When Heather Warnken was named executive director of the University of Baltimore School of Law’s (UBalt) new Center for Criminal Justice Reform (CCJR) at the beginning of 2022, it was a homecoming in more ways than one. Not only was Warnken born and raised in Baltimore and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, but her father, Byron Warnken, spent four decades at UBalt’s School of Law.

“It was always very meaningful for me to come back to Baltimore to this dream job, but the significance of that deepened,” Warnken says, when her father passed away shortly after her appointment.

Warnken, an alum of the U.S. Department of Justice and Berkeley’s Warren Institute, has focused her career on addressing the harm caused by the criminal legal system and promoting healing within marginalized communities, work she continues at CCJR.

“Our mission is to advance public safety and address the harm and inequity caused by the criminal legal system,” says Warnken. “Working toward a more fair and equitable society and criminal legal system will not just address those harms, but will ultimately make us safer.”

This translates into policy reform work and student-facing work at the law school, where they’re training the next generation of lawyers.

“Our student fellows are researching and writing,” says Warnken, “and helping to shape laws in real time in Maryland on these issues. We really view our responsibility to be of service first and foremost in our own backyard.”

Warnken and her crew keep extraordinarily busy—as of April, they’d filed testimony on over two dozen bills, including the Victim Compensation Reform Act of 2024. She describes the center as doing “multi-system, collaborative, problem-solving across what are often such siloed spaces.”

Says Warnken, who was recently named to the Task Force to Study Transparency Standards for State’s Attorneys by Gov. Wes Moore, “I love bringing a collaborative lens to the policy reform work we do.”

One day at the Islamic school near her village in northern Afghanistan, Soraya Hosseini made friends with a new girl, “my mosque-mate,” who soon told the inquisitive Soraya that she also attended a public school.

“She just said, ‘You can come with me,’” Soraya recalls, sitting in an empty, six-floor classroom of the University of Baltimore School of Law. “I later followed her to the school, and she told me that her mom was a teacher. For me, that was shocking. I’d never heard of a woman teacher. I never heard of public schools.”

Soraya’s father, a farmer, and mother, a homemaker, did not read or write, and none of her four older siblings ever attended public school. Her Kunduz Province village didn’t even have a public school until 2003-2004, after U.S. troops had dislodged the Taliban, the fourth-year evening law student explains.

When she confided to a sister that she’d started going to school with her friend, she was told she must not let anyone find out. Her uncle, a fundamentalist with multiple wives, would kill her if he learned. A sympathetic village woman sewed her a uniform, which she carried in a bag to and from classes. Pencils and books stayed at school, a practice that continued for a half-dozen years.

“Girls, and there were only a few, had to graduate by 14. That’s when they are supposed to get married.”

To avoid that fate—her mother was wed at 13—Soraya moved to Kabul to help her sister and husband with their small children. But with an ulterior motive. Away from her village, she continued her education, studying and later teaching law, while also advocating on behalf of oppressed women, including some imprisoned over “moral” crimes.

Tragically, during a brief return to her village in late 2015, a rocket destroyed her family’s house, killing her father. The attack, she believes, was directed by the Taliban because she’d gone to school and worked with U.S. humanitarian groups. Recognizing she had to flee her country, she arrived at Dulles in January 2017 with a temporary visa, little money, and a few words of English. (Her name has been changed in this story out of fear of further retribution. Soraya has not had contact with her family since leaving Afghanistan.) When she asked an airport taxi driver to take her to the asylum office, he drove her to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration field office in Baltimore.

“It was such a long drive, I thought I’d been kidnapped,” she says, wiping away tears before smiling in disbelief at the journey to the place she now calls home.

Today, more than 500 Afghan refugees live in Baltimore, almost all resettled by the International Rescue Committee since 2022 and the end of the 20-year war.

When Soraya came, there was no Afghan diaspora community, however. Turned away at the asylum office, which does not accept walk-ins, she spent months in homeless shelters. Eventually, she was introduced to several local nuns, who offered temporary accommodations at their convent.

“People began to ask if I was going to become a nun because I was living with them,” says Soraya, a practicing Muslim. “They were wonderful.”

They put her in touch with the Asylee Women Enterprise, a Catholic-associated Baltimore nonprofit that helps asylum seekers, foreign-born survivors of human trafficking, and other forced migrants rebuild their lives. They connected her to the University of Dayton, where she initially earned a master’s degree in law before landing a city government job and applying to UBalt. This year, she became the first recipient of a UBalt scholarship established by lobbyist Bruce Bereano and his son, Judge Bryon Bereano, a UBalt law grad.

She’ll take the Maryland bar exam in July.

Meanwhile, she has served as interpreter for recent Afghan immigrants and has her share of “Smalltimore” moments as well. “I’m still in touch with the nuns, but everywhere you go in Baltimore, you see people you know.”

Soraya acknowledges bouts of depression, particularly when obstacles have seemed overwhelming. But she also sees negative portrayals of Baltimore and believes there’s hope in her story.

“I love Baltimore and I love that it’s diverse,” she says. “It’s a beautiful place and it has a lot of people who are really kind. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

When asked if there have been any new developments beyond graduation plans, she adjusts her head scarf and smiles again.

“I bought a car. I’m the first in my family to drive now, too.”

Former Baltimore City mayor Catherine Pugh was sentenced to three years in prison and three years probation Thursday as a result of conspiracy and tax evasion charges resulting from the sale of her Healthy Holly children’s books. Prosecutors were seeking a five-year sentence, and Pugh faced a maximum of 30 years in prison. Pugh will also be forced to pay restitution to the University of Maryland Medical Center and Maryland Auto Insurance, two of the organizations she sold books to. All copies of Healthy Holly in government custody will be destroyed.

Much has been speculated upon regarding how much time—if any—Pugh would serve in prison, and if the sentence delivered by U.S. District Judge Deborah Chasnow would send a message intended to prevent further political corruption in Baltimore.

“If you hold yourself up to a higher office, you’ve got to hold yourself up to a higher standard,” says Michael B. Runnels, associate professor of law and social responsibility at Loyola University Maryland. “Mayor Pugh is just the latest in a series of mayors who have run afoul in these types of getting a hand caught in the cookie jar dynamic.”

