Staff
Click on a staffperson’s name to view their biography. You can find former staff here.
PARENT ORGANIZING
América Calderón, Parent Organizer
Allyson Criner Brown, Tellin’ Stories Project Manager
Jazelle Hunt, Documentarian
Iris Jacob, Professional Development Specialist
PUBLICATIONS
Don Allen, Publications Director
Derrick Weston Brown, Publications Advocate
Alissa Escarce, Publications Advocate
Brittany Fenison, Publications Advocate (Substitute)
Charles Girard, Publications Advocate
Gavin Hutchinson, Publications Advocate
Grace Kaissal, Publications Advocate
Gowri Koneswaran, Publications Advocate (Substitute)
Elena Lacayo, Publications Advocate
Cat Nguyen, Publications Advocate
Brianna Oliver, Publications Advocate
Dan Schwartz, Publications Advocate
Amrita Wassan, Publications Advocate
Chris Towne, Publications Advocate
Izetta Mobley, Publications Advocate
Grace Wingo, Publications Advocate
Mae Wiskin, Publications Advocate
PROJECTS
Lauren Cooper, Zinn Education Project Coordinator
Alison Kysia, Program Associate, Zinn Education Project
Jenice View, Civil Rights Movement, Senior Professional Development Specialist
ADMINISTRATION
Allyson Criner Brown, Associate Director
Deborah Menkart, Executive Director
Wiley Reading, Administrative Associate
Mykella Palmer, Communications and Media Associate
SPECIAL PROJECT CONSULTANTS
Enid Lee, Virtual Scholar
Staff Biographies
Don Allen, Publications Director
Don has been working in bookstores and libraries since his Kent State college days when the South African anti-apartheid/divestment movement reached the campus. His first political lesson about government lying was when Reagan fired his dad for being a striking member of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union. Don used his bookstore experience and those political lessons to become Teaching for Change’s first bookstore manager upon the founding of Busboys and Poets. After 5 years in the bookstore, he is looking forward to bringing his experience to the entire Teaching for Change publications department.
Don seriously believes that Naomi Klein is walking strongly in the footsteps of sorely missed Howard Zinn as a writer/activist. When not reading Klein’s tweets and newsletters, Don enjoys international mysteries by writers such as Colin Cotterill, Donna Leon, and Qui Xiaolong. Don and his wife, Kelly, live in Takoma, D.C. with a cat named after a Twain character. He often spends his free time rooting for last place baseball teams and against publicly funded sports stadiums.
Derrick Weston Brown, Publications Advocate
Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in creative writing from American University. He has studied poetry under Dr. Tony Medina at Howard University and Cornelius Eady at American University. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem summer workshop for black poetsand the VONA summer workshop. His work has appeared in such literary journals as Warpland, Mythium, Ginsoko, Drum Voices, The Columbia Poetry Review, and the online journals Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Howard University’s Amistad, LocusPoint, and MiPOesias. Published by the Busboys and Poets imprint of PM Press, his first book of poetry, Wisdom Teeth, is available here.
Derrick is a bookseller and poetry book buyer for Teaching for Change’s Busboys and Poets Bookstore. As the first Poet-In-Residence of Busboys and Poets, he is the founder and curator of The Nine on the Ninth, a five-year-old monthly poetry series, and helps coordinate the poetry programming at the 14th & V location. He teaches poetry and creative writing to an amazing crew of seventh and eighth graders at Hart Middle School in Southeast Washington, D.C., and to a small class of high school students at the Emerson Preparatory School in Dupont Circle. He is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland.
América Calderón, Parent Organizer
Usually, I am asked if I was named because of the “country” so I use my name to educate people that America is not a country but a continent. I am from Guatemala. I was forced to flee my country in 1982. For the first six months in the U.S.A., I did not get a bed because I thought the “revolution” was going to win and we could go back soon. Twenty five years later, I am still here, we did not win the revolution, nothing has changed back in my country, but I got a bed. I started working for Teaching for Change with the Tellin’ Stories Project in February 2008 as a program manager and community organizer. I like working with such a diverse group of women in a collaborative, supportive way that I could not get anywhere else. I have three children: one lives in Mexico, one in Pittsburgh, and the youngest is finishing college in Providence, RI. I love biking to work, swimming and my passion is doing ceramics. My great accomplishments are my children.
