of the state’s 68 parks, forests, and wildlife areas, such as Elk Neck on the Eastern Shore, Susquehanna north of Baltimore, and the county’s own Gunpowder Falls. By all accounts, this career has been her calling, and after 15 years with the service, she became Park Service’s interim director last April, before being hired full time in the fall. And with the Great Maryland Outdoors Act ushering in new parks, staff, and funding, plus record-high visitation still lingering from the pandemic, she arrives at a pivotal time—with lots of her own big ideas to boot. 

Growing up around Baltimore, how did you connect with nature?
Nature is always around, if you look for it. When I was about four, we lived off Loch Raven Boulevard in a built-up area, but we still had trees. We moved a few years later, close to Herring Run Park, so I spent a lot of time there as a kid, running around, splashing in the water, collecting crayfish and tadpoles, looking for salamanders. Then we moved a little further north, near the Big Gunpowder Falls…I’ve just always felt at home in the woods.

You’ve helped bring the likes of Juneteenth and Pride celebrations to Maryland’s state parks. How do you hope to continue these efforts toward more inclusivity into your new role?
My entire goal is to bring the Park Service forward. Sometimes public lands aren’t accessible to everyone. You definitely need a car to get to most of our state parks—there’s only one you can take the bus to. Camping can get expensive—you need the time off and the gear. And, of course, the history of African Americans in public lands is very negative. In the beginning of national and state parks, people worked hard to keep minorities out. I want to make sure that everyone feels welcome to not just visit, but stay and work here…And that the stories that we tell in our state parks resonate with everybody, too.

For example, the history of Maryland’s Black beaches that have recently come to light.
Lonesome vs. Maxwell is the court case that desegregated all of our public lands, and that started at Sandy Point State Park in Annapolis. What’s currently the East Beach was for Black folks and the South Beach was for white folks….On the way to South Beach is a large plantation house that was owned by Henry Mayer. He enslaved people on that property. And a lot of people visit that park and have no idea. But sharing that history is important work to me.

You also spent years at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Park on the Eastern Shore.
Living down there changed my life. I felt like I was not only telling Harriet’s story but living it. I would walk in the woods and feel the same things she did. In the wintertime, you could look up and see the stars through the trees. In the summer, it’s atmospheric and full of leaves. I just really felt a connection to her, and to the outdoors, and to her connection to the outdoors. And I loved sharing that. A lot of people are familiar with Tubman but not her knowledge of nature. She was a natural outdoors woman. But she needed to be, for the Underground Railroad. It’s a luxury for me.

What are some of your other priorities this year?
The Great Maryland Outdoors Act is huge and has a lot of parts to it. It creates one new state park right away, which is Freedman State Historical Park [in Montgomery County]. And then by 2025, it creates Port of Deposit State Historical Park up in Cecil County. It requires the Department of Legislative Services to do a comprehensive one-year research project about Maryland State Parks—how we can improve them, how we can make them more accessible.

That’s taking up a lot of my time, because I want to get it right…We’re severely underfunded and severely understaffed, and the plan addresses that, too. We’ll be hiring more people, breaking up some of our complexes, where sometimes one park runs two, three, four, sometimes 10 of our public lands. When 2020 hit with the pandemic, our visitation skyrocketed, and we have to be able to serve all of these people that want to enjoy these places, and safely…The Great Maryland Outdoors Act will allow us to do more than just fix problems. It will help us be able to treat these resources that we’ve taken pledges to protect and love with the honor and the respect that they deserve. I don’t know the last time we had such an influx of cash and interest. So this is a very exciting time to take the reins of the Maryland Park Service.

What are the perks of visiting the parks in the off-season?
With fewer people, more critters come out. When I was taking this photograph in Gunpowder Falls, an eagle flew over, then an immature bald eagle, and then another. And that happens to me a lot in our state parks, when it’s just me and nature. I see foxes. I hear turkeys. It’s very quiet and peaceful.

