but suddenly your cup is full
and so is your heart
Spring 2025: I’m at a National Day of Action as Project 2025 unfolds during Trump 2.0
“But still, like air, I’ll rise.”
-Maya Angelou
Fall 2024, there was a hunger for knowledge like none other. So, I hosted some of the Bay Areas finest cultural critics and communicators to help students make sense of the world…and the following gallery of posters marked those events.
SJSU students, traumatized by the news of Israel and the plight of the Palestinian people, needed spaces to learn about what had happened, and express their grief, and channel their outrage. So, our beloved Santa Clara Poet Laureate Emeritus, Tshaka Campbell, answered this call with his poetry and compassion. 
Poet and educator, Sheila Smith McKoy, PhD, led students into a discussion about her book, “The Bones Beneath,” and the ties of Black poetics to historical and contemporary engagements with, and critiques of, the social construction of race. Dr. McKoy unpacked the use of literary craft and poetics as synaestheses for equity, inclusion, and social justice. 
Vernon “Trey” Keeve III, PhD, poet, author, and educator, deconstructed excerpts from his award-winning book, “Southern Migrant Mixtape.” California Poet Laureate Emeritus, Al Young (1939-2021), said of Keeve’s unflinching work, “Vividly, from a post-American century, Vernon Keeve III–a post-millennial, book-loving African American–shares, reflects and reports on life lived at global split-levels. Southern Virginia-born, gay, comfortably reared, poet-storyteller Keeve takes unblinking looks at how the damage and ravages of so-called white privilege split and splintered the world. Upbringing, family, education, world-outlook, environment, spirituality–all of it trembles here on edge.” 
Activist and community organizer, Carmen Brammer, led students through the history of the vote (e.g., the obsolescence of the electoral college) and a discussion on the mandate or the political will that will have to be mustered for any change we might hope to see in the future.
I didn’t know the political excitement in 2008 would inspire my eldest son to run for a position on our local school board in 2018 and again in 2020, but it did.
I was right there with his supporters, amazed by these everyday activists that pushed the campaign forward. It felt like small drops at first, as folks got behind something important and did the work they might have not otherwise done. They, like Basil Saleh and I felt good about taking agency over local politics and the trajectory of the future.
and again, Basil Saleh: 2020
carpe diem
Carmen Estela Kennedy Saleh 