Arkansas Times | April 2025

BRACKET BUSTERS

2025 ACADEMIC ALL-STARS BRING THEIR A GAME

RWAKE UP: Rwake, the legendary doom/sludge metal band from North Little Rock, is back with its first album of new material in 13 years (Page 78).

9 THE FRONT

Chatting past generational lines to craft a timeless narrative. By Frederick McKindra

Communing with Black ancestors by remixing archival photos. By Joshua Asante

An olive-brown freshwater mussel is one of Arkansas’s most endangered animals. By Ariana Remmel

Rapidly rising housing prices in Fayetteville are pushing out the city’s coolest residents. By Jordan P. Hickey

20 exemplary high

seniors you’re gonna wanna keep tabs on.

From the Publisher: Let me read in peace. Q&A: With writer Scott W. Stern, who unearthed darkness in Mississippi County. Big Pic: Low-budget Easter egg substitutes.

15 THE TO-DO LIST

Nada Surf at Stickyz, Tyler Childers at Simmons Bank Arena, Cake at First Security Amphitheatre, Jessica Pratt at The Momentary and more.

22 NEWS & POLITICS

WHITE FLIGHT INSIGHT

LEARNS voucher applications have parents saying the quiet part aloud. By Austin Gelder

STATE-SPONSORED SADISM

Nitrogen gas, coming to an execution chamber near you. By Matt Campbell

EVERY LITTLE BIT COUNTS

How helpful is Gov. Sanders’ plan to slash the state grocery tax? By Benjamin Hardy

78 CULTURE

The raucous return of Rwake. By Dan Marsh

82 FOOD & DRINK

Potluck Food Rescue wants to mobilize you. By Rhett Brinkley

86 CANNABIZ

Pre-legality nostalgia from an erstwhile dealer. By Jack A. Rowe.

90 THE OBSERVER

Broom flights in the Heights? A witchy new boutique in a decidedly non-witchy neighborhood spells small-scale scandal.

ON THE COVER: William Obiozo, a senior at El Dorado High School, is one of our 2025 Academic All-Stars. Photo by Kasey Dumas.

Big bank muscle. Small bank hustle.

PUBLISHER Alan Leveritt

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Austin Gelder

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Mandy Keener

MANAGING EDITOR Benjamin Hardy

PRINT EDITOR Daniel Grear

FOOD EDITOR Rhett Brinkley

CANNABIZ EDITOR Griffin Coop

CULTURE EDITOR Dan Marsh

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Matt Campbell

AGRI AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTER Phillip Powell

REPORTER Milo Strain

VIBE CHECKER Stephanie Smittle

EDITOR EMERITUS Max Brantley

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt

PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson

DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER Madeline Chosich

DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT Wythe Walker

ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain

GRAPHIC DESIGNER Katie Hassell

DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING/ SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS PUBLISHER Brooke Wallace

ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

Terrell Jacob, Kaitlyn Looney and Evan Ethridge

ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden

SPECIAL SECTION MANAGING EDITOR Caleb Patton

EVENTS DIRECTOR Donavan Suitt

DIRECTOR OF CANNABIS SALES AND MARKETING Lee Major IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman

CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Anitra Lovelace

CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson

BILLING/COLLECTIONS Charlotte Key CHAIR MAN Lindsey Millar

PRODUCTION MANAGER Ira Hocut (1954-2009)

ARKANSAS TIMES (ISSN 0164-6273) is published each month by Arkansas Times Limited Partnership, 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200, Little Rock, Arkansas, 72201, phone (501) 375-2985. Periodical postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ARKANSAS TIMES, 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, SUITE 150, Little Rock, AR, 72201. Subscription prices are $60 for one year. For subscriber service call (501) 375-2985. Current single-copy price is $5, free in Pulaski County. Single issues are available by mail at $5.00 each, postage paid. Payment must accompany all orders. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents without the written consent of the publishers is prohibited. Manuscripts and artwork will not be returned or acknowledged unless sufficient return postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope are included. All materials are handled with due care; however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for care and safe return of unsolicited materials. All letters sent to ARKANSAS TIMES will be treated as intended for publication and are subject to ARKANSAS TIMES’ unrestricted right to edit or to comment editorially. ©2025 ARKANSAS TIMES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

TOPSY-TURVY:

Inspired by the political chaos in the White House, Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt hung his father's funeral flag upside down.

BEDTIME STORY FOR THE TRUMP ERA WHAT

TO DO WHEN READING THE NEWS BECOMES UNBEARABLE.

BY ALAN LEVERITT

FFor years, my girlfriend, Suzanne, has enjoyed me reading to her. She’s Swiss and she says she likes my Southern voice. A history of the Comanche in Central Texas, Ukraine, chicken recipes, excerpts from “The 1619 Project,” a tropical fruit I’ve never heard of … it’s a random choice of stories, the product of a wandering liberal arts education, I guess. There is an intimacy, scrolling early mornings through The New York Times or evenings with bourbon and book talk, that we treasure.

Lately, though, our reading time has become dark. New York Times headlines have turned into a litany of political absurdity, lies and betrayal. Reading aloud the words and fulminations of this president is like walking knee-deep in sewage. Former Arkansas Times columnist and author Gene Lyons recently retired, saying that in the limited time he had left on Earth, he was done thinking about Donald Trump.

A few months ago, Suzanne and I rented a vacation house for a few days surrounded by green and purple mountains, long, deserted beaches and a multicolored sea. It was pure tranquility. Yet every day I would open my phone and begin to recite aloud the utterances and actions of unserious sycophants strutting and bellowing across the national stage. One morning we looked at one another and I asked, “Why are we doing this?”

Now I read the paper and turn on NPR out of a sense of duty, not because I expect to be inspired or lifted up. It’s like being an Arkansas Democrat: You vote because you are a citizen, not because you expect anything good to come of it.

Several weeks ago our country, along with North Korea, Belarus and Russia, voted against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Then the president attacked the Ukrainian president during their meeting at the White House, blaming Ukrainians for Russia’s invasion of their country. Then JD Vance, with all the gravitas of a barking chihuahua, went after Zelensky. At that point, Brian Glenn, a reporter for the fringe TV outlet Real America’s Voice, demanded to know if Zelensky owned a suit. The place had gone batshit. My country has lost its moorings and no one will stand up.

I keep my dad’s funeral flag folded on the mantle in my living room. The VA gave it to us at his funeral in recognition of his service during World War II. He didn’t put up with bullies or wannabe dictators; he had seen more than his share. That morning the White House room was full of bullies and dictators, but on the American side this time.

I live in Trumpland in northern Pulaski County and pass several blue Trump flags on Batesville Pike every day on my way to work.

Most of my neighbors support Trump but, for the most part, we are respectful and civil. I don’t want to descend into crankdom. But the idea we were buddying up to a man like Putin stank of betrayal and treason. I felt my dad was with me when I unfolded his flag, went out to the street and hung it upside down, fastened with zip ties to our big farm gate. There it hung for the next three weeks until I noticed mud starting to splatter and took it down for cleaning.

