
Why Hurts Is a Verb: A 14 Million Year-Long Story
It’s February 2020, one of our last weeks in the classroom before everything turns inside out, but we don’t know this yet. I am a writer in residence at a public elementary school that serves San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. A San Francisco Arts Commission grant funds my residency, part of an initiative to place poets and fiction writers in public schools, community centers, and jails to lead creative writing workshops. I’m about to teach––and learn––my most difficult lesson as an educat