All I did was sign up for a course taught by someone whose play I loved. It was last winter, just before theaters shut down. What I...

2020 has been a year of firsts for me. My first (legal) drink, first pandemic, first apartment, first presidential election, first Zoom...

When I stepped out of my house on Beyer Avenue on November 3rd, I took small sips of my coffee, believing I would have time to finish...

Someone has slit in half the 30-foot-long Black Lives Matter banner outside our St. Luke and the Epiphany. For the second time.

Intergenerational stories of voter participation to inspire your vote Voice That Jawn is a six-part podcast miniseries by #VoteThatJawn summer intern Michaela Prell that shares intergenerational stories of voting. Listeners will be inspired to vote when they hear stories from their peers, elders, and voices in between on why voting matters and how each voter participates in history. Episode one features 99-year-old Ms. Rena Graves of Germantown, who tells the story of her fir

By Carson Eckhard This article originally appeared in Philly Metro. You can view the original post here. In my Tampa, Florida high school in 2016, I learned the hard way that voting wasn’t an excused absence. The line at the poll was long. When I arrived at school, I was sent to the school office where they put a new tardy mark on my record. Why, I wondered, couldn’t voting be an excused absence? Now that I go to university here, I see that it can be. Philadelphia’s public sc

In January, a handful of young organizers perched in my office in the English Department at the University of Penn planning the 2020...

VoteThatJawn and Fresh Artists tap an army of kiddos to turn out the parent vote.

What’s your jawn? For Monique*, it’s the underfunding of Philly schools. For Sofia*, it’s the loss of a friend to gun violence...

Philadelphia Youth Poets Laureate and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society respond to Walt Whitman's "Election Day: November 1884" On September 17, #VoteThatJawn held a reading conceived in partnership with the Kelly Writers House and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society (PCMS), to explore civic engagement and the youth vote through poetic responses to Walt Whitman's poem, “Election Day: November 1884." The Kelly Writers House featured original poems by Philadelphia Youth Poe

This guide offers a lesson plan and resources for teaching Whitman's "Election Day: November, 1884."

Learn how to write a blog for VoteThatJawn.com on your voting "jawn" — that issue that ignites a fire in you drives you to the polls.

Monnette Sudler never skips a vote. Never will. But as a kid, Sudler says, she wasn’t into politics. For her, it was all music.

Think, for a moment, about the fanfare that comes with life’s milestones: marriage, birth, quinceañera, driving, graduation… and so on.

By Sophie Burkholder The way we vote is about to be turned upside down. Fears of the coronavirus pandemic have prompted fears of in-person voting, and demand for mail-in ballots has seen a dramatic increase. There’s little that will stand in the way of the determined youth vote, but recent changes to the polling system because of the pandemic might challenge it. Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot applications require voters to enter their driver’s license numbers, preventing those

“Just Mercy” tells the story of Bryan Stevenson, a criminal justice lawyer who moves to Alabama to represent wrongly convicted...

By Lorene Cary Special thanks to the Escobar family: three talented young musicians who live with their parents in suburban Philadelphia. In this podcast, Nicholas, the composer, Alec, the singer-songwriter, and Gabriel, the musical theater singer, actor, and dancer, are joined by their mom, Louisa Shepard, News Officer in Penn's Office of University Communications. We learned so many ways that their music had shaped their lives—and their whole family's. What did we miss? Wel