I am old enough to remember Orval Faubus, the Capital Citizens’ Council and the raft of misogynistic bigots (all Southern Democrats) that populated our Legislature in the ’50s and ’60s. I also watched as our state transitioned to Rockefeller, Bumpers, Pryor and Clinton. The pendulum does swing and I believe this will happen again, both in Arkansas and America. Eventually, I hope, the American people will have had enough of Trump’s stupid economic policies, his tariffs, his scapegoating, his narcissism, his opportunistic othering of immigrants, gay people and any other helpless group that catches his eye. Eventually, Trump will take his rightful place alongside Joseph McCarthy, and our country will awake, as from a long sleep. And if I am still here, I will go back to reading to Suzanne in the mornings and evenings, never to think of Trump again.

‘THERE IS A DEEP BROODING IN ARKANSAS’ A

Q&A WITH WRITER SCOTT W. STERN.

Oakland, California-based scholar and attorney Scott W. Stern’s book, “There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou,” was published in January by Yale University Press. The book intertwines, in thematic rather than chronological fashion, two rape trials that occurred in Mississippi County alongside a recounting of the life of Maya Angelou, who began the long process of recovering from her own childhood rape trauma in Stamps, and whose memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” became a cornerstone of anti-rape activism. Stern recently talked with the Arkansas Times about his book and why these stories remain so important.

Arkansas is a much-overlooked state, and I think many of us who grew up here are always a bit astounded when folks from beyond Arkansas show an interest in our history. What led you to the stories contained in this book?

WHAT WAS YOUR IMPRESSION OF LITTLE ROCK WHEN YOU VISITED?

I really enjoyed it. When I'm in new places, I always try to walk as much as possible, which is how I eventually found a very cute bakery near the UALR campus (and a lovely if slightly overpriced coffee shop on Kavanaugh Avenue).

Back in 2018, I was doing research for an unrelated project when I stumbled across the collections of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and I learned that UALR has case files for thousands of criminal cases from the early 20th century, including countless trial transcripts. This struck me as a treasure trove, since transcripts are the rare sources that consistently contain the unedited words of very marginalized people. It was in the bowels of UALR, poring over thousands of pages of legal documents, that I came across the trials of Frank Bethel and Mike Wallace, two white men accused of rape in the late 1920s, and Bubbles Clayton and Jim X. Carruthers, two Black men accused of rape in the early 1930s. Both pairs of men were sentenced to death in the same courthouse in Mississippi County, but — as I would learn — that was just the beginning of their stories.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING?

“The Rich People Have Gone Away” by Regina Porter.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY LISTENING TO? A few podcasts: “If Books Could Kill,” ”Critics at Large” and “Fragile Juggernaut.”

the first place. Foremost among these conditions is poverty: Countless studies have linked poverty to higher rates of rape and abuse. Other conditions that render people vulnerable to violence are alienation, social isolation and simple loneliness. If we want to prevent sexual violence, we should work to build a society that prevents people from becoming poor and cut off from their communities.

You noted that the NAACP eagerly defended Black men accused of rape but did little for Black women raped by white men. Does the experience of Black women continue to remain sidelined in our national conversation? Most definitely. As I write in the book’s epilogue, based on a number of studies, “Women of color are disproportionately likely to be sexually assaulted, and they are also disproportionately likely not to be believed.” I’m inspired, however, by the many activists — especially Black women — who fought against sexual violence throughout the 20th century. I'm thinking, for instance, of Althea Hart, a 16-year-old Black girl who insisted in the 1930s that the NAACP fight as much for Black women as it did for Black men. Their work shows that resistance is one of history’s constants.

Is that why it was important for you to include Maya Angelou’s story in this book?

You expound upon how NAACP lawyers, in order to defend Black men accused of rape, regularly sought to cast aspersions upon the moral character of their white accusers. In more recent times, the #MeToo movement’s mandate to “believe women” has clashed with the historical reality that believing women uncritically often landed Black men a death sentence. How do we move forward from this? To my mind, the most productive way forward is to reduce the conditions that cause violence — including sexual violence — in

Yes! I thought it was vitally important to include Maya Angelou’s story in the book for a number of reasons, and her remarkable resilience was certainly one of them. But just as importantly, her writing and activism provide a perspective on Jim Crow sexual assault trials and their aftermaths that I couldn’t glean from trial transcripts alone. Angelou spent much of the 1930s in Arkansas recovering from sexual violence, but I also narrate her decision, decades later, to take what happened to her and write about it in her first book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Digging into Angelou’s recently opened archival papers, I was struck by the fact that initially, she didn’t write about the rape, instead focusing the memoir on her later life. Yet as she was writing, she eventually decided to put the assault and its aftermath at the center of her book. She later told interviewers that she did this to empower survivors of sexual violence, especially other Black girls, to tell them, “You might encounter defeats but must never be defeated.” In other words, Angelou’s story illustrates the many forms that resistance can take. —Guy Lancaster

THE POOR MAN’S EASTER EGG

ECONOMY.

BARGAIN ALTERNATIVES IN THE TRUMP

HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED:

Plastic, whether it’s ping pong balls or wiffleballs, does not play well with egg dye. It refuses it, in fact.

Potatoes will soak up dye only when they’re peeled. And that’s OK, but the dyed potatoes shrivel and darken pretty quickly, resembling used rubber erasers. It’s not worth the bother.

Kiwis are the right shape to mimic an egg, but not the right texture. Fuzzy skins resist dye.

Maybe you blame bird flu, maybe you blame Joe Biden, maybe you blame Donald Trump. Regardless, the price of eggs is high in 2025.

Athletic socks soak up dye pretty well. But who wants to look for balled-up socks in the grass?

Marshmallows are the clear winner. Extremely affordable at about 5 cents each if you get the store brand, marshmallows soak up vinegar-activated dyes just fine. And, unlike with real eggs, marshmallows won’t stink if one or two remain in their hiding places past Easter Sunday.

While we seem to be receding from January’s $10-per-dozen high-water mark, eggs are still dear enough that you might not want to roll them in your yard or leave them sitting out for Peter Cottontail to do with them what he will.

Easter-specific economic anxiety sent us scrambling for a more affordable alternative.

HERE’S WHAT WE TRIED:

Ping pong balls

Wiffle balls

Potatoes

Kiwis

Marshmallows

Athletic socks, balled up

BRIAN CHILSON/ PRAPATSORN.STOCK.ADOBE

LET THE FEAST BEGIN!

NADA SURF

WEDNESDAY 4/23. STICKYZ ROCK N’ ROLL CHICKEN SHACK. 8 P.M. $25. Fans of anthemic rock, impassioned ballads and upbeat yet meaningful pop will want to secure tickets for Nada Surf. The alt-rock band from New York City encompasses all these sounds and maybe a few new ones on its first new album since 2020, “Moon Mirrors,” released last year to critical acclaim. No Depression lauded the work for its “pure, hook-laden” rock, while Paste applauded its “propulsive rhythms, jangling guitars, and gleaming melodies.” Of his songwriting technique, lead singer Matthew Caws, one of the group’s original members, told Magnet magazine in 2024: “I just start messing around with a guitar and singing about whatever I’m thinking. There are exceptions, where a concept comes to me first and I set out to illustrate it. But more often than not, it’s something like, ‘I’m having feelings, I’m not sure I understand them, but I’m curious. Let me start making something and see if I can figure it out.’” We can’t wait to see that brand of immediacy on display at Stickyz. Get tickets at stickyz.com. DM

BY DAN MARSH, DANIEL GREAR, OMAYA JONES, CALEB PATTON AND MILO STRAIN

PALOMA BOMÉ.