Lauren Cooper, Zinn Education Project Coordinator
Born and raised in Phoenix, AZ, Lauren fled the 110°+ summers as soon as she could to attend the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies in California, an alternative college that presumes students are inquisitive individual learners, not passive consumers of education. She discovered how wonderful and challenging learning can be when the student is able to actively participate in the educational process. She studied media and sociology, and graduated in 1998 with a BA in Visual Sociology: Film and Societal Issues.
With an interest in independent media, she worked at the Phoenix New Times back in Arizona, and then the Independent Press Association in San Francisco, accumulating six years of professional publishing experience ranging from editorial to distribution, from marketing to client and vendor management. She was able to fuse her educational and publishing experience when she joined the Teaching for Change staff in 2007. She is a coordinator of the Zinn Education Project. She’s Native American (Creek and Pima) and enjoys “being around books and people who read them.”
Allyson Criner Brown, Associate Director
Allyson Criner Brown joined Teaching for Change in September 2010 as associate director and program manager of Tellin’ Stories, our nationally recognized approach to family engagement. A former middle school teacher, she has experience ranging from working with middle school youth to partnering with business and community leaders. Allyson holds a master’s degree in public administration with a concentration in nonprofit management from The George Washington University, and she has received awards from the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Forum for Black Public Administrators. Allyson is driven by experiences in the field and managing programs in community based nonprofits that focus on education, youth development and social justice.
A native of Oakland, California, Allyson is an avid cyclist who enjoys the bike lanes and trails of the metro D.C. area. In her spare time, she also enjoys cooking, exercising and reading recommended books from the history and literature sections in Teaching for Change’s Busboys and Poets Bookstore.
Brittany Fenison, Publications Advocate
A proud native of Southern California, Brittany earned her BA in Theatre from San Diego State University and then moved to Saint Louis, Missouri to work for the nation’s largest African American theater company, The Black Rep. In the summer of 2009, she moved to D.C. to work within the Dean of Arts office at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She first gained interest in social justice and multicultural studies as a teenager with a performance troupe Socially Together and Naturally Diverse United Performers (S.T.A.N.D.) in which she traveled across California performing educational plays about racial tolerance and individual dignity. She has since traveled to South Africa, Central America, and Europe in pursuit of cross-cultural experiences. Her passion falls within multicultural studies, the arts and youth.
Charles Girard, Publications Advocate
Charles came to D.C. from the University of Mary Washington, where he studied Gender and Sexuality. On campus, he was active in multiculturalism and queer activism. He was a co-founder of the gender neutral housing program, vice-president of the queer club on campus, as well as the head student employee of the multicultural center. One of his most educational experiences in college was when he and a classmate travelled to Jackson, Mississippi to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides with SNCC and CORE members. His main passion is working for trans equality through grassroots education. He moved to D.C. to intern working with queer youth, and stayed to do an AmeriCorps program called City Year where he tutored third graders in Anacostia. Charles’s dream is to work in schools making them safer for trans youth. In his spare time he enjoys Photoshop, planning his bike trip across America, and eating as much avocado as he possibly can.
Gavin Hutchinson, Publications Advocate
Gavin Hutchinson hails from the island of Jamaica, where he was a very eager high school student, excelling in mathematics and the sciences. There was little surprise in 2000 when he attended the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida to study Aerospace Engineering. Somewhere along the way though, Gavin discovered his passion for the humanities and social sciences and eventually earned his bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with concentrations in Communication, International Relations and Information Technology. He returned to Jamaica in 2006, soon to become a talk show host on nationally syndicated radio and a communications coordinator for the Bob Marley Group of Companies. He also traveled to Toronto, Canada as a regional coordinator for Ignite The Americas—a youth arts forum staged under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS). Back in Kingston, he helped to launch the Berhane Selassie Art Gallery in February 2010, after which he worked to establish Manifesto Jamaica, a youth led non-profit organization that empowers young people through arts and culture programming. Following the staging of its first festival in October 2010, Gavin decided that it was a good time to step aside and has since relocated to Washington, D.C. to continue his journey. “Bookman,” as he is often called, is very much in his zone as a bookseller, surrounded by our selection of progressive titles.