Pugh’s dealings are the latest in a series of corruption scandals involving local officials. In 2017, Gary Brown, a Pugh aide who has also been implicated in the Healthy Holly scandal, was charged with making illegal campaign contributions. In 2018, former Maryland senator Nathaniel Oaks was sentenced to three and half years in prison on corruption charges. Earlier this year, Tawanna Gaines, a former Maryland state lawmaker, was sentenced to six months in prison for wire fraud. Also earlier this year, Cheryl Glenn, a former Balitmore state delegate, pled guilty to taking bribes for political favors.

“It gets exhausting to see this unrelenting negative press in Baltimore,” Runnels says. “It’s almost like we take one step forward and two steps back.”

When asked his thoughts on Pugh’s sentencing earlier this week, Baltimore mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young offered no comment. In a statement, City Council President Brandon Scott did not specifically share his thoughts on Pugh’s sentencing, but offered that the occasion marked “an opportunity to move forward” for her and the city.
But in the past several weeks, local politicians including Kweisi Mfume, who recently won the Democratic nomination to succeed Congressman Elijah Cummings, and friends of the mayor, like former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, have requested leniency for Pugh. On the eve of the sentencing, Pugh’s lawyers released a 13-minute video in which she asks for forgiveness. At the sentencing hearing, they referenced Pugh’s public service to Baltimore and dedication to the city as reasons why she should not receive heavy prison time.

But in issuing her verdict, Chasanow sent a clear message that the extent and depth of Pugh’s crimes warranted multiple years of prison time.

“Public corruption should be treated with great scrutiny and seriousness,” says Roger Hartley, the dean of College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. “Especially in a situation like this where there was some real forethought behind selling books to large donors who might then be in a position for currying favor for contracts later with the city.”

Pugh’s sentencing wraps up an almost year-long saga, as The Sun first reported on the scandal in March of 2019. For Hartley, the conclusion of the former mayor’s trial marks the closing of a chapter, as the city looks forward toward a mayoral election.

“After this decision, so many people in the city want to move forward with a strong new mayor and a strong government that is transparent, legitimate, and trustworthy,” he says. “I think that’s what the voters, businesses, and citizens of this city are looking for right now.”

Visual Art

Maren Hassinger: The Spirit of Things
Maren Hassinger’s four-decade career in art is rooted in sculpture and dance. A selection of her sculptures, made with wire rope, plastic bags, and newspapers, are on exhibit in the Contemporary Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art in the solo show The Spirit of Things. Some have been reconfigured for this exhibition, which also contains video installations of her performance art and dance. She’s also known for her role at the Maryland Institute College of Art as director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture, which she has served since 1997. July 18-Nov. 25, performance and conversation with the artist at 3 p.m. Sept. 8. BMA, 10 Art Museum Drive.

ISLA: Regarding Paradise
Ironically, the etymology of the word “paradise” goes back to its Greek and Old Iranian roots meaning “walled enclosure.” In this group exhibit at Towson University, curated by Baltimore artist Jackie Milad, contemporary artists working in an array of mediums examine the figurative and literal walls that enclose the pristine beach images of the Caribbean islands, a place that has worked toward political autonomy and environmental justice. Sept.7-Oct. 20. Reception on Sept. 6. Center for the Arts Gallery at Towson University, 8000 York Rd., Towson.

DOS-à-DOS
Baltimore artists L. Nef’fahtiti Partlow-Myrick and Jenny O’Grady met as students in the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts master’s program at the University of Baltimore and will now exhibit the fruits of their labor: a collection of art books, made from a variety of materials both traditional and unorthodox (paper—but also metal and beans, for example). The show’s title references a bookbinding technique that ties together two text blocks with a shared spine-that spine being the MFA program, in this context. Sept. 7-30. Hamilton Gallery, 5502 Harford Road.

Baker Artist Awards 2017 & 2018
Recent Baker Awards awardees—Abraham Burickson (interdisciplinary, 2018), Sara Dittrich (interdisciplinary, 2017), David Marion (visual art, 2017), and Amy Sherald (visual art, 2018)—will show work in an exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Included in the show will be Burickson’s “The Odyssey Works Box,” an archival box filled with books, photographs, and other ephemera, accompanied by a video tour of the history of the arts collective Odyssey Works; Dittrich’s wall sculptures, arranged with hundreds of clay ears; Marion’s multimedia sculptures “Extinction Event” and “Fracking,” which explore violence perpetrated on the natural environment; and two portraits by Sherald. Sept. 12-Oct. 14, with a free opening event with performances on Sept. 13. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

Balancing Act
Joseph Paul Cassar has been working in Baltimore for 13 years as a visual artist and art historian, and is a professor at the University of Maryland University College. He’s shown his work around the world, and this month will exhibit in our city, when Y:ART Gallery in Highlandtown shows his recent work in Balancing Act—drawings in ink and pastel, paper cut-outs, collage, and acrylic on canvas. Sept. 12-Oct. 20, opening reception from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 15, artist talk from 4-6 p.m. Oct. 13. Y:Art Gallery, 3402 Gough St.

Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day
Renowned contemporary artist Mark Bradford represented the U.S. at the 2017 Venice Biennale and will bring that work to Baltimore for the exhibit Tomorrow is Another Day, accompanied by a new site-specific installation, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Bradford explores themes from his personal life, black identity, Greek mythology, and the universe through mixed-media pieces, paintings, and video. Sept. 23, 2018-March 3, 2019; opening celebration, 1-5 p.m. Sept. 23. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

What Makes Us (Us)
Gina Pierleoni exhibits some 200 paintings and mixed-media portraits of people encountered over a 25-year period in Baltimore and beyond. She’ll lead a coinciding workshop which will include live music to help to dig deeper into questions of place and perception. Aug. 25-Sept. 29; workshop, 6-7:30 p.m. Sept. 15. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

AfriCOBRA: The Evolution of a Movement
This group exhibit at Galerie Myrtis celebrates artists in AfriCOBRA, aka African Commune for Bad Relevant Artists, a coalition that was born from the black arts movement that began in the 1960s and is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. The aesthetic of these artists emerged from activism and aims to speak to black people specifically. The show will display paintings, photographs, prints, and 3-D pieces by the group’s earliest and most recent members, including Akili Ron Anderson, Kevin Cole, Adger Cowans, Michael D. Harris, Napoleon Jones-Henderson (founding member), James Phillips, Frank Smith, Nelson Stevens (founding member), and Renee Stout. Coinciding programming will include Tea with Myrtis (as in, founding director of Galerie Myrtis, Myrtis Bedolla) and an art salon with AfriCOBRA members who will talk about their artwork and its impact on the black arts movement. Sept. 15-Oct. 17, with an opening reception from 5-7 p.m. Sept. 15. Galerie Myrtis Fine Art, 2224 N. Charles St.

Music

Taste of Tuva
Celebrated artist Joyce Scott will host this special evening featuring the music, art, and food of Asia. Alash Ensemble, a trio of throat singers from the Central Asian state of Tuva, will bring both their music and culinary specialties, while collaborating with Baltimore musicians Shodekeh and J Pope. The event supports the Asian Arts & Culture Center at Towson University. 6-9 p.m. Sept. 15. TU South Campus Pavilion at Towson University, 8000 York Rd.

Abdu Ali’s Last Show of 2018
Baltimore music artist Abdu Ali will perform their last live show of the year this month at Metro Gallery, joined by Kotic Couture (hip-hop with pop, Baltimore club, and underground art influences), Pamela_ and her sons (the solo music project of Alessandra Hoshor), and W00dy (Philadelphia-based experimental pop artist). 8 p.m. Sept. 5. Metro Gallery, 1700 N. Charles St.

BeatClub at the Lewis
Over the years, Bmore BeatClub has met regularly inside clubs, bars, and initially a record shop to celebrate hip-hop and beats. Novice artists rap alongside experts at these gatherings, and this month’s event will be extra special, as Bmore BeatClub will bring hip-hop, spoken word, and poetry to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. 7 p.m. Sept. 28. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.

Theater

Fades and Fellowship Barbershop Stories
Barbershops are places of conversation and camaraderie—and from this idea came the production Barbershop Stories by Baltimore-based theater troupe Fades & Fellowship. A cast of real barbers will perform the stories overheard in the shop—and then give actual haircuts to selected audience members. Sept. 28. The Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Literary Arts

CityLit Swing: A Special Celebration Honoring Kwame Alexander
CityLit will honor poet, educator and New York Times bestselling children’s author Kwame Alexander with its Chic Dambach Award for Service to the Literary Arts during a celebratory evening at The Motor House. Sliding-Scale tickets are available for this CityLit fundraiser, which will include lite fare, libations, jazz, and a reading by Alexander. 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Sept. 13. The Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Small Press Expo
The annual Small Press Expo celebrates indie cartooning and comic arts, bringing more than 4,000 creatives to Bethesda for readings, workshops, and to meet with one another. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sept. 15 and noon-6 p.m. Sept. 16. Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, 5701 Marinelli Road, North Bethesda

Miscellanea

Mortified: Share the Shame
Everyday adults share their most mortifying moments via teenage diary entries, poems, love letters, lyrics, and locker notes in this popular show. 6 and 8 p.m. Sept. 22. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Mono Practice
Founding director Ruri Yi is opening a new contemporary art gallery, Mono Practice, in Station North this month, with a focus on abstract and reductive art. The inaugural exhibit, Pointing To The Sun | An Exercise In Abstraction, is curated by Rod Malin and will feature work by Baltimore-based artists David Brown, Zoë Charlton, Ariel Cavalcante Foster, Terence Hannum, Stephen Hendee, Bill Schmidt, and Yi. Sept. 6-Oct. 13, with an opening reception from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 6. Mono Practice, 212 McAllister St.

Siobhan Hagan digs Elvis and Polaroid photos. She has a metal Scooby-Doo lunch box. She wears 1950s dresses and vintage sweaters, and when the 33-year-old’s grandmother passed away, “I moved everything from her house into mine,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. The confessed “old stuff nerd” was born in the city and earned a graduate degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis there was built around the archives of WJZ-TV, which proved a fortuitous decision. The station hit the airwaves in 1948, and 70 years is a long time, enough for film to deteriorate and oxide particles to fall off magnetic television tape.

Hagan had grown up watching WJZ—“My mom turned on Rise and Shine every morning, it was my alarm clock as a kid”—and founded the nonprofit Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) two years ago. In the process, she acquired WJZ’s archives, then being stored, but without a plan to preserve the collection, at the University of Baltimore. Hagan is in the process of digitizing as much of the 25,000-piece acquisition as she can before the early footage and videotapes disintegrate.

On a recent night in Hampden, Hagan screened some WJZ throwback tapes as part of a fundraising effort. Highlights included Eyewitness News coverage of Hurricane Agnes in 1972, Richard Sher and Oprah Winfrey hosting People Are Talking, Chuck Thompson recapping the O’s stunning World Series sweep in 1966, irrepressible weatherman Marty Bass ditching his hairpiece, behind-the-scenes clips of The Buddy Deane Show—the inspiration for John Waters’ Hairspray—and Romper Room with Nancy Rogers Claster. Plus, Jerry Turner burying his head into the anchor desk in uncontrollable laughter after a rabbi’s son made funny faces, unbeknownst to his father, to the camera throughout an entire Hanukkah segment.

Beside the time-capsule clips of life in Charm City, which also include WJZ’s disco-era Evening Magazine, is footage from the ’68 riots, investigative pieces on racial issues and public housing, and, of course, coverage of the colorful 44th mayor of Baltimore, one William Donald Schaefer.

“People’s memories are sensitive to time, and these [tapes and films] are, too. They don’t last forever. They’re endangered,” says Rob Schoeberlein, who oversees the cavernous Baltimore City Archives in Better Waverly, which houses MARMIA’s office and the WJZ collection. “Normally, when we think of archiving material, it’s manuscripts, letters, legal documents, and photographs. This is now important material, too.”

Beyond MARMIA’s WJZ-TV collection, the nonprofit gathers other local films, found VHS tapes, recorded sound and mixtapes, and home movies in an effort to document the arts, history, and culture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Hagan will even digitize old wedding films—as long as MARMIA gets to keep a copy.

One couple, in their 80s, Hagan recalls, had never seen their wedding film—shot by the bride’s father and essentially lost for six decades—until their daughter rediscovered it and asked Hagan to digitize it. They all watched it for the first time last fall on a pop-up screen at the City Archives building.

“My parents had been bickering during the ride down. Over what, who knows? Just the way old couples do,” Susan Hebble says. “They were married in 1956, and the reception had been at the Casablanca, a jazz club in Liberty Heights that later became the Sportsman’s Lounge when former Colt Lenny Moore bought it. Zim Zemarel’s swing band played—you could see the name on the drum kit.”

Hebble says her family watched the film again over Christmas, and then again during her mother’s funeral this spring. “My mother had begun having some memory issues by the time we went [to the City Archives], but she had none while looking at their wedding. Everything came back, and she became her normal, bubbly self again. The whole way home, my parents were very romantic toward each other. My dad told my mother he had forgotten how beautiful she was.”

Visual Art

Reflections: Intimate Portraits of Iconic African Americans
Photographer Terrence A. Reese’s career has led him to take portraits of such stars as Lauryn Hill and George Clinton. The artist, who goes by TAR, will exhibit a selection of his work at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum this month in the show Reflections: Intimate Portraits of Iconic African Americans. Black-and-white images will depict such luminaries as the Nicholas Brothers and Gordon Parks in their natural environments and living spaces so as to better reflect who they are, through their personal objects, style, and the context of their lives. Wednesdays through Sundays, Feb. 1 through Aug. 12, at Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.

Artist talk with Shirin Neshat
Iranian artist Shirin Neshat explores gender, identity, and politics in her work, as well as the differences in culture between the West and Muslim countries. Because she tackles such complex themes, there is no shortage of questions and discussion surrounding her work. It also makes her a perfect candidate for MICA’s Mixed Media lecture series, which brings to Baltimore artists from across the globe. For this installment, Neshat will be in conversation with Baltimore Museum of Art Director Christopher Bedford. 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount  Mount Royal Ave.

Music

Charm City Django Jazz Fest
Nothing like some live gypsy jazz to add a little heat to a cold winter’s day. Creative Alliance has got us covered with not one but three days of its annual Charm City Django Jazz Fest, which will bring in acts from across the region and world, including headliner Samson Schmiit, a legendary Manouche gypsy guitarist from France. Swing on by to see Sara L’abriola, Ultrafaux, ‘Nuff Said, and others, to experience a range of styles within the genre. Feb. 23 to 25 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Out of Darkness: Two Remain
A new opera looks at what you might consider atypical Holocaust survivors: one, a political prisoner, and the other a homosexual Protestant, both of whom used words to overcome the traumas of captivity during the war. World-renowned composer Jake Heggie developed the two-act opera based on the true stories of these characters who “survive through their poetry,” says Garnett Bruce, stage director of the Peabody Chamber Opera’s production of the piece. Feb. 8 through 11 at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. The composer and librettist will attend opening night, with a talk following the show.

Theater

Constellations & Crossroads
Constellations & Crossroads is a theatrical double-header steeped in American history and exploding with life. Baltimore Rock Opera Society partnered with Arena Players, Baltimore’s historic African-American community theater, to present two short musicals in their entirety, backed by a live band. The Determination of Azimuth tells the story of Katherine Johnson, a black mathematician who worked for NASA and was responsible for comp[uting paths for rocket ships sent into space. Battle of Blue Apple Crossing leans more on fiction to tell the tale of blues legend Robert Johnson, said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical ability. The score follows America’s musical heritage from field spirituals to rock ’n’ roll to garage rock. 8 p.m. Feb. 9 through 18 at Arena Players’ venue at 801 McCulloh St.

All She Must Possess
The Rep Stage premiere of All She Must Possess tells the story of Baltimore’s famed Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, extravagant world travelers and collectors of art and curios. During the early 20th century, they stored thousands of paintings—including work by Matisse and Picasso, among other greats—in their homes, amassing what would become one of the world’s largest collections of modern art (a large portion would eventually be housed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it is today). In the theatrical version of their lives, written by University of Maryland Baltimore County professor Susan McCully and directed by Rep Stage artistic director Joseph W. Ritsch, paintings come to life and Gertrude Stein—Etta’s lover—makes an appearance. Coinciding with the play is an exhibition of historical women’s clothing from the Cone sisters’ time, on display at Howard Community College’s Rouse Company Foundation Gallery through March 11. The play runs Feb. 8 to 25 at Rep Stage at Howard Community College.

Dance

The Community Project
Each year, The Collective pulls together dancers from the community and pairs them with a professional choreographer to develop the Community Project performance. This year, 22 dancers—ranging in age from teens to baby boomers and across all skill levels—met on several cold January weekends to rehearse under dancer Caitlin McAfee for this year’s show, which is but one component to the Baltimore Dance Invitational. Set to Indian Wells’ song “Cascades,” the group will show through movement how the mind races, gets distracted, and follows its own trails of thought. Gordon Center for Performing Arts on Thursday, February 15, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts, 3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills. 

Beyonce vs Rihanna Dance Party: Round 2
The Ottobar event flier states it best: “Are you ‘Drunk In Love’ or ‘Drunk On Love’?!” At the Beyonce vs Rihanna Dance Party, that is precisely the question. And also, are you ready to duke it out—through dance, of course, to support your diva de jour. The dance party battle will light up with Beyonce tracks from DJ Mills and Rihanna tracks from Ottobar owner Craig Boarman. 9 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St.

Miscellanea

African-American Arts Festival
The University of Baltimore helps us to celebrate Black History Month specifically through art at its annual African-American Arts Festival. Its offerings span an array of artistic mediums: film, visual art, music, theater. Some highlights: a panel with Black Ladies Brunch Crew of D.C., an African drumming circle, readings of Langston Hughes poetry spliced with live, improvised jazz piano, and a screening of Jonathan Demme’s film of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Feb. 15 to 18 at the University of Baltimore, 1420 N. Charles St.

Exhibit of Original Costumes

We may be 2,500 miles from Hollywood, but John Klisavage brings us a touch of its wonder by way of costume. At his bookstore in Havre De Grace, he’s displaying several outfits worn in major motion pictures, including Hunger Games and The Notebook. February and March at Washington Street Books & Music, 131 N. Washington St., Havre De Grace.

A culinary documentary on Basque cuisine
Parkway Theater has teamed up with a local restaurant to bring a food and film pairing, naturally. After a screening of The Txoko Experience: The Secret Culinary Space of The Basques, scriptwriter Marcela Garces and director Yuri Morejon will answer any questions the audience has, and then . . . everyone can partake in the food portion of the evening: passed pintxos from the Basque-inspired La Cuchara restaurant. Renowned Basque chefs serve as narrators of the culinary documentary, which explores Txokos, groups of people who gather to explore innovative and experimental ways of cooking. As Morejon puts it, “Txokos represent a distinctive, albeit enigmatic element of Basque gastronomy. As the private temples of traditional Basque cuisine, they captivate people with their warmth, ambiance, and great respect for fresh products.” 7 p.m. Feb. 22 Parkway Theater, 5 W. North Ave.

Derick Ebert dreamed of being many things, like an athlete at Baltimore City College, maybe a football or basketball star, rushing for 100 yards or hitting a winning three-pointer at the buzzer.

He wound up on the debate team.

“It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me,” says Ebert, who became the city’s first Youth Poet Laureate last year. “Being on the debate team was about becoming fearless and getting up in front of a crowd of people, my peers.”

The 20-year-old Ebert, now an English major at the University of Baltimore, is taking a break in the UB Student Center between exams. Sitting in an upstairs lounge overlooking Mount Royal Avenue, he wears a gray sweater with blue Beats headphones draped around his neck and exudes a casual self-assurance that’s compelling. He speaks with a balance of passion and poise, though his widening eyes and gesturing hands often tip the scale in the direction of the former. It doesn’t take long to glean that he’s as much a performer as he is a poet.

Over the course of one year, Ebert performed at The John Hopkins and Towson universities, the Baltimore Book Festival, and Teach for America’s inaugural gala at the American Visionary Art Museum. He visited the White House for discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline and was summoned to City Hall during the Freddie Gray unrest to talk about youth-related issues with Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. American Short Fiction and the Poetry Society of America featured his poems online, his photo appeared on the front page of The Sun, and his debut book, Black Boy Archaeologist, was published last month.

Ebert impressed Kenneth Morrison, director of Dew More, the community-based arts group behind the Youth Poet Laureate initiative, which, according to the group’s website, “[gives] young people the opportunity to express themselves creatively and have a political impact on our city.”

“Baltimore,” says Morrison, “could not have had a better young person than Derick as its first ever Youth Poet Laureate.”

It certainly has been a whirlwind for him. “Two years ago, I never imagined any of this could happen to me,” says Ebert, with a look of mild disbelief. “I’m definitely not the same person I was back in high school, before all this started. And it’s all because of poetry.”

Asked if he has always liked poetry, Ebert shakes his head. “No, I’ve always liked attention,” he says, smiling. “Poetry came out of nowhere.”

Ebert grew up in Northeast Baltimore and can tick off a list of his old neighborhoods that would make a 3rd District councilman smile proudly: “north of Montebello,” “Woodlea,” “closer to Hamilton,” and “around the Moravia area.”

He has an older brother, Michael, and an identical twin, Trevor, who attends UB as a public policy major. Derick and Trevor are first-generation college students.

He’s as much a performer as he is a poet.

They are the product of a mixed-race marriage. Ebert’s mother, an educator at Moravia Park Elementary, is black; his father, a driver for UPS, is white. Ebert thinks his parents’ relationship is extraordinary, especially considering that his mom was one of two black students at her middle school, where she was called racial slurs, and got chased home after school. “Chased and harassed by white people,” notes Ebert, “and she ended up marrying my father. It’s amazing she didn’t have some sort of trauma that would prevent her from marrying a white man.”

He finds it surprising that his parents rarely talk about race. “If something happens to come up, we might talk about it,” he says, “but race is never at the forefront. I’ve always wondered what other family members thought about their relationship. Did they support it? I love my dad, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and they love me, but there’s a distance that’s created by the things we don’t talk about.”

But race was definitely an issue outside his household. Because he is light-skinned, Ebert experienced a great deal of colorism within his own community. A middle school teacher, for instance, chided him for self-identifying as African-American on standardized test forms, saying, “You’re not black. You are white.”

Another teacher called him to the front to demonstrate the “brown paper bag test,” which has historically been used to evaluate skin tone with an eye toward denying privileges to darker-skinned people. In Ebert’s case, the teacher held the bag up to his face and declared, “See class, Derick is lighter than a brown paper bag, so he could pass for being white.”

The demonstration distanced Ebert from his fellow sixth-graders, who labeled him “white” despite his claims to the contrary. They also chastised him for “talking white,” which, he says, grew out of being educated and watching Cartoon Network. “Ever since I can remember, it was about race for me,” he says.

At City, Ebert found teachers that nudged him toward a deeper sense of self, teachers he later celebrated in his poem, “Pieces.” In it, he likened Sedrick Smith, a history teacher, to “an instruction manual from Ikea/he could never make things easy” and recalled him urging students to see the world and return as teachers. He praised Mark Miazga, an English instructor, for introducing him to the work of James Baldwin, and Patrick Daniels, the debate coach, for being his “brick wall” and counseling him to “not flinch when things fall apart.”

He compared Tameka Taylor, another English teacher, to “a wrecking ball,” because she “knocked down borders for children.” She spoke frankly with her students and laid out the challenges ahead: “People like you don’t often make it out of the city,” she told Ebert, “and that’s why it’s especially important to pursue education. You can do anything you want, but there’s a lot of distance between where you are and where you dream of going.” Ebert appreciated her candor. “It was like the kitchen table talk that your mom, your uncle, or anyone who really cared about you would have,” he says.

Taylor remembers her former student as being reserved, even a little timid, as a freshman. “I had the opportunity to watch Derick blossom,” she says. “His personality and confidence seemed to emerge when he found his stride with the debate team.”

Still, she never pegged him as a poet. Ebert’s father didn’t envision him as a poet, either, and encouraged him to study history, or maybe work as an archaeologist (hence the poem of the same name and title of his book).

But like many scribes before him, Ebert found poetry after having his heart broken.

Ebert was in a long-term relationship when he started at UB. During freshman year, he and his girlfriend split up, leaving him “shattered and lost.” That is, until a teacher, once again, showed a way forward.

“Derick ensured his platform included conversations not captured on CNN.”

His writing professor, Anthony Moll, was fond of playing spoken word and poetry slam videos at the beginning of class, and they caught Ebert’s ear, and eye. In the age of Def Poetry and YouTube, popular poets are akin to hip-hop stars and have the page views and Twitter followings to prove it. Ebert was immediately taken with Rudy Francisco’s love poems, wordplay, and circuitous route to “a-ha” moments. The first time he watched Javon Johnson perform “cuz he’s black,” where the poet looks at police brutality through the eyes of his 4-year-old nephew, Ebert cried. He watched it a second time, connected profoundly with the storytelling, cried again, and thought, “I would like to try that.”

So he did, shutting himself in his bedroom to write poems between homework assignments and PlayStation sessions. Like many of his peers in contemporary poetry, Ebert envisioned himself “spitting” poems, not publishing them. His early performances, often documented on video, coupled the debate skills he gleaned at City with his experiences as a young black male coming to terms with race, masculinity, and expectations for the future. His poetry is captivatingly visceral, combining strong emotion with everyday metaphors.

“Initially, I was doing it mostly for the videos,” he says. “I wanted to become YouTube famous.”

His goals evolved considerably, especially after winning the Youth Poet Laureate competition and witnessing the Freddie Gray unrest erupt about a week after he was officially appointed to the position at City Hall. Ebert took his responsibilities seriously as an arts and culture ambassador, striving to give voice to city youth, especially with regards to deep-rooted concerns and often-overlooked accomplishments. Some of his work entailed teaching foster kids to write poetry and embarking on a mini-tour of appearances at various Enoch Pratt Free Library branches.

“I became more geared toward children and my peers,” he says. “I saw that I had an impact, and I wanted them to lead an impactful life as well.”

Dew More’s Kenneth Morrison witnessed those encounters firsthand.

“During a time when the city had no choice but to hear the concerns of its youth, Derick was essential in taking that voice to corners of the city that needed it most,” says Morrison. “It became easy this year to allow campaigns and media to limit the conversation, but Derick ensured his platform included conversations not captured on CNN. I watched him grow into his voice and, more importantly, grow his understanding of the responsibility that comes with his voice.”

That voice will change this month, as the next Youth Poet Laureate will be decided by a competition held at City Hall on February 1. It will be a two-round poetry slam, with each poem judged on a scale of zero to 10. Ebert is one of the judges.

Beyond that, Ebert looks forward to graduating from UB and, hopefully, going through Teach for America to become a Baltimore City public school teacher. “To some extent, I am already a teaching artist,” says Ebert. “I definitely know how to lead an urban classroom and get everyone’s attention.”

Checking his watch, Ebert sees it’s almost time for his English Literature final. He stands and reaches for the headphones around his neck, as he prepares to walk toward the elevator for his next test.

“I’m still discovering and questioning things about myself,” he says. “I’m always changing and growing.”

It brings to mind the closing lines of “Archaeologist”:

I’m not going to pretend to be a poet.
I told you,
I’m an archaeologist.
I’m just trying to find the pieces
that’ll make me feel whole.

However top political communications consultant Ruth Sherman believes that, while Carson’s debate performance improved at the third GOP debate, he has a long way to go in that format. As a media coach, she thinks Carson remains too soft spoken.

“He was significantly looser in his presentation [at the CNBC debate]. He was more prepared and his presentation was more engaging, though his physical and vocal affect are still too quiet,” she says. “His voice is especially monotonous, which causes a mismatch. He is unable to show excitement or display passion. His facial expression is flat, though he didn’t close his eyes as much, which is a bad habit.”

Karen Bradley, the director of graduate studies in dance at the University of Maryland and a movement analysis expert, says that one of Carson’s strengths is that he speaks in clear, short phrases and can be animated with his eyes—“they can twinkle”—and hands. Carson, however, she says doesn’t generally give the impression that he fully “stands behind” what he says with strong “core” positioning, in the manner other, more practiced candidates do.

In that way, Carson shares a certain characteristic with Trump that may be helping voters identify with each political newcomer. Notably, neither of the two GOP leaders comes across as overly rehearsed in their speech. “We call this ‘flow’ and it’s fun to watch,” Bradley says. “They say what they think and move from topic to topic.”

Essentially, in terms of communication, it is this lack of self-censoring that is appealing about outsider candidates. Of course, it’s the same quality that makes both Carson and Trump prone to controversial statements.

“Carson appeals to the nonpolitical type, he’s someone who is viewed an uncorrupted by the political system,” says Shawn Parry-Giles, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Political Communication and Leadership. “He says: ‘I’m not a debater, I’m just a person trying to do the right thing’ and that is really appealing right now.’”

On the other side of the aisle, Martin O’Malley’s communication skills, which can vary widely and send mixed messages, can be harder to parse. “I’ve seen him as ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ and ‘Mr. Nasty,’” Vatz said.

None of the experts we spoke with believe that the former Baltimore mayor and former two-term governor with a liberal record of accomplishment in Annapolis doesn’t mean what he says. He just doesn’t communicate “authenticity”—the signature quality primary campaigns are about when party activists are looking for candidates they can back with enthusiasm.

“He comes off as ‘too smooth,’” said Parry-Giles. “He wants to be the ‘cool guy,’ the Obama-figure—the young, energetic guy—but he hasn’t taken off and it’s too late now.”

O’Malley, in many ways, has been stuck in the outside lane, unable to get in-between Sanders, the self-declared socialist, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate.

It’s somewhat ironic, Parry-Giles said, that Bernie Sanders is one the seen as against the establishment. “He’s unkempt and unpolished, but he’s a lifelong politician, too.”

But while Sanders’ Brooklyn accent, at times, uncombed hair and emphatic gesturing communicate ‘genuineness,’ O’Malley often misses the authenticity target because his anger can feel rehearsed and his smiles ill-timed or forced.

“Psychoanalysts—and I’m not one—call this ‘misplaced affectation,’” Vatz said, referring to O’Malley’s occasional mismatched expression and context.

On the other hand, Bradley says, O’Malley on the stump or at the podium, speaks with a “tremendous” amount of core support, which communicates that’s he engaged and “stands behind” what he says. O’Malley is able to turn his body and look directly at other candidates on stage. He’s also able to look into the camera and use his smile, effectively, at times. O’Malley’s main problem, as Bradley sees it, is that he speaks in very long phrases that may be hard for some people to follow.

“He’s not easy to understand in the way that Bill Clinton is,” she said.

Cohen agrees with Bradley and takes it a step further. He says not only does O’Malley—a well known policy wonk—speak in phrases that are too wordy; he also tries to squeeze in each of his talking points when he’s interviewed on television or standing on the stage. The combination inevitably makes his presentation more awkward and stiff than necessary.

“It always looks like he’s trying to get everything he’s written down on his ‘3 by 5’ cards into his allotted time,” Cohen says. “That’s why he struggles to communicate on a deeper level with voters.” In Maryland, the University of Baltimore political observer says, voters have had time to get to know O’Malley, but that’s not true outside the state.

In fact, in some ways, the challenge O’Malley faces is similar to one that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush face. All three have strengths based on governing experience and knowledge of policy, but they are not the most gifted nonverbal communicators.

All three want to make the case want that they are the “competent” choice for voters—and, to their credit, put forth their policy plans. Not exactly a recipe for excitement or how we tend market things in the U.S., however.

In the end, it will be interesting to see where Carson and O’Malley land even if neither wins their primary nominations. Some, cynically, already view Carson’s campaign as largely an effort to enhance his brand and book sales. Some also believe that O’Malley’s realistic aim in the short-term is not the Democratic presidential nomination—though he would certainly accept it—but the vice-president slot or a cabinet level position.

“He’s a really smart politician. I consider him one of the smartest politicians around,” Vatz said of O’Malley. “I don’t think he’ll be making unnecessary personal attacks at Sanders or Clinton and take the risk of offending the party.”

This Friday at 8 p.m., MSNBC host Rachel Maddow will moderate a Democratic forum from Winthrop University featuring O’Malley, Clinton, and Sanders.

The next Republican debate, the GOP’s Fox Business Network debate from Milwaukee, WI, is scheduled for 9 p.m. Tuesday.

Chris Wilson takes a seat at a long wooden table in the University of Baltimore law library, 12 floors above Mt. Royal Avenue. He has the bright, airy space almost to himself in the mid-afternoon. Wearing a dark business suit, dress shirt, and wide-knotted, royal-purple tie, Wilson is all business as he lights up a MacBook Pro and bows his clean-shaven head to concentrate on the screen. His boyish face and alert brown eyes make him look younger than his 36 years, which is fitting because Wilson isn’t an attorney or law student, but an undergrad at UB’s Merrick School of Business, where he’ll complete his degree in business administration this December. Specializing in entrepreneurship, he has won business plan competitions, been named a Ratcliffe Scholar, and earned a place in the school’s rigorous Entrepreneurship Fellows Program.

In addition to his course load, Wilson is the founder, owner, and operator of the Barclay Investment Corporation—a small general contracting company—as well as the House of DaVinci, a startup furniture repair and upholstery business.

In short, he’s a busy man because he’s making up for lost time. In fact, Wilson isn’t supposed to be here at all. At 17, he killed a man. Tried as an adult for first-degree murder, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. By all odds, Wilson should still be serving time at Patuxent Institution in Jessup, where he served more than a decade of the 16 years he spent behind bars.

However, less than four years after his release following a reconsideration of his sentence by a new judge, Wilson is now employing other ex-offenders at both of his enterprises, building on experience gained as a community organizer at the Greater Homewood Community Corporation. He also has become an advocate for juvenile justice and sentencing reform, and counts best-selling author Wes Moore and the former NAACP head Ben Jealous among his friends and clients.

Inside the law library, he takes time to appreciate the sweeping view of Baltimore from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“I like being high up over the city,” he says. “I can look out and see The Belvedere Hotel, where I restored furniture. I can also see Station North and Barclay, where I do a lot of my work. Across the street is the business school, which is really important to me. It’s where I turned my life around.”

As a boy, Wilson grew up mostly with his grandparents in Northeast Washington, D.C. He loved to read in bed at night, even risking his grandmother’s wrath by crossing a busy thoroughfare to check out books from the East Capitol branch of the D.C. Public Library. But by the start of the 1990s, as crack and killings swept the nation’s capital, he was doing his reading—everything from books on dinosaurs to Aesop’s fables and Greek myths—curled up on the floor where he slept as a precaution against stray bullets.

Eventually, after the shooting death of a cousin, Wilson went to live full-time with his mom, a single parent of five in suburban Prince George’s County. “A nice neighborhood,” Wilson recalls, but not the refuge it appeared to be. His mother fell under the control of a physically abusive boyfriend, who was later convicted of sexually assaulting her. In the process, she turned to alcohol and drugs. Meanwhile, the violence in D.C. began spilling over into P.G. County.

“How can you expect a kid to be normal when people are dropping like flies?”

Against this backdrop, Wilson stopped caring about school, tuning out through booze, weed, and other substances. “I buried a friend every couple of months,” he says, reflecting on his teenage years. “How can you expect a kid to be normal when people are dropping like flies? I’m arming up,” he remembers telling himself. “I’m going to start carrying weapons.” Quickly, he accumulated charges for gun possession, assault, and a string of robberies. His descent was so rapid that the court system had not locked him up for any length of time before he made the worst decision of his life.

Around 10 p.m. on June 29, 1996, Wilson—who’d been smoking marijuana—was walking less than 500 yards from his mother’s house on Allentown Road in Camp Springs when someone came up and told him they had “a message” for him. “Another street dude,” Wilson says. “That’s all I knew him about him.”

A brief, threatening conversation ensued. “I didn’t think,” he says. “I just started shooting.” He was 17 years old.

On June 16, 1997, the Circuit Court of Prince George’s County sentenced Wilson to life and referred him to the Patuxent Institution, a prison with educational and therapeutic opportunities for young offenders. For months afterward, he sat in a haze of smuggled marijuana available at the Baltimore prison where he awaited his transfer to Patuxent.

Although communication from his remaining family members quickly tapered off, a phone conversation with his grandfather, dying of cancer, would stick with him. “I don’t understand how somebody that’s smart would purposely do stupid stuff,” his grandfather told him. “That’s not you, man. Promise me you’ll turn your life around.”

With a life sentence, his grandfather’s advice seemed absurd. But just a few months later, alone with his memories and thoughts, a moment of clarity pierced through the fog. “I saw what I had become,” Wilson says. “I started to have an honest conversation with myself.”

He wrote out what he calls his “master plan” of self-improvement. He traded cigarettes to get a spot in a woodworking class. He devoured the prison library, studied Spanish, and earned his GED, as well as a degree from Anne Arundel Community College. With the help of counselors, he also began to untangle his past and face what he had done. In victim impact group meetings, he rediscovered a capacity for compassion. He wanted to learn more about the man who he’d killed and tried to reach out to his family. “All I did was study, go to therapy, and exercise,” Wilson says.

Though it seemed like a pipe dream, he imagined one day starting his own business and employing other ex-offenders as a means of repaying his debt to society.

On November 3, 2006, after a decade of incarceration, Wilson returned to court to meet with Judge Cathy Serrette, newly assigned to his case for a review and potential reconsideration of his sentence based on what he’d accomplished while imprisoned.

“Even if you don’t give me a chance, I’m going to be 77 years old, still learning another language, running the yard, still running my programs,” he told Serrette. “That’s who I am. But if you give me that chance, just watch what I do.”

“I’ll be watching you,” he recalls Serrette telling him. “That master plan is law.”

“I saw what I’d become,” Wilson says. “I started to have an honest conversaton with myself.”

Wilson eventually re-emerged into the outside world six years later, in 2012, at 33, after spending almost half of his life in prison, and not long after learning his mother had died. His biological father had been killed a number of years before. He had been moved into a halfway house in Baltimore and, drawing on connections made in prison, UB became his refuge. Professor Elizabeth Nix quickly took note of Wilson in a class on civil rights. “He never missed a class and always elevated the discussion,” she says. “Chris was an intellectual sponge. I also saw him around campus all the time,” Nix continues. “He told me later he stayed on campus all the hours he was not required to be back at the halfway house, so he could stay focused.”

Nix was contacted by Karen Stokes, executive director of the Greater Homewood Community Corporation, who was looking for someone to organize dialogue between the community and developers. Nix suggested Wilson, who later began recruiting unemployed men and women, often with criminal backgrounds, into job training programs.

“Chris was personally committed to trying to find jobs for these people, or create the jobs himself,” says Stokes. “[It was] his frustration in finding jobs for people with limited skills and work history, who also might have a criminal record and no high-school diploma, that led him to forming his own company that employs people with this background.”

Two of the men Wilson has hired are Tony Hartley, 42, who has been working home-improvement jobs with Wilson for more than a year, and Derick Lilly, 21, who has been with Wilson’s general contracting company for four months.

“I didn’t really learn about [Wilson’s criminal] record until later,” says Hartley, who shares Wilson’s sense of mission and now helps recruit new employees for the business. “I probably have more convictions than him. We learned about our backgrounds around the same time. It brought us a lot closer.”

Lilly says Wilson gave him an opportunity no one else would. “I’m a hard worker, but I’ve been through the system,” he says. “That’s why we get along.” Lilly began working on clean-up, moving, and janitorial service jobs, and now is also taking responsibility for newer hires. “Chris said leadership is what he wants us to do,” Lilly explains. “I teach other people: Use up all the space in the truck so we don’t have to make as many trips—time is money—but don’t be careless and scratch up furniture.”

Jealous, the former NAACP president, first met Wilson as a customer when he needed help with a move. “He and his guys did great work,” says Jealous, who still works and resides in Baltimore. “When he told me he has a furniture-restoration business, I entrusted to him antiques from ancestors who had been born slaves, very precious stuff.”

Jealous says he found he and Wilson had a lot of interests in common, and admires his drive and ability. “He builds teams from people the rest of us, well, people we have seen fit to discard,” Jealous says.

Today, it’s more difficult for other offenders to follow Wilson’s path. Maryland law changed after Wilson’s conviction and now requires judges to rule on sentence modifications within five years of the original sentencing. In Wilson’s case, as his lawyer, Harry Trainor Jr., points out, “Five years in, it would not have been apparent to a judge that he had changed so much.”

At the same time, justice and sentencing reformers have begun to find support for more flexibility in the way juveniles are charged and sentenced, and Wilson has been sharing his story in Annapolis and Washington. When the General Assembly considered bills to expand juvenile offenders’ access to sentencing review and eligibility for parole, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth invited him to testify before the state House and Senate judiciary committees.

Wilson later summarized his testimony in an opinion piece, “Allow Children Sentenced to Life a Second Chance,” published this past March in The Baltimore Sun.

“He certainly had an impact,” says Nikola Nable-Juris, policy counsel at the campaign. “As a mentor, speaker, and skilled businessman, Chris represents the loss of talent sitting in prison. Several legislators said at the hearing and in person that Chris’s story is one of the most powerful stories they’ve ever heard.”

The legislation did not succeed last session, but Wilson sees incremental progress. “I felt there was a lot of traction,” he says. “People do care.”

“He had an impact. Chris represents the loss of talent sitting in prison.”

Returning to his hometown, he has also shared his story on Capitol Hill with members of Congress.

To Jealous, Wilson demonstrates that “there are individuals who can redeem themselves, and that our society can redeem itself from its addiction to mass incarceration.”

“I hope that people will look at Chris and think of how much more good he could do, how much faster, if we helped,” Jealous says.

Ultimately, says Wilson, who currently will remain on parole for years to come, he’d like to build a coalition of socially conscious companies that employ people, make money, and have an impact in Baltimore.

In the meantime, he draws strength from a vote of confidence he received after speaking at a 2013 national conference focused on helping prisoners re-enter society.

After hearing his story, many attendees crowded around Wilson with questions, including one woman who waited patiently for an opportunity to greet him.

She shook his hand and smiled, needing no introduction.

“‘I didn’t have to let you out,’” Wilson recalls Judge Serrette saying.

“‘I could have just left you in there,’” she told him. “‘But I had a feeling in my gut, and I believed you. I made the right decision. I am proud of you.’”