ARKANSAS TIMES FILM SERIES: ‘CABARET’ (1972)

TUESDAY 4/15. RIVERDALE 10 VIP

CINEMA. 7 P.M. $12-$14.

Director/choreographer Bob Fosse followed his 1969 feature film debut, “Sweet Charity,” with “Cabaret,” a box-office hit musical that won eight Academy Awards in 1973, including Best Director (over Francis Ford Coppola, nominated for “The Godfather”!), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli) and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey). Set in 1931 Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, the film follows cynical yet pragmatic nightclub singer Sally Bowles (Minnelli), who gets involved in a love triangle with a married playboy (Helmut Griem) and a young English teacher (Michael York) as the Nazis attack the culture of the city. In his four-star review, Roger Ebert wrote that Fosse goes “to the bleak heart of the material,” calling the film an “unforgettable cry of despair.” Get tickets at riverdale10.com. OJ

TYLER CHILDERS

SUNDAY 4/6. SIMMONS BANK ARENA. 8 P.M. $49.50$199.50.

If there’s proof that you can fill arenas without the usual hallmarks of mainstream country singerdom, Tyler Childers might be it. He doesn’t pack a brotastic voice, or wear his cap backward while sipping a beer. And look at the video for his first hit single, “In Your Love,” which tells the story of two gay coal miners. Don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen queer passion sympathetically portrayed in a country music video, and that’s refreshing. (The song is much closer in style and content to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” than anything by, say, Morgan Wallen.) Otherwise, much of the material on Childers’ 2023 album, “Rustin’ in the Rain,” is more old school, which isn’t a bad thing. Tracks like the title cut (a classic barn burner), the languid “Phone Calls and Emails,” and especially Childers’ take on the Kris Kristofferson classic, “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” invigorate the genre. His music feels like bluegrass, Americana and the best contemporary country — all of which should make for a good time at Simmons Bank Arena, where Memphis-born singer-songwriter Cory Branan will serve as his opener. Get tickets at ticketmaster.com. DM

SAM WAXMAN

CAKE

THURSDAY 4/17. FIRST SECURITY AMPHITHEATRE. 8 P.M.

$45-$69.50.

Bust out your “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” and travel “The Distance” to the First Security Amphitheater for Cake in concert. The genre-bending altrockers, known for their “staunchly trend-averse” (Billboard) attitude and whose heyday fell in the late ’90s/early 2000s, revealed last year that they’d be putting out their first new album in 14 years (no release date has been announced), so perhaps a comeback is in order. Bands rarely grace the stage of the criminally underused River Market amphitheater, especially those as cool as Cake, so this is worth making an evening of. It’ll be Cake’s first-ever Little Rock show and first Arkansas show in 13 years, having played at the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion in Rogers in 2009 and 2012. Expect lots of quirky audience interaction and slick, groovy tunes. Get tickets at stubhub.com. MS

JESSICA PRATT

‘FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE / WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF’

WEDNESDAY 4/16-SATURDAY 4/26. 7:30 P.M. QUAPAW QUARTER UNITED METHODIST CHURCH. $20$25.

From the mind of legendary playwright/ poet Ntozake Shange, this form-shifting choreopoem tells of seven Black women using poetry, song and movement. A groundbreaking work of modern American theater, the play falls in line with the Actors Theatre of Little Rock’s commitment to productions championing visibility, emotion and power for marginalized people. Bursting with passion, humor and unfiltered honesty, “for colored girls” celebrates womanhood and discovery through monologues and conversation, weaving a tapestry of joy and triumph as its characters discover their own rainbows. “for colored girls” has eight showings at the Quapaw Quarter UMC. Get tickets at actorstheatrelr.org. CP

SUNDAY 4/6. THE MOMENTARY, BENTONVILLE. 7 P.M.

$34.

To hear Los Angeles singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt is to be reminded that even within the simple pairing of melody and an acoustic guitar, there’s still new ground to cover. Occasional accoutrements — simple chords on the upright piano, atmospheric strings, a soft shaker — find their way into her songs, but the general feeling is one of remarkable restraint. How Pratt’s minimalist musical landscapes are able to so effortlessly ensorcell is a puzzling testament to the strength of her peculiar voice — elegant yet childish, self-possessed yet frail, as if the reverb drenching her recordings might just blow her away. Pratt’s latest album, “Here in the Pitch” — a list-topping item on year-end roundups from publications like Paste, Pitchfork, Stereogum and Rolling Stone — doesn’t have a single dud, but “World on a String” might be the quickest path to falling irrevocably in love. Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Merce Lemon is set to open. Get tickets at themomentary.org. DG

THE MYSTERY LIGHTS

FRIDAY 4/25. WHITE WATER TAVERN. 8:30 P.M. $17-$20. Until recently, I was unfamiliar with The Mystery Lights, a garage rock band from Salinas, California. But part of the joy of this job is finding groups like this one. I’ve always been a sucker for garage rock, and this band’s 2024 album “Purgatory” is a fine example of the genre. Dial it up and hear touches of everyone from Bo Diddley to Bob Dylan, The Monkees to The Doors. Vocalist Michael Brandon, guitarist LA Solano, bassist Alex Amini, Lily Rogers on keys and Zach Butler on drums race the listener through a variety of styles and voices (“In The Streets” has the driving rhythm of a Beach Boys song) without sounding like copycats. The Mystery Lights will bring its arsenal of Who-like screams and dreamy SoCal vibes to the White Water Tavern with psychedelic quartet Levitation Room. Get tickets at whitewatertavern.com. DM

‘THE ELVIS OF RUSSELLVILLE’

FRIDAY 4/4-SATURDAY 5/10. THE JOINT. 8 P.M. $30.

Visit the Argenta Arts District in April or May, and you could buy a ticket to the final run of shows performed by comedy trio The Main Thing (Steve and Vicki Farrell, plus Brett Ihler). The troupe's work has been featured on "Saturday Night Live," HBO and Dick Clark's United Stations Radio Network, among other outlets. Billing themselves as “3 ACTORS. COUNTLESS CHARACTERS,” they’ve called the North Little Rock cabaret theater home for years. "The Elvis of Russellville" runs each Friday and Saturday night from April 4 to May 10, with nothing further on the schedule for The Main Thing in 2025. (According to a social media post dated Jan. 22, the Farrells have decided to sell their ownership of The Joint, but the entertainment venue will remain open.) Set in a honky tonk in (the presumably fictional) Dumpster, Arkansas, "Russellville" concerns a record company executive and a local singing star who "suddenly has a shot at superstardom." Laughter and music ensue. Get tickets at thejointargenta.com. DM

MARCELO HERNANDEZ CASTILLO

WEDNESDAY 4/9. REVES RECITAL HALL, HENDRIX COLLEGE, CONWAY. 7:30 P.M. FREE.