Hilary Harp Falk has been immersed in the Chesapeake Bay all of her life. The daughter of famed former Sun photographer Dave Harp, the 44-year-old North Baltimore native spent her formative years exploring the Bay’s waterways, later landing her first job as an intern for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF). In January 2022, Falk was hired as the president of CBF and, as a longtime champion of environmental equity, her people-focused leadership is helping to redefine how the organization preserves, protects, and restores the nation’s largest estuary

What are some of your formative memories of the Chesapeake Bay?
My dad was working on some stories with author Tom Horton and would take me with him down to Smith Island. Tom would let me drive his boat, and my sister and I would go chicken-necking [for crabs] off the Chesapeake Bay Foundation dock. I just thought it was one of the most magical places I’d ever seen…and one that really spoke to me about the connection between people and the Bay. I also spent my childhood in Baltimore, learning about how the city had an impact on the harbor and the Bay. I stenciled stormwater drains, learned about recycling, and took part in all of these environmental activities that were gaining traction in people’s consciousness.

CBF was started in 1967 with the now well-known motto, “Save the Bay.” What does that mean today?
I stand on the shoulders of some incredible leaders who started the modern Chesapeake Bay movement. But we’re in a different time, with a significant amount of generational change. So much of the Bay movement has been looking back—historical data and so on. But I am really energized by the opportunity to bring people together to re-envision the future of the Bay movement with forward-facing goals—getting clean water closer to people, confronting challenges like the climate crisis.

You’ve been a champion of equity in the conservation movement throughout your career, which includes a long tenure at the National Wildlife Federation. How is that informing your leadership at CBF?
I think we can acknowledge that the Bay movement has left people out. Communities have been left behind. So a lot of our work now is about the nexus between people, environmental justice, and clean water. Some of that work is through the lens of litigation, like addressing legacy pollution at Sparrows Point. Some of that, like the Great Baltimore Oyster Partnership, is by supporting initiatives that allow new voices to be included. We still have a long way to go. But we’ll continue to collaborate with leaders and communities from Cooperstown, NY, to Virginia Beach to make sure clean, fishable, swimmable water is something we all get to enjoy throughout the watershed.

Imagine 300 kids sharing a single book. In book deserts, or lower-income neighborhoods without walkable libraries or bookstores, this is the average ratio for what’s available per child. But as the founder of Storybook Maze—a local program intent on increasing literary access in underserved communities and helping kids learn to love reading—Baltimore librarian Araba Maze is changing that.

Known for hosting pop-up “street-corner story times” for kids of all ages, the self-described “radical street librarian” has donated thousands of free books to children through pop-up events and a vending machine for picking out books at no cost.

Before you became a librarian, you were a teacher, giving away books to kids from your own home library. How did this evolve into Storybook Maze?
When I first started working as a librarian, I realized that the kids who were coming in weren’t the same ones I was reading to out on my front stoop. I wanted to think of innovative and engaging ways to reintroduce those kids to the idea of reading.

In Baltimore, book access varies by location, with children in the “Black Butterfly” neighborhoods estimated to have fewer books at home. How do you choose your pop-up library locations?
I’m always looking for locations with high foot traffic—where the kids already are and where the community is already going. We focus on Black neighborhoods. But also, we use a book desert [map] from Unite for Literacy, which has identified areas where children are estimated to have between zero and 10 books at home.

What goes into curating your selections?
We know that when kids have books that they can relate to and can see themselves in, they’re more eager to read. For us, this means books with Black characters, who live in neighborhoods like our kids live in, celebrate the same things they do, and reflect their lives. We also talk to community leaders, teachers, and organizations in the area and see where they think kids need support the most. Some kids need more positive affirmations, so we give them a book like I Am Amazing!

This year, you installed a book vending machine at the Randallstown YMCA, with plans for more in the future. What comes next for Storybook Maze?
Right now, we’re doing free pop-up bookstores, where we partner with community organizations to offer a free selection of curated books. Next summer, we hope to start up streetcorner story times again. We’re looking to add a “book bus,” so we can visit multiple locations a day…There are a lot of great organizations that are working toward [youth literacy], but we can do so much more. One of our visions is to make Baltimore “The City That Reads” again.

Last year, the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore was placed under the umbrella of the Greater Baltimore Committee—with the hope that the combined forces of these two vital civic organizations would help the region be even more competitive on a national and global stage. A refreshed mission called for a fresh face, so urbanist Mark Anthony Thomas stepped in to serve as the 68-year-old organization’s new executive.

The 44-year-old Michigan native’s resumé includes more than two decades of experience in urban economic development in various metro areas, including Los Angeles, New York, and, most recently, Pittsburgh, plus degrees from MIT and Columbia University. On top of all that, Thomas is also a published poet, whose spoken word performances are available on Spotify and YouTube.