Iris Jacob, Professional Development Specialist
Iris Jacob is an author, activist, educator and change agent. Iris has facilitated inclusion trainings at numerous conferences, institutes and schools and given keynote addresses about diversity awareness, women’s empowerment and multiracial experiences. In her free time, Iris enjoys spending time with her friends and growing family. She has a deep passion for chocolate, love, and great conversation.
Gowri Koneswaran, Publications Advocate
Gowri Koneswaran is a poet, singer, and lawyer whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Sri Lanka. Her advocacy has addressed animal welfare, the environment, and the rights of prisoners and the criminally accused. She was a Lannan Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library and has been a featured poet at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and Campus Progress’s Protest Through Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in
Beltway Poetry Quarterly,
Bourgeon,
Lantern Review, and she released her first chapbook,
Still Beating, in 2010. Gowri was a member of the 2010 D.C. Southern Fried Slam team and serves as the program director at BloomBars community arts space in Columbia Heights. She is working on a book
The AlternaGirls: A Girl’s Guide to Changing the World and was acknowledged in
Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer, and
Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety. Learn more about Gowri’s poetry at
http://notherelong.wordpress.com.
Alison Kysia, Program Associate, Zinn Education Project
Alison’s career as an educator committed to social justice spans 20 years. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, she earned a BA in Race, Class and Gender Studies from Penn State University. Afterward, she moved to Boston, where she taught in an alternative boarding school for girls dealing with extreme abuse issues, helping her students make connections, through the study of history and literature, between their own experiences and larger social justice issues. Later, she taught English language in community-based schools in Somerville, Massachusetts, that offered free or subsidized English classes for local immigrants, many of whom were undocumented. She also worked for a non-profit agency that provided citizenship assistance to low-income immigrants. While in Yemen for a year, she designed and taught advanced English conversation classes that revolved around themes of cross-cultural analysis. After returning to the United States, she earned the MA in History and has been teaching at Northern Virginia Community College since 2007. In addition to teaching U.S. history, she developed the first courses in World History at the Alexandria campus, as well as an Islamic Civilizations class. Alison was a 2013 fellow at Teaching for Change.
Elena Lacayo, Publications Advocate
Raised in the United States and in her native country of Nicaragua, Elena is truly bicultural. She has extensive experience working in for social justice for and within the Latino community in Latin America and the U.S. During her time at the University of Notre Dame, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Liberal Studies, she conducted ethnographic research on a local Latino population in Elkhart, Indiana. In 2012, while working for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), she had the honor to coordinate number of events that brought together the African-American and Latino communities in response to discriminatory state laws being passed in the South, including the reenactment of the historic walk from Selma to Montgomery. Prior to joining Teaching for Change, Elena worked on immigration issues for NCLR, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and NETWORK, a National Catholic Social Justice Lobby. When not at Teaching for Change’s bookstore, Elena spends much her time working on her music project,
Elena & Los Fulanos, a bilingual folk rock band.
Deborah Menkart, Executive Director
Raised in D.C., Deborah’s activism began in junior high school when she protested D.C.’s “taxation without representation” and the “dresses-only” dress code for girls. The dress code changed, but D.C.’s colonial status continues. Her perspective on the world was shaped by being the first born in the U.S. of European immigrants on both sides of her family and being raised by a single mother who worked as a dressmaker. During the 1970s Deborah lived in San Diego, California, where she worked as a shipyard electrician and was active in the antiwar, women’s, international solidarity, and labor movements. Through all of these experiences she decided that for any social justice movement in the U.S. to succeed, a change in pre-K—12 education is essential. Since 1989 she has been pursuing that goal in her work at Teaching for Change.
Cat Nguyen, Publications Advocate
Originally from the Inland Empire in Southern California, Cat earned her bachelor’s degree in Global Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she was also very involved in the Asian American Studies department and served as a student advocate at the UCSB MultiCultural Center. After relocating to DC in 2010, she briefly worked with Earth Day Network, and then served as a Corps Member with City Year Washington, DC, an education-focused nonprofit, where she worked as tutor, mentor, and role model for the first and second grade students of DC Scholars Stanton Elementary in Southeast DC. When not at the Teaching for Change Bookstore, Cat can be found working as a conference planner for a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the US. Cat enjoys exploring the sights and sounds of DC, baking cupcakes, and trying new Vietnamese restaurants.
Mykella Palmer, Communications and Media Associate
Convinced that her future career title would read Advertising & Design Mogul, Mykella chose to major in marketing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a member of the highly select, nationally acclaimed Hinman CEOs living-learning program. But it was in an African American Rhetoric class where she discovered her true passion. Words. Inspired by the ability of such titans as Frederick Douglass, Cornel West, and Maya Angelou to shape a culture’s ideas through the seductive power of language, Mykella decided to add writing to her list of artistic pursuits. When she’s not working on her first novel, she spends her time as the most recent member of the Teaching for Change admin team. But if you really need her and can’t find her, try looking in a comfy corner somewhere. You’ll probably discover her there, hiding out, curled up with her nose in a book.
Wiley Reading, Administrative Assistant
Raised in the middle of The Great Swamp in the noble state of New Jersey, Wiley spent her formative years reading everything she could get her hands on, but four years of immersion in a justice-oriented, woman-empowering, queer-friendly university culture was what turned her into the enthusiastic social-justice advocate she is today. While at Smith College in Northampton, MA, Wiley worked as a Digital Music Monitor, but her work as a community educator on transgender rights was her true passion. When not working at Teaching for Change, Wiley draws compulsively, cooks compulsively, connects with Feministe writers over Twitter, and doesn’t take the same route to the grocery store twice, if she can help it.
Dan Schwartz
Dan Schwartz is from Washington, DC. He is a writer and musician, who plays in the bands Southern Problems and Elena & Los Fulanos. He earned a Master’s of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2010. He has previously worked at the Smithsonian Institution, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, First Book, and The Washington Home & Community Hospices. He was an editor of the literary magazine PRISM International from 2009-2010.
Jenice View
Dr. Jenice L. View is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. For more than 20 years, View has worked with a variety of educational and nongovernmental organizations, including a public charter school, the Just Transition Alliance, Rural Coalition, the Association for Community Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc. to create space for the voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations: women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents, and especially youth. She has a BA from Syracuse University, an MPA-URP from Princeton, and a PhD from the Union Institute and University. View, a native of one of the last U.S. Colonies (Washington, D.C.), is the proud mother of two daughters, Ava and Leah. She hopes to pass on her inheritance of being a politically aware and socially active woman that she received from many including her paternal grandparents (among the first organizers in the Nation of Islam in the 1940s), and her parents (who have helped form and sustain many local D.C. community institutions).
Grace Wingo
Grace Wingo comes to D.C from the University of Maryland, College Park where she earned her bachelors degree in Theatre with a focus on set design and directing. A trip to Honduras in 2011, while pursuing post-baccalaureate studies in psychology, set her on the path to discover her passion for how people teach and learn in different settings. She is now pursuing her Master of Science in Educational Psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Currently, her research interests are in the areas of the imagination and creative pedagogy. In her free time she enjoys leading an active lifestyle, pottery, meeting new people and enthusiastic high fives.
Amrita Wassan
Amrita Wassan is curious about the interconnection between internal and collective liberation. She explores this curiosity through her practices as a student, writer, educator, activist, friend, and facilitator. Amrita is passionate about building cooperatives, ending rape culture, and sustaining healing communal spaces. She spends her time laughing, biking, and visiting the elephants at the zoo.