“When I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility.” Those are the words of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, who trekked from Mexico to California with his family at the age of 5, endured an upbringing of uneasy secrecy, then went on to become the writer of two acclaimed poetry collections: “Dulce” and “Cenzontle,” which The New York Times called “celebratory and mournful all at once.” Hernandez Castillo pins down his journey from anxious anonymity to literary success in “Children of the Land,” an “intimate and lyrical” memoir in which he “arranges vignettes in fragments that cross time and space, creating a sense of constant motion that lays out the complex and rich tapestry of his history” (The Rumpus). Hernandez Castillo will read and discuss his work in Conway as a guest of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation, and reservations aren’t necessary. DG

YOLANDA

JULIA KHOROSHILOV

Fresh Ideas for Spring: Celebrate, Create, and Connect at CALS

April is Earth Month!

Go green with CALS and celebrate sustainability, creativity, and community. Join us for eco-friendly programs, handson activities, and resources to help you make a positive impact. Whether you’re exploring ways to reduce waste, upcycling materials, or discovering the power of nature through books and events, there’s something for everyone.

Rock Paper Run

April 6 | 7:30AM

In celebration of National Library Week, the Rock Paper Run 5K, hosted in partnership with the North Little Rock Public Library System, will take place on Sunday, April 6. This year’s course features a scenic loop, starting and ending at NLRPLS’s Argenta Branch and winding through the River Trail in Little Rock. The week-long celebration will conclude with a special event at Laman Library on April 12. For details and registration, visit rockpaperrun.org.

Children’s Day at Maumelle Library

April 26 | 10:30AM

Join us for our 3rd Annual Children’s Day at Maumelle, featuring a handson DIY Foosball Table workshop led by artist Vicente Yañez. Children will have the opportunity to decorate their players, design their stadiums, and even customize the foosball itself before teaming up for friendly matches. All supplies will be provided while they last.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

ARKANSAS’S SCHOOL VOUCHER APPLICATION ASKED IF PARENTS WERE SEEKING ‘A DIFFERENT RACIAL MIX OF STUDENTS.’

BY AUSTIN GELDER

At 8 a.m. on March 3, the Arkansas Department of Education opened online applications for state-funded school vouchers for the 2025-26 school year. Created by Gov. Sarah Sanders’ 2023 LEARNS Act, the vouchers give families nearly $7,000 per student to put toward private school tuition or homeschool expenses. As of last month, they’re newly available to all K-12 students statewide.

By the afternoon of March 3, the voucher application was drawing fire on social media over a multiple-choice question that asked parents why they were applying. Among the nine options provided was this one: “To access a different racial mix of students for my child.”

The uproar prompted what looks to have been a bit of a panic at the education department. By 2:11 p.m. that day, the “different racial mix” option had been scrubbed from the application.

The education department also deleted

PRIVATE THOUGHTS: A question on Arkansas's LEARNS voucher applications aimed to identify what parents were looking for. “A different racial mix,” perhaps?

three possible answers to a series of other survey questions that touched on the sensitive subjects of race, religion and mandatory retention. In three separate questions, the application asked parents of kids who received a voucher in the current 2024-25 school year to identify their top three reasons for not using the funding, if applicable. The 13 dropdown answers for those questions included the following: “Child did not want religious instruction,” “Child did not want to be held back a grade,” and “Child did not pass admissions test.”

In the roughly six hours the original response options were available, 110 applicants representing 129 students clicked to indicate that accessing “a different racial mix of students for my child” was among the top three reasons they wanted a school voucher.

No one who filled out a survey on the first day indicated their students qualified for a voucher in the current school year but declined to use it to avoid religious instruction or

being held back a grade, or because the student didn’t pass an admission test to a private school.

The education department said there were 16,386 applications submitted that first day, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. (More than 32,000 students had applied by March 20.)

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the department reveal an internal scramble on March 3 to change some of the answer options on the questionnaire.

A fevered email exchange between Darrell Smith, assistant commissioner in charge of the education department’s Office of School Choice and Parental Empowerment, and Kalina Young of Facts Management, a vendor running the online applications, shows that Smith reached out to Young at 1:16 p.m. that Monday. The subject line of his email was “URGENTREMOVE drop-down option Immediately.”

“Kallina, I need the highlighted option re-

moved from the application drop down immediately,” he wrote, attaching a screenshot of a post by public school advocate Veronica McClane on a Facebook page for Little Rock School District families and other stakeholders. In it, McClane highlighted the answer option for parents aiming for “a different racial mix of students for my child” and asked for reactions.

People engaging with McClane’s post seemed both taken aback by the question and interested in the answer.

“I mean, we all know why they are doing it. I just didn't think they would be quite so obvious about it,” Greg Henderson commented.

“The voucher program is a conservative attempt at resegregation, besides being a handout for wealthy Christian families,” one user commented.

Not all of the reactions were negative. Maybe the question simply aimed to find out how many Arkansas families are looking for schools with more diversity, some suggested.

“My child is Asian so I want him to be around a good mix of cultures, not just white, so I think the question could be looked at multiple ways,” Facebook user Shannon Fields wrote.

As social media users were weighing in, Smith was working to revise the online survey. Ten minutes after Smith sent his urgent email, Young responded, asking if he was available for a phone call.

“Please call ASAP,” Smith fired back at 1:33 p.m.

No records provided to the Times’ FOIA request explain why the Arkansas Department of Education removed the answer options about religious instruction, being held back or failing an admissions test. But at 2:11 p.m., Young emailed Smith a confirmation that the four answer options had been scrubbed from the survey.

Not everyone who filled out voucher applications that first day were asked the same set of questions. The survey is of the choose-yourown-adventure type, where the questions being asked vary depending on previous answers.

When asked how the questions for the survey were chosen, education department spokeswoman Kimberly Mundell referred us to the Office for Education Policy, a research shop at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville that often works closely with the state.

“In an effort to obtain data on the EFA program, the University of Arkansas’ Office for Education Policy included a series of optional survey questions in the EFA application,” Mundell wrote in an emailed response. (“EFA” means “education freedom accounts,” the state’s official name for the voucher program.)

“OEP included the optional question and response referenced in your email, though it was quickly removed at the request of ADE [the Ar-

kansas Department of Education]. For questions regarding why OEP wanted that question included, you should contact them.”

When we reached out to professor Patrick Wolf at the Office for Education Policy, however, he pointed back to Mundell.

“The survey is part of the ADE application form for the program. Thus, ADE ultimately decides what is and is not included,” Wolf said by email.

A much-cited researcher on “school choice” options, including charter schools, vouchers and other alternatives to traditional public education, Wolf offered a bit more background on the methodology behind the questions.

Asking parents why they are seeking vouchers is standard practice, and the answer options provided on the Arkansas application match surveys in other parts of the country, he said. Even the one about race.

“The question you refer to, and the answer categories provided, came from a federal government survey used to study the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Both the question and the answer options commonly appear in surveys used for these kinds of studies. The question simply asks parents what considerations entered into their school choice decision,” Wolf wrote.