Business leaders formed the GBC in 1954 to advocate for redevelopment and renewal in Baltimore. How do you want that founding objective to evolve under your leadership?
Part of my message has been that the way civic and economic organizations have evolved across the country is that they’ve become much more visionary—[bringing together] the thought leaders, the conveners, all of the fragmented ecosystems of a region into a place where big things get done. The merger allows us to provide what I truly believe is the reason [for its existence], but in a way that is very collaborative, ambitious, and that people are excited to be a part of.

GBC’s founders focused on “urban renewal”—which is now a loaded term. How does that complicate its current ability to achieve those goals?
I don’t think it does. There’s a lot of baggage in the way we thought about how cities are designed, who they are for, and how regions deal with issues of displacement. We’ve learned in a tough way that the approaches of the past can’t be replicated. It’s about winning trust and delivering in ways that people feel are inclusive and well thought out. We’re also a more diverse society, so a lot has changed in terms of who gets a voice. I want to ensure our work reflects the voice of all the stakeholders who care about the region’s future.

What issues that the GBC traditionally avoided do you think it must help solve to remain relevant?
The biggest is neighborhood redevelopment. You can’t have an environment where we’re creating a ton of job opportunities and leaving neighborhoods in the conditions we inherited. We have to be hands-on in ensuring all of our neighborhoods are vibrant, thriving, and appreciating and creating inclusive wealth, not the status quo…There’s a role for the private sector and the philanthropic community to make a difference. That’s how I envision the role we’ll play.

You’re also a poet. How does exercising your creative instincts help in your professional life?
Before I had the type of influence I have now, I had to earn it through the things that I wrote in the things that I published…That’s given me a lot of patience in how to build trust and awareness. And you’re going to see that translated into how GBC operates.

At only 23 years old, John Tyler already seems to be everywhere. Six years ago, at age 17, the Brooklyn-born, Hoes Heights-raised musician launched the Love Groove Festival, a now-beloved annual local music and art showcase, slated to take place again in September. Since then, Tyler has cranked out a variety of songs, albums, videos, and YouTube series; performed at the likes of Artscape and Firefly; and produced music for other artists, all the while seeking to build a platform for Baltimore’s budding creatives.

This year, he’s busy as ever—curating music for the Orioles, creating his own ice cream flavor at The Charmery, and releasing new EPs—but found time to chat with us about the local scene.

From Brooklyn to Baltimore, what were some of your early music influences?
Music was everywhere, from my mama playing Michael Jackson to going out in the neighborhood, where Lil Wayne was blasting. My grandma and all four of her sisters are professional pianists, so it was always jazz, blues, and classical [at her house]. I didn’t really get into it until Guitar Hero III came out. I ended up playing that game like it was my religion. [Later,] my grandma got me a guitar, and funnily enough, it came naturally, because the game kind of trained me.

How did you come to the local music scene?
That started in high school, when I had more freedom to explore the city. I found myself at the CopyCat, where the underground queer and house scenes were happening. I was going to hip-hop shows in people’s basements. I got a taste for a variety of sounds, cultures, and scenes, and just let it soak in. The Love Groove Festival actually started from seeing all of that and being like, “Why aren’t these people on a real stage with lights and production?” or “Why is this scene predominantly, white, or Black, or Hispanic?” and trying to bring
those communities together.

What makes Baltimore a great place for musicians?
The city has grown so much since I was in high school. Dapper Dan Midas was telling me that he remembers a time when there were no venues, no basement shows—nothing. Like, “It was literally us in the park, rapping to no beats, no speakers, just a cappella.” Now, the city is so connected and everyone is so supportive of each other.

Tell us about your upcoming EP, Men Do Cry.
It started as a joke during a music video shoot for my song, “inToxicated.” There’s a scene where I’m on the ground crying about this girl who broke up with me. My cinematographer jokingly said, “Why are you crying over this? Men don’t do that.” Everyone laughed. But I went home that night, and was like, “Why can’t I cry over a woman that I love?” [Making the EP,] I ended up processing deep memories—things I thought were dreams that ended up being traumas I’d buried because of these ideologies I was taught, like real men are tough. It was such a crazy experience to process all of that and then convey it in the music.

Rahne Alexander is a creative polymath—a singer-songwriter, a writer, a multimedia artist, a performer, an activist. And over the last 20 years in Baltimore, the 53-year-old Baker Artist Award winner has used that talent to become a fixture on the local arts scene, where she regularly performs under her musical persona, the 50-Foot Woman, and also contributes to local publications such as BmoreArt and UMBC Magazine. As a trans woman, she’s also a vocal advocate for the local LGBTQ community. Stay tuned for a new EP from her hard-rock band Santa Librada this summer, as well as a solo residency at The Voxel theater this fall.

Two decades ago, you arrived in Baltimore from California. How did you first realize this city was home?
I visited a friend who had come here for grad school and fell in love with Baltimore. It felt like a place where art, culture, connection, and collaboration all seemed very possible. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that my suspicion has paid off. It’s given me so many opportunities to connect and collaborate with artists across generations and just seep into the energy that comes out of this city.

As a trans woman, how has the local art scene shown support?
The Baltimore scene has been really welcoming for me, in many ways. I remember doing my very first performance here, which was with the Charm City Kitty Club in 2003, and getting offstage and being showered in love and admiration from generations of queer audience members. I was like, “This is what I’ve been looking for.” And that’s persisted ever since.

In California, you advocated for your community through your time as board president of what is now the Santa Cruz Diversity Center. How has art been a means of activism and self-expression, too?
When I was in California in the ’90s, I was turned into an activist by virtue of just being out in the world as a trans woman. I realized quickly that when it came to making political change, I was better suited to doing that on stage than in a courthouse. My best and most effective work was connecting with people on a [more personal] basis, oftentimes connecting with audiences. And that’s more or less what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. When I started doing this, there wasn’t a whole lot of visibility. There weren’t a whole lot of other trans artists doing that. And now there are many, many more, and that’s great. It suggests to me that this is the time for the dialogue to be able to move to the next phase.

How does the Baltimore arts scene fare in terms of fostering inclusivity?
When it comes to curatorial decisions, a lot of times we’re still left out on the margins….Then it becomes a question of: How are we distributing resources? How are we sharing stage time? All these things are really important to keeping everything going for LGBTQ artists. We need to be seen and we need to be heard if we’re going to be able to have careers.

Tell us about your latest EP,  In the Raw.
I recorded 40 songs in two days. It was just me on an electric guitar and my voice. I thought about those early Billy Bragg albums, The Trinity Session by Cowboy Junkies, and a Michelle Shocked record, The Texas Campfire Tapes. You hear the mistakes. You hear the squeaks of the guitar strings and the lyrical missteps. That intimacy is what I really wanted to go for.

For 28 years, Michael Buckley introduced listeners to new kinds of music and interviewed some of the region’s most fascinating people as part of his weekly Sunday Brunch radio program on Annapolis’s late WRNR 103.1 FM. A blend of musical genres and a celebration of the Chesapeake’s vibrant culture, it was a beloved weekly ritual for listeners across Maryland.

Five years after launching the show, Buckley would incorporate a regional interview into each broadcast called “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay,” ultimately interviewing hundreds of the estuary’s most notable subjects, from watermen and environmentalists to Civil Rights leaders and Indigenous tribe elders.

The station went off the air in February, but in Buckley’s state-capital studio, the music and stories play on. Listened to archived episodes via voicesofthechesapeakebay.net and tune into his new show, Americana Voices, on Saturdays at 2 p.m. via 88.5 FM.

What got you interested in interviewing people?
When I was 16, I dropped out of high school and hitchhiked across the country for eight years. I learned how to talk to people. When they pick you up, they want you to talk about yourself, but then it gives you a chance to interview them, too. It taught me a lot. But as time went on, I started to feel like I’d missed a lot by not going to school. I thought knowledge should be shared, it should be available to people of all ages, and we can all learn from each other.

You don’t have a background in broadcasting, but you worked with WRNR for 28 years. How did you get started?
I was running the big music store at the flagship Borders [in Montgomery County] and I put together music programs on new releases, with one panel discussion about the radio revolution. Later, I ended up having a meeting with Jake Einstein [who founded WHFS and later WRNR] and ranted about all the music that wasn’t getting played.

He listened to me contentedly, and after about a half an hour, he said, “You should have a radio show—do you have a tape?” I didn’t. But I said, “Yeah, I got a tape,” and I went home that night and used all these different artists, and he loved it. He put me on Sunday mornings, for a five-hour show, 7 a.m. to 12 noon. And I did that until WRNR went out of business.

What was your vision for the Sunday Brunch?
I have this philosophy, which is free form: a DJ should pick the music right on the spot while they’re doing the show. So I did my thing; I wanted the world to have the experience of listening to all different kinds of music—classical, jazz, folk, blues, mixed together in harmony and in one place…I wanted to get people to look at things from a variety of points of view, and I had a captive audience. The interviews for “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay” were based on this common passion for this Bay that we live around. Everybody’s got a great story to tell. Everybody has twists and turns in their lives that lead to extraordinary moments in a lifetime.

What do you think as you look back at 28 years with WRNR?
Each show is like my child—I can’t pick a favorite. But I’m blessed to have done all of these interviews. I’m enchanted with this country that we live in, which is so rich in stories, so massively beautiful. I wanted to find out if people are basically good people, and I think I’ve found that people are genuinely friendly, impressive, approachable. For me, it’s one form of living a full life. I have gotten to interact with and encourage people to have an awareness of how rich their lives are.

Jennifer Mendelsohn found genealogy by accident. She stumbled upon a documentary about a matzo factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mendelsohn remembered her mom had cousins who lived on the same street, but hadn’t thought about them in years. So, she did what anyone would do—Googled their names and “Rivington Street,” and the 1940 census listing from Ancestry.com popped up. It piqued her journalistic curiosity, so she started looking up other family members.

“The next thing I knew I had completely fallen down the rabbit hole,” says Mendelsohn, an occasional Baltimore contributor and now an expert in the field of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic genealogy.

In partnership with the Center for Jewish History in New York City, you are leading a new worldwide effort to reunite families separated by the Holocaust. The pilot program you co-created, known as the Holocaust Reunion Project, will make commercial DNA kits available free of charge to survivors or their children. How did that come about?
Over the past few years, I’ve taken on a number of pro bono cases helping Holocaust survivors find family—the last few with my research partner, Dr. Adina Newman. We both felt like there should be genealogical support, and particularly genetic genealogical support, available on a wider scale to the survivor community to help restore, in part, precisely what was taken from them: family. We hoped that partnering with an existing Jewish organization would provide resources that would allow us to help more people, and we were thrilled to be able to make that happen through the Center for Jewish History.

Why is it so important to get DNA kits into the hands of survivors?
DNA can be an incredibly powerful tool for making connections and filling in gaps when the genealogical paper trail has been severed. And the Holocaust severed paper trail connections in myriad ways. Part of this project is just making people aware that DNA testing can link you to relatives. So many people don’t bother testing because they mistakenly think it will only tell them their ethnicity, which they already know. Many Holocaust survivors are in the twilight of their lives and have been haunted for decades with questions about relatives. We want to give them the reassurance of knowing they did absolutely everything possible to find family—and the possibility that they might actually make a connection—while we can.

What is your personal connection to the Holocaust and genealogy reunification?
My mother lost her uncle, aunt, and four first cousins in the Holocaust; they were the subject of a well-known book by my brother, Daniel Mendelsohn, called The Lost. But the very first genealogical research project I undertook on my own was discovering that my husband’s 95-year-old grandmother, a Polish Holocaust survivor who lost her entire nuclear family and 99 percent of her extended family, had three living first cousins in the U.S. that she had never known about. Reuniting them after more than 70 years was an incredibly powerful experience for our entire family, and I was hopelessly hooked. We joke that my book will be called The Found.

When her oldest son showed an interest in beekeeping five years ago, Monica Schmitt decided she would learn, too. They signed up together for a course at Carroll Community College through the Carroll County Beekeepers Association, and Schmitt was instantly hooked.

“Our local beekeeping community is amazing,” says Schmitt, now the president of the association. Her interest in bees also coincided with a dark time when she felt like her life had no purpose. “But I woke up every day thinking about my bees,” she says. “I realized it was very impactful in changing my life. It gave me that purpose that I needed.”

Her nonprofit, Mission Beelieve, grew out of that realization. “The bees saved me.”

Your nonprofit works with mostly veterans and first responders. Why those groups?
I’ve worked with a lot of veterans. You could see this lack of purpose in their life when they come home [from deployment]. They have a certain routine that they must follow, and when they aren’t there, those routines aren’t there. They needed a purpose. And that’s what we’re doing with the program.

Why beekeeping?
The beekeeping community is one of the most welcoming places. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, where you live, what you look like—they don’t care. You want to talk about bees? They want to be your friend. It’s a very nondiscriminatory place. And they are always wanting to help.

So this is beekpeeing as therapy?
When bees are happy, they have a light hum. When bees are angry, they have a loud hum. They play off your emotion. So, if you’re having a rough day, those bees will feel it. We teach veterans about the difference in the sounds and smells of a honeybee colony to help understand [how] our emotion plays into their lives. Those bees will bring them back, allow them to refocus. We don’t sit in therapy groups. Instead, they learn how to redirect that negative energy into something positive through beekeeping…Honeybees can teach us a lot. Bees don’t work for themselves—it’s for the whole colony. They work together as a whole to thrive.

How does Mission Beelieve work?
We have veterans from Maryland, but also Connecticut, Kansas, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Utah. We are education-based, so they are learning to be true, successful beekeepers. We provide them with a six-week beginner beekeeping class via Zoom. We have world-famous beekeepers donating their time. They do not get their own bees the first year. Instead, they are partnered up with an experienced beekeeper and they go into their apiaries. We have 48 mentors and 63 veterans right now.

I assume you get something out of this besides just great honey.
We launched two years ago and haven’t looked back. We are changing people’s lives and we see the impact it’s making…It’s worth every moment of tears and frustration and bee stings and drops of wax all over the floor.

At the end of a long, weathered dock at the Middle Branch Marina in Cherry Hill sits the future home of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative. For years, during a weekly get-together with friends, its co-founders discussed the lack of diversity in their respective fields—Rona Kobell is a former journalist for the Sun and Bay Journal; Donzell Brown Jr. has a background in politics, community leadership, and environmental policy.

How, they wondered, could they share their connections and resources to get to the heart of this issue? Set into motion after the death of George Floyd, they launched EJJI in January 2021, with a goal of creating an online platform for Black and Brown youth to share their own environmental stories, report on those that directly impact their neighborhoods, and gain skillsets—from editing and multimedia to even scientific methods through the group’s waterfront headquarters—for a variety of career paths. On a summer visit, one intern was testing water quality for local oysters.

Tell me about the significance of this location.
RK: You can really see all of Baltimore from this one place. A lot of the city has become severed from the water one way or another, be it by highways or development. It’s very hard to get access, unless you’re extremely wealthy, and we’re hoping this place can get the community involved and better connect us to the nature and maritime history of Baltimore.

How do you see the intersection between journalism and environmental justice here?
RK: To have this site to train young journalists about the stories of Baltimore is really special, because you’re really able to see this panoramic view of both the city’s promise and its problematic past. I think there are a lot of stories to be told just in this marina. When we think about seafood, we tend to write off the city’s largely Black fishing community. There are guys here who have been crabbing for decades and they learned how from their dads or their moms.

How did you meet?
DB: We have a group of friends who met pretty much every Friday. Politicians, professionals, scientists, journalists, community leaders. A lot of time, we were sitting around a table complaining about issues in Baltimore and across the state—about diversity and science and journalism and the lack of diversity in reporting on environmental justice. As you said, many environmental stories have been done about fishermen with their weathered white faces. But those stories impact these communities just as much, if not more.

Partnering with students through local schools and other environmental organizations like the National Aquarium and the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), the concept has evolved beyond just being a journalism platform. How would you describe your goal today?
RK: We probably weren’t thinking big enough at the beginning. We don’t just do journalism. We’re not trying to be a news organization. We’re unapologetically an environmental justice organization. We do have a point of view. We want better things for these communities that have been marginalized. We want to help people find their voices and tell their own stories, as opposed to how traditional journalism outfits work, where they come from the top down.

DB: Journalism will always be at the heart of EJJI, but [now] we’re approaching it more like a think tank…We’re trying to create a community and a platform for a group of underserved people where they can share the work that they are doing, as well as a support system.

With the help of EJJI’s board, you plan to share your own respective connections and resources with these students. How have you experienced a lack of diversity in your careers?
DB: In many instances, I have been the only one in the room who looks like me. That’s often difficult. I empathize with these students because I know they have a long bright career ahead of them and I know that room is going to be less and less diverse as they grow up.

RK: It took me a long time to figure out in my own reporting that I was excluding people. As a Chesapeake Bay reporter, I covered oysters, crabs, watermen. My stories were mostly about white people. But over time, I’ve seen that things like climate change and sea-level rise have disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities, I wasn’t there to write that story and I should’ve been…These communities deserve sustainable coverage about these issues. And I realized that my better purpose is to not do it all myself, but to teach people the skills, which will hopefully lead to a richer story.

As an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Christine Chen spends her days poring through research proposals from the world’s astronomers and astrophysicists—all eager for time on NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), considered the most powerful technology of its kind in history. Launched on December 25, the $10 billion telescope, now hurtling through space to a destination one million miles away, promises to answer questions about the origins of our universe.

What most excites you about the telescope?
JWST will probe farther back in time than any other instrument to see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. The universe is expanding, and these distant galaxies are flying away from us at tremendous speeds. With the telescope’s use of infrared wave lengths, we can peer into these galaxies at the edge of time and advance our understanding of galaxy evolution—and how the universe evolved from those first galaxies 100 million years after the Big Bang to the galaxies we see today.

We’ll also learn a tremendous amount about exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system that orbit a star, and the composition of their atmospheres. This field has grown immensely since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet in the mid-1990s. Since then, we’ve discovered more than 4,000, which has led to exponential growth in our understanding of planets. With JWST, that growth will continue to expand our knowledge, likely in a mindboggling way.

For example, we might learn what happens, say, on an extremely hot planet with a temperature of 1,700 kelvin, or 2,600.33 degrees Fahrenheit, versus planets with temperatures more like Earth, at 300 kelvin, or 80.33 degrees Fahrenheit. At 1,700 kelvin, silicates condense to make up the mineral olivine and gemstone peridot—deposits that cause the green sand beaches of Hawaii. So, we can imagine that there might be green clouds of peridot on these planets or something totally unlike what we see on Earth.

The international astronomy community awaited the launch of JWST for a long time. Tell us about the wait—and how it feels to have the telescope off the ground.
When I joined the mission in 2008, JWST was scheduled to launch in 2014 but ran into a whole series of setbacks. One challenge involved the telescope’s enormous sun shield. Made of five thin layers, each the size of a tennis court, the sun shield launched in a folded position and needed to unfurl in space, with hundreds of motors and actuators syncing to make it happen. When they tested it on the ground, the sun shield tore, and they had to patch it. This, in itself, caused a number of delays. On December 31, 2021, the sun shield deployed successfully in space. Now that we’re a few months in, we’re past the big milestones involving scary engineering. We can breathe a huge sigh of relief—and just get excited about the work of tens of thousands of people’s efforts coming to fruition.

With scientists worldwide clamoring to use the telescope for research purposes, how do you decide who uses JWST?
JWST is an “open skies telescope,” which means anybody can submit a proposal to use it, and data collected will be shared with the world as soon as possible so everyone can analyze and learn from it. But the telescope is in high demand, and time is limited. We use a double-blind peer-review process to remove bias from our proposal selection. This means we don’t know the scientist or institution submitting the proposal—a process that, we hope, will enable younger people and smaller institutions, not just the big R1 research institutions, to be more successful proposers. Another goal is to lower the success rate disparity between men and women.

How does it feel for you personally to be at the center of such a bold endeavor?
It’s tremendously exciting to work with the forward-thinking optimism that comes with everyone daydreaming about how our findings will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. It’s easy to get lost as a scientist, with your head down in analysis. But this reminds us that science is a human endeavor that pushes the frontier of knowledge.

We have to ask: do you expect to find life?
I think we’ll take a step in that direction, but I worry about people setting their expectations that we will definitively find life. It’s safe to say we’re looking for what we know are astrobiological-relevant molecules [which signal life] in these planets, but planets in their unique atmospheres are complex systems, and interpreting what we find will be complicated. Take, for example, when they searched for life in our own solar system and sent the Viking landers to Mars in the 1970s. They discovered that the chemistry of the planet was totally different, so the experiment they designed to work on Earth didn’t work on Mars. The challenge will be getting past ourselves and our limited experience with only one way of life. The universe has so many unimagined possibilities.

When can the public expect to see the first images?
Six months after the launch, at the end of June, NASA will share what they call “early release observations” to give everyone a flavor of the kinds of images and information JWST can generate. We can expect to see some gorgeous, newsworthy pictures at that time, while getting a sense of what’s to come.

Thanks to global demand, aquaculture, aka the farming of seafood, has quickly become the world’s fastest growing food system, and Eastern Shore native Imani Black is working to ensure that more minorities are included in the conversation. An alum of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), and currently a faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory, the 26-year-old oyster farmer has launched a nonprofit aimed at nurturing a more diverse and inclusive industry, while also honoring the historic contributions of African Americans on the Chesapeake Bay.

What was your first connection to the water?
Since childhood, my family and I would always go down to the Chestertown wharf [on the Eastern Shore] and fish on Sundays after church. When I was seven, I went to an overnight environmental science camp at the Horn Point Laboratory [of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge]. We learned all about striped bass, blue crabs, oysters, submerged aquatic vegetation. I was an active kid who loved being outside and on the water. I just understood it. From there, I got into 4-H and community cleanups and volunteering, and it just stuck with me.

You graduated with a degree in marine biology at the Old Dominion University in Virginia before pursuing a career in aquaculture, working with two strong women-led teams at CBF and VIMS. When did you connect that there were still not enough women, let alone women of color, in this industry?
After college, I worked at an oyster farm in Virginia and got smacked in the face being the only woman. I was coming out of playing Division 1 lacrosse, but I’d be carrying totes from one end of the dock to the other and three guys would be like, “Oh no, no, that’s too heavy.” The owner would say, all hands on deck, but not you, this is a man’s job.

It was frustrating. The only other people of color I saw were Hispanic and African-American men who were laborers on the farm. I had just one girl of color in my marine classes in college. But growing up on the Eastern Shore, I was the token Black girl most of the times. My lacrosse team was white. My coaches were white. My teachers were white. I was comfortable in that role. It didn’t affect me until later on.

What made you start to see it differently?
Because I’d been the token, I never really wanted to call things racist. If somebody was being a certain way, I’d be like, maybe they’re just having a bad day. But eventually I got to the place [in my career] where I’d done all I could do, been a great employee, showed up my best, worked on myself, and still kept hitting walls. That’s when I really had to be like, okay, maybe…

When did the idea for Minorities in Aquaculture come about?
I actually had the semi-idea last January. I had seen this Netflix show, Chef’s Table, with Mashama Bailey, a Black chef in Savannah, Georgia, who converted a once-segregated Greyhound bus station into a five-star gourmet restaurant. In her episode, there are two Black oyster farmers, which was the first time I’d ever seen a Black-owned oyster farm. I asked myself when the last time was that I saw a person of color in a leadership role in aquaculture.

Then May came. Ahmaud Arbery was probably the one that really shifted my view, because when I found out, I had just gotten back from a jog. It became so real. The few in our industry who put out statements [following the death of George Floyd] talked about conferences and forums to make aquaculture more diverse. I thought, what are people who don’t even look like me going to do? A lot of Black scientists had the same thought at the same time, with like 12 organizations being formed last summer. Black By Nature. Black Birders. Black in Marine Science. I knew when I started MIA that it was a lot bigger than me. And if you don’t do it, who’s going to?

What are some of the biggest obstacles for minorities entering marine sciences?
Exposure. A lot of people, let alone people of color, don’t know what aquaculture is. They don’t know that more than 50 percent of the seafood that we eat is farm raised. And when you’re not from an area that has a connection to the water, how can we ever expect you to? We can’t ask people to be biologists or conservationists if they don’t understand their environment.

Also, representation. I had an interview at the Hudson Valley Steelhead Trout Farm facility in upstate New York and saw one Black lady who worked there. When I got the job, I took every chance I could get to talk to her. I can only imagine what more experiences like that would mean for the industry.

What has it been like to find resources and even members for MIA?
Super hard. People generally think there’s some list of Black women that I have in my back pocket. I’m like, do you know any black women? Please, give them my name! We’re starting from the ground up with a few PhD students. We can support their research and be a soundboard. Right now, we’re looking at battling some of the obstacles they face in this industry.

You’ve also been diving into the history of Black watermen on the Chesapeake, which includes your own family. How have you gone about your research?
I first learned about Kermit Travers—this highly respected Black skipjack captain from Blackwater, where I had been driving every single day for work. Then I came across Vincent Leggett and his Blacks of the Chesapeake organization, where I really learned from his writing about where we had been and what we had done.

I’m not doing something new; I’m doing something that was a part of my family and so many other people’s families for centuries. There are 12 active Black captains on the Chesapeake today, all over the age of 60, and we used to have 900. This is a part of our history that’s actively dying, and there have been thousands of stories of Black watermen that have never been written. It’s about getting more people of color involved, but also preserving this history.