It makes sense. Despite the naked racism it might reveal, don’t we all want to know how many Arkansas families are using state-funded vouchers to intentionally self-segregate? This seems like good data to have!

It’s possible such data would become fodder for opponents of the program. Clearly, not every parent seeking a voucher is motivated by race. But the idea of vouchers (and many private schools themselves) were born out of the wish of white parents to keep their children in

segregated classrooms after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, after all. And research suggests vouchers still feed segregation in 2025.

Universal voucher programs like Arkansas’s are still in the experimental phase. Parents, educators, politicians and researchers on both sides of the debate are hungry for any data about who’s using them and why.

And hard numbers on Arkansas’s voucher experiment have so far been hard to come by. When it comes to public schools, the education department publishes information about the racial and socioeconomic makeup of their student bodies, along with numbers on academic performance and other key metrics. Yet private schools do not have to report any of that information, and we know almost nothing about the demographics of students in the taxpayer-funded program.

The vouchers were available to only limited groups of students for the first two years of the program. In its first year, the 2023-24 school year, 5,548 Arkansas students used vouchers. Participation increased to more than 14,000 in the current school year.

The state education department has provided only limited data on the voucher program, but we know the vast majority of participating students in the first two years — more than four out of five — were never in the public school system to begin with. Most were existing private school or homeschool students or new kindergartners.

Voucher eligibility in the first two years was limited to groups such as students with disabilities, those entering kindergarten, children of military personnel and kids who previously attended an unusually low-ranking public school.

The 2025-26 school year will be the first in which all Arkansas students are eligible to apply.

The price tag for a voucher is tied to the state’s per-student funding amount for public schools. It has risen from $6,672 in the first year of the program to $6,864 in the upcoming school year (though certain students with disabilities can get more). In the current school year — Year 2 of the program — vouchers will cost the state more than $95 million.

State lawmakers haven’t finalized budget numbers yet for the coming year, but the governor’s budget plan calls for putting $187.7 million toward voucher expenses, with another $90 million in reserve. But even $280 million may not be enough to cover everyone who wants a voucher. Should money run out, priority will go to students who are already receiving vouchers, who have special needs, who live in a zone with public schools graded D or F, whose parents are first responders or in the military, and who are first-time kindergarteners.

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INHUMANE: Arkansas adopted a new method of state-sponsored execution.

DEATH BY NITROGEN

ARKANSAS ADOPTS A TORTUROUS NEW METHOD FOR STATE-SPONSORED EXECUTIONS.

BY MATT CAMPBELL

The first person to be executed in America by way of nitrogen gas was Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama, just over a year ago. Witnesses said Smith writhed and seized for several torturous minutes before he died.

Regardless, Arkansans on death row could soon face death by nitrogen gas under a new state law.

House Bill 1489, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Wardlaw (R-Hermitage) and Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) and co-sponsored by 64 other Republicans, made its way through the Arkansas Capitol easily and was bound for the governor’s desk at press time. It adds nitrogen gas as a second method to the list of approved methods of execution under Arkansas law. Currently, only lethal injection is allowed, after the state outlawed the electric chair in 1983 except as a fallback option if lethal injection is outlawed.

Nitrogen is an inert gas that makes up more than three-quarters of the air we breathe. For execution purposes, the condemned inmate is administered 100% nitrogen. Proponents of the method say this induces hypoxia — a lack of oxygen in the blood — leading to uncon-

sciousness and death.

The bill is silent as to how nitrogen gas would be administered, leaving that up to the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Based on discussions in Alabama, which has carried out four of these executions, and Oklahoma, the first state to change its law to allow such executions, it is likely Arkansas would adopt one of two methods: either a “medical-grade tent” (basically, a temporary gas chamber) that could be filled with nitrogen gas after the inmate was inside or a mask that covers the inmate’s entire face and which could be filled with nitrogen once the inmate was strapped to a gurney.

Alabama used the mask method last year when executing Smith, who was convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett. Whether Smith’s nitrogen-gas execution was a success depends on how one measures it. Smith did die, so by that metric, the nitrogen gas worked.

On the other hand, Alabama has hidden several of the details about how long it took for Smith to die, and witness accounts of the execution suggest it took several minutes.

The Associated Press reported, “Smith be-

gan to shake and writhe violently, in thrashing spasms and seizure-like movements, at about 7:58 p.m. The force of his movements caused the gurney to visibly move at least once. Smith’s arms pulled against the straps holding him to the gurney. He lifted his head off the gurney and then fell back.

“The shaking went on for at least 2 minutes. [Priest Jeff] Hood repeatedly made the sign of the cross toward Smith. Smith’s wife, who was watching, cried out.

“Smith began to take a series of deep gasping breaths, his chest rising noticeably. His breathing was no longer visible at about 8:08 p.m. The corrections officer who had checked earlier the mask walked over to Smith and looked at him.”

The U.S. and Arkansas constitutions prohibit cruel and unusual punishment. The burden of proving that a new method is unconstitutionally cruel, however, rests on the person challenging the method of execution, and the current state and federal supreme courts are generally considered pro-death penalty and resistant to striking down methods of execution as cruel and unusual.

A second potential legal issue with Arkan-

sas’s new execution-by-nitrogen law is the discretion it gives to the director of the Arkansas Division of Correction to take his pick of injection or gas for future executions.

“The method of execution has to be a legislative decision and cannot be delegated to the administrative process,” criminal defense attorney Jeff Rosenzweig told the Arkansas Times. “That was the takeaway from the methods litigation of approximately a decade ago.”

The “methods litigation” refers to a lawsuit in which the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down legislation that gave corrections officials discretion to choose the method of execution that would be used in future executions. In 2012, the high court said the law unconstitutionally violated the doctrine of separation-of-powers, because it was up to the Legislature to choose a method of execution and they could not delegate this responsibility to an executive branch agency, such as the Department of Corrections.

The new law likewise appears to delegate the Legislature’s responsibility to someone else. The bill specifically states: “Upon receipt of a warrant of execution from the Governor, the Director of the Division of Correction shall provide written notice within seven (7) days to the condemned prisoner of the method of execution.”

ARKANSAS NOT ALONE

Constitutional questions aside, Arkansas is hardly alone among death-penalty states in looking for a new way to kill prisoners. There has been a national push for alternative methods of execution over the last 15 or so years for at least two reasons.

First, doctors and drug manufacturers have become more vocal in their opposition to using medical methods and medical products to kill. Big names in the drug industry, such as Pfizer, have stopped selling drugs for use in lethal injection, leading to dwindling supplies and an inability of some states to replenish expired execution drugs at all. Compounding this problem, while many states require a medical professional as part of the lethal-injection process, the American Medical Association says physicians have an ethical duty not to participate in executions.

At the same time, stories of botched executions using lethal injection have become more common. Smith — the man executed via nitrogen gas in Alabama last year — suffered through a failed lethal injection in 2022. Alabama botched lethal-injection executions of Alan Eugene Miller and Joe Nathan James Jr. that year as well. In 2017, Arizona had to inject Joseph Wood 15 times with the lethal drug cocktail over the span of two hours. (The process was supposed to take one dose and 10 minutes.) And in 2014, Clayton Lockett convulsed and tried to speak for 43 minutes as the state of Oklahoma attempted to execute him.

WHETHER SMITH’S NITROGENGAS EXECUTION WAS A SUCCESS DEPENDS ON HOW ONE MEASURES IT. SMITH DID

DIE, SO BY THAT METRIC, THE NITROGEN GAS WORKED.

It was Lockett’s botched execution that prompted Republican Oklahoma state Rep. Mike Christian to introduce nitrogen-gas execution as an alternative in that state. Christian asked his friend, Michael Copeland, then a criminal justice professor at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, for alternative execution methods that would be more efficient and more humane.

Copeland has no medical training and has no experience in executions. He did, however, go to high school with Christian and returned to Oklahoma in 2010 to help Christian run for office.

Despite his lack of relevant credentials, Copeland and two other professors authored a 14-page study in 2014 that was the basis for Christian’s execution bill. Christian asked them to complete the study and asked Copeland to present it in support of the bill. Oklahoma lawmakers may have been persuaded, but others were not.

The Frontier, a nonprofit news outlet in Oklahoma, said Copeland’s report “included no medical doctors and conducted no actual first-hand research.” Rather, the Frontier wrote, “the study’s authors reviewed articles from Slate.com and The National Review, as well as YouTube videos of kids inhaling helium until they passed out.”

The dearth of academic or evidentiary support for Copeland’s findings notwithstanding, the Oklahoma Legislature adopted nitrogen-gas executions in 2015. The law would make such executions the state’s primary means of execution if lethal injection were ruled unconstitutional or if the state were to run out of lethal-injection drugs.

RETURN OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Capital punishment was illegal in Arkansas and the rest of the nation in 1972-76. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down nationally in 1972’s Furman v. Georgia, all people then on death row in the country had their sentences automatically commuted to life imprisonment. At that point, Arkansas had not executed anyone since Charles Fields in 1964.

The court said executions could resume in 1976, but Arkansas’s first post-Furman execution did not take place until John Edward Swindler was executed by electric chair in June 1990. He was the last Arkansan to die by electric chair. Another 30 have been executed via lethal injection since then, including Christina Riggs, the only woman executed in Arkansas, in 2000.

Arkansas has 25 men and no women on death row. In the last 20 years, the state has executed five men. One was in November 2005, while the other four were killed in a one-week period in 2017 as part of then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s attempt to execute eight inmates before the state’s supply of lethal-injection drugs expired.

Since the four executions in April 2017, Arkansas has added only two inmates to death row, both in 2018. No executions are currently scheduled.

JUST CRUMBS

SANDERS’ PLAN TO END THE 1/8-CENT GROCERY TAX WILL SAVE YOU A WHOLE QUARTER FOR EVERY $200 YOU SPEND AT THE STORE.

BY BENJAMIN HARDY

Gov. Sarah Sanders held a press conference with Republican legislators on March 4 to announce “two major pieces of legislation that will address the cost and availability of food here in the state of Arkansas.” One is meant to give liability protection to food bank donors; the other would end the state grocery tax.

Both will very likely pass before the legislative session ends in mid-April. But that doesn’t mean Arkansans will stop paying all sales tax on groceries. It just means they’ll stop paying the tiny portion that goes to the state, which had already been reduced down to just 1/8th of a cent on the dollar (0.125%) in past years, thanks to former Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe.

Normal city and county taxes will still apply to grocery purchases, according to the governor’s office and the state Department of Finance and Administration. In Little Rock, the city sales tax rate is 1.125% and Pulaski County’s rate is 1%, for a combined 2.125%. That’s nine times the 0.125% levied by the state.

In other words: Don’t expect your grocery bills to shrink much as a result of this bill. If a carton of upscale, free-range eggs right now costs $8 at Kroger, removing the 1/8th-cent state tax would bring it down to $7.99. For a $200 grocery bill, ending the state tax would save you about 25 cents.

That’s not to say ending the grocery tax is a bad idea. Sanders said in March it’s “Arkansas’s most regressive tax,” and she’s not wrong: Taxing groceries means taxing the poor more heavily than the well-to-do, because lower-income families spend a greater share of their paycheck on food than those with more disposable income.

The larger problem is the state has been making its overall tax structure more regressive for some time by steadily lowering income taxes on corporations and middle-to-upper-income households. Phasing out a sliver of sales tax that pulls in just $11 million each year statewide won’t create much of an effect in the lives of Arkansans struggling to afford food. Though, to be fair, Sanders has championed other, more meaningful hunger relief policies — for example, the excellent bill that passed earlier this session to provide free breakfast for all public school students (paid for with medical marijuana taxes).

If sales taxes on groceries don’t make a big impact on state coffers, though, they matter a lot to local governments. When Sanders first announced plans to end the grocery tax, there was much concern from Arkansas cities and counties that the state might force them to exempt groceries as well. Doing so would blow a hole in their collective budgets to the tune of $280 million or more.

The governor has said repeatedly that the bill only eliminates the ⅛-cent state tax, not their local counterparts. But the statutory picture is still murky, given that cities’ and counties’ authority to levy sales taxes is generally tied to state law. If groceries aren’t taxed at all on the state level, do local governments really have the ability to tax them separately?

And there’s another potential legal wrinkle: The ⅛-cent state tax is dedicated to environmental conservation purposes under Amendment 75 of the Arkansas Constitution. Can it really be partially rescinded by the Legislature?

Such bothersome questions may explain why such a broadly popular proposal still hasn’t gotten a vote in committee as of March 19. Lawmakers and staff are presumably working behind the scenes to square the circle, policywise. But it’s indicative of Sanders’ opaque, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach that the details remain unclear two weeks after the bill was introduced.

The worthy challenge of intergenerational dialogue.

BY FREDERICK MCKINDRA

Now six

years since her passing, I think I can say I’m at peace with my mother’s absence. In 2017, when I moved back to Little Rock to help care for her during her fight with pancreatic cancer, I had no idea that what I might have been doing was returning home to finally have the difficult conversations with her I’d moved 19 hours away to avoid. I hadn’t wanted to talk to her about what happened at Howard University and why I’d run even farther away. I hadn’t wanted to talk about the habit we’d fallen into of avoidance and niceties.

But in the two years I spent with her here in Little Rock, we did talk. We argued, and we shouted, and we retreated. We’d worked our way to a détente over religion and sexual orientation, me being cowed by what she was now facing and terrified by what saying goodbye to her soon might truly mean — all the while, her bravely confronting chemo and me trying to force-feed her past her lost appetite. She probably knew I’d been away fashioning my arguments, preparing my gripes and grievances for 15 years. And though she refused to sit through family therapy in those last years, she was willing to make space for me to say my piece. So that mother wound is not what I’m still processing, I think. Not why I’m trying to understand intergenerational dialogue and how it sometimes fails us, why we sometimes avoid it because of how difficult it may seem, or to shirk the potential disappointment in others or, more terribly, ourselves.

No, the dialogue I now, at 40, lament not ever having, was one with my cousin Bob. The last time I saw Bob was at a family reunion in St. Louis. By then, dementia was crippling his mind and body, and it seemed inappropriate to approach him with the barrage of questions I’d been storing up. I’d wanted to query him about his life, and his work, and where he’d lived, and where he’d traveled, and whom he’d loved, and his relationship with his family, and how his parents had taken the news about his lifestyle, if he’d managed to speak it to them at all? All of it to ask him, basically, how he’d done it. How had he survived this long, still a regular biannual attendee at the family reunions, still universally beloved by his kin?

In truth, I’m not even sure it was the dementia that stalled me from approaching Bob. It was probably the same old shame that kept me away. But I still wonder whether he’d ever recognized me as a gay man? Had I been visible to the outside world? Had he ever intended to pull me aside and signal his knowledge of my membership in a different kind of family?

My pursuit of intergenerational dialogue derives from this lack, I think. These silences, where my courage failed me, or where my elder assumed I’d be all right, that surely I’d make it and so didn’t spare the time and effort to talk to me. I’m no more patient, nor a better listener, than any of my contemporaries. I pursue these conversations somewhat selfishly, and selectively, having told my father just a few weeks ago — wary of being conscripted into some fantasy project of his of gathering the stories of his now-dead relatives — that tragically, or perhaps not, the record of some folks’ lives just don’t get collected, that they’re not remembered or retold.

A lifelong reader, and from that practice probably an ordained writer, it took me until my teenage years to realize that books were mechanisms for cheating the quiet of death. They were essentially telephones for the dead, whereupon humans could relay information from beyond the grave. I’d attended umpteen funerals up until then, and yet not until that moment in my teens did I realize that books were the most cogent means of achieving immortality. They guaranteed one an everlasting life.

It’s taken me up until adulthood to expand my thinking beyond such an egotistical ambition as projecting my ideas onto future generations and to appreciate the value of writing for more prudent, dialectic aims: mediating tough discussions with my parents, with my community and within myself. This is the intergenerational dialogue I’m interested in exploring.

It’s important to distinguish the two genres I work in as a writer, and the questions they raise of authorship and audience. With fiction, though I am working through characters that have varying degrees of distance from myself, the work is more intensely personal and allows me to dramatize things that I can’t quite claim ownership of yet.

Because, in fiction, you are uniquely able to describe someone’s inner thoughts. You can explore ideas that a character, and more importantly, the author, doesn’t have to take responsibility for in the public sphere. The shame, and therefore the needed anonymity, still makes it the place where I can most readily work out the dialogues that I most want to have.

Consider this opening line from a short story I’ve been working on periodically for the past year: “Truth be told, Jordan had long aspired to some semblance of the black bourgeoisie, un petit monde of black exceptionalism, with its border rigidly policed. His own little Negroland, peopled with his kind of people.”

My buddy Gabe and I have a running joke that I am a Black Republican. Which is decidedly not true. But I can’t claim that my habits toward rigor and critique haven’t branded me with the labels “snob” or “elitist” before, not exactly a “man of the people.” In fiction, I’m able to tunnel into, or sometimes just tease, the abiding stress points in my psyche, in this case social class and race, access and denial.

Now consider creative nonfiction. In a practice so deceptively straightforward, I, a person equally compelled toward the consoling seclusion of privacy and the thrill of exposure, set out toward truth. In actuality, it’s much more ephemeral than that. It’s a challenge to reconcile the pedantic tone one inevitably takes in committing so many words and ideas to print with a self-conscious awareness that those ideas remain unstable and, more so, unreliable.

Still, creative nonfiction allows me to tell someone “I love you” and “You hurt me” in the same breath. It allows me to tell a place that I love it and simultaneously despise it. It allows me to hold these two big truths in proximity to one another in order to approximate the fluctuating reality that is probably the closest to describing my actual feelings for things.

A lifelong reader, and from that practice probably an ordained writer, it took me until my teenage years to realize that books were mechanisms for cheating the quiet of death.

SOUTH END CHILDHOOD: Clockwise from top left, writer Frederick McKindra’s cousin Bob; McKindra (left) and his brother and father; and McKindra (front) with his brother and sister.

Creative nonfiction allows me to tell someone “I love you” and “You hurt me” in the same breath.

GROWING OUT: A teenaged Frederick McKindra stands next to his father.

In 2016, I wrote an essay about my relationship to youth football, a game I played as a child and early adolescent. The tone I effected was not intended toward rhapsody. I wrote:

“Every team I ever played for, that’s what we were, a collection of dangling parts, limbs of one singular black-boy body. First in little league at 8, then junior high, then in high school where it ended, we were a body submitted for seasoning, in advance of what the world held in wait. I remember the dread I felt daily at school in anticipation of football practice, the blows to be taken that evening, the feel of my body gone grimy, the nausea rising in my belly. This rite of passage, it seemed to me, had been made brutal intentionally, meant to wring the boy out of our collective young man-ness, drain us, leave us spent, the way orgasms had begun to only a few years before.

“Leaving the sport — and the affirmations of maleness I imagined my family and community demanded of me — required quitting, on three separate occasions.”

You hear the same burgeoning disdain, the desire to flee, in an essay of mine from 2018, where I wrote about the neighborhood in which I grew up:

“I’ve long struggled with my feelings toward the South End, having never loved the place the way I thought I should. Both my parents rhapsodize about the segregated black communities of their origins. But whereas their tales communicated the wills of their neighbors to persevere, my community seemed intent on trumpeting its hardship. My relationship to the blocks from 25th Street down to the train tracks at 36th has mellowed over the years, from simmering hostility, to indifference, to a fondness that derives from nostalgia mostly, and so sometimes seems too facile. Much of that trajectory was informed by popular depictions of black community, defined throughout much of my lifetime as a place meant for escaping. I bore some guilt for having harbored those fantasies at times, for longing to abandon it.

“In junior high school, a classmate once confronted me about this, asking why I didn’t represent the South End the way one was expected to back then, bellowing the name of one of the city’s black neighborhoods — East End, or Hangar Hill, John Barrow, or Southwest — and thereby declaring myself testament to the place’s toughness, or conspicuous affluence. In the moment, I feigned bewilderment, as though unable to recall ever having been asked to do so outright. I shrugged, hoping to convince him I would have served as a poor representative anyway. But I knew what he meant. Consciously or not, I was guilty of scrubbing those mannerisms the South End’s reputation begged of me, according to my peer’s understanding of its history, from my manner and speech. Implicit in his challenge was our mutual recognition of the judgment I cast on the place. Somewhere along the way, I’d begun betraying my block. He wanted me to know that he knew what I was doing.”

Writing these essays was about working my way to a resolution, a momentary stay against the confusion I felt about sport, my gender, my racial identity, the community of people I consider home and the pillars of that community that made such an activity available to me in the first place. I would work to get the lan-

guage right, establish some distance by elevating the word choice just so, land a couple of ripostes against the safe, established villain — white people, mostly — all the while knowing that the feelings I had on the subject might change tomorrow, that I’d arrived at this moment’s truth, but that it might just expire in an hour.

Intergenerational dialogue like this, about world-shaping moments in our lives, feels especially hard because we may not have the stamina for it. We may get to a place where we are exhausted by being called wrong, or the offender or the victimizer over and over again. We may tire of being called to the mat to share our pain, our hurt, our rage again and again, of telling the woeful story about the time that we were bested by something, the point in our personal history where things went irrevocably wrong and our personal biographies, or physical bodies or professional resumes carry some missing element, some depleted piece. What compels us back to these dialogues then? Love of the community informed by the failed attempts at discourse. Love of the people, and therefore a desire for them to know you exactly, and more fully. Frustration at having gotten it wrong, yet again, and an undue confidence in one’s ability to do it differently this time.

As the writer, I have to accept that sometimes my reportorial acumen may fail the task at hand, sometimes the demands of journalistic integrity won’t allow me to submit certain claims, and sometimes my audience may even have a personal axe to grind and therefore flit right past the larger intention at play within a piece.

The essays I write, beyond being records of the receipts I’ve kept for long-simmering arguments, are ways of charting these hidden constellations that exist and, in their randomness, seem to shore up my belief in the existence of the community and the family and the self I claim to know. I write them because I don’t want to see the institutions I’ve known and been impacted by eroded by time or misinformation or lack of institutional confidence and esteem. I write them because I want folks beyond Little Rock to know about the complexity of inhabiting a place like this, and that this place demanded the same kind of rigorous attention and exploration that inform the exegesis of Harlem or Brooklyn or London or Paris, or even Jerusalem.

I write them because of the ever-present fear of death, and its accompanying silence. I write them to record the impact of things like community talk radio programs on KABF, queer histories like that of Little Rock’s E. Lynn Harris, the lost achievements of the alumni of Horace Mann High School, muted by the din of Little Rock’s self-congratulating integration narrative, and for the seemingly small intergenerational dialogue I return to most mornings and some afternoons at the Jim Dailey Fitness & Aquatic Center, a place where the activity of my mind is quieted by the huff of my breath, standing right beside the most racially, socioeconomically and age-diverse population I’ve ever encountered out there in the wide world.

This essay was adapted from a speech McKindra gave at the Arkansas Times Lecture Series in February.

GHOST OR MEMORY OR THE SPACE BETWEEN

Last fall, my friend Valerie Wingert at South Main Creative handed me the most perfect stack of archival photos of Black people. Most of the images are from the late ’20s through the late ’50s. As it turned out, some of them were printed at two studios that functioned for a time in Pine Bluff: Alpha Studio and Logue Studio. Seeing those faces for the first time was exhilarating, both a mirror and a portal. Black archival photos are common enough to encounter out in the world, but a batch of them in relatively good condition is a bit of a rarity on my path.

Since then, I've been working in Pine Bluff and shooting around the city in less busy moments. I was drawn to the architecture and structures, many of which retain a great deal of beauty in their decline. Those sun-spent shotgun houses call out in the voice of John Biggers, row after row, a centuries-long echo of diasporic magic and ingenuity. The patchwork motel with a big, blue bellyful of laughter and lies. The theater of silver dreams and golden-belted doors. There is a sparkle of beauty in every crevice if the eye is willing.

In these works I've sought the nexus where figures in the archival photographs intersect with what has become of the town and life they came to know. Through multiple exposures, scans and a great deal of screen time, I've begun to see the merging of the people and the place and the love. So much tenderness courses through it all, and the accompanying poem I hear in their voices.

A photo essay by Joshua Asante.

"I Smile When I Think Your Name, I Smile When You Speak Mine"

"A

Mountain Is Fire With No Lover To Breathe Into It"

ONLY THE LONGING

life peels us like fruit until only love remains. only the longing.

what are you, ghost or memory or the space between?

what was this place before we were here? surely, the fecundity of this saturated earth has nothing to do with us. it all has to do with us. we watered these southern trees with saliva and blood.

//sister wind, prayers i shroud around your shoulders. carry them to god//

here, it is the little deaths that pile atop our days we must not embrace. our cities breathe cold uncertainties and indifference into us, adding to the weight.

i, a dream beggar, wade into town soaked through with longing. peeled.

//light full of knowing, guide the path i do not see. please, save a place for me.//

eventide washes oranges and blues over us, fading the dusts of the day. will we make enough oil tonight to keep from rusting in our sleep? stick to me like a memphian zephyr in june or like the cool clay we ground ourselves into.

two brown as the river.

down by the lake, up by some refracted grace. who are you? what was this place before you were here?

"She Said Meet Me At Saracen, I Said I'm Already There"

"Can You Help Me Find My Mother, She Looks So Much Like Yours" (left)

"The Space Between Two Bodies Is A (S)Fear" (right)

Who will mourn the Arkansas Fatmucket?

HOW THE FILTER FEEDERS IN ARKANSAS’S STREAMBEDS REFLECT THE HEALTH OF OUR WATERWAYS — AND WHY THEY’RE WORTH SAVING.

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARIANA REMMEL

n a warm summer day near Benton, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission aquatic ecology program supervisor Kendall Moles and his technician paddled kayaks along the Saline River with precious cargo in tow. The pair were on their way to release one of the state’s most imperiled animals back to their native habitat through a program supported by the federal Endangered Species Act. So when they turned the bend into a quiet side channel, Moles unloaded a cooler full of Lampsilis powellii: an olive-brown, oval-shaped freshwater mussel known more commonly as the Arkansas Fatmucket. It’s a lamentably comical name for an organism facing a tragic demise.

The Arkansas Fatmucket was once a common species of the Saline, Caddo and Ouachita rivers. But after decades of stressors from water pollution and habitat destruction, its populations declined precipitously. In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the species as threatened, meaning it may soon be in danger of extinction across its range. Unfortunately, it’s not alone.

“Freshwater mussels are one of the most endangered group of organisms in North America,” Chris Davidson, the deputy field supervisor for the USFWS Arkansas Ecological Services Field Office, said. In fact, the Arkansas Fatmucket is one of more than 40 mussel species of greatest conservation need — including 14 species federally listed as threatened or endangered — in Arkansas alone.

Fatmuckets, pocketbooks, pigtoes and other unfortunately named invertebrates don’t receive the same level of funding or public sympathy as game species that make their home in The Natural State. Yet these underappreciated animals

help undergird the intricate aquatic ecosystems prized across the state. As filter feeders that burrow in the streambed, mussels naturally purify contaminants from the water and stabilize the substrate at the bottom of the river that other critters depend on, including the small aquatic insects that fish need to thrive.

“It’s not a charismatic species and most people probably won’t mourn the extinction of a freshwater mussel that they know nothing about. But it’s really an indication of what’s happening to our rivers and streams,” Davidson said. These are rivers and streams that outdoor enthusiasts pay top dollar to enjoy every year. Boating and fishing added more than $398 million to the state economy in 2023, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In partnership with federal and nongovernmental agencies, Moles and his team at the AGFC are working to both bolster mussel populations through captive propagation and restore the waterways where they live. Both approaches present unique challenges, and neither is guaranteed to save the Fatmucket. But the combined efforts may be enough to salvage the natural communities that thrive in Arkansas’s rivers and streams.

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

To a landlubber’s untrained eye, the rocky stretch of streambed that Moles has chosen as the forever home for this batch of fatmuckets looks more like an inanimate backdrop to the real action on the water’s surface than the vibrant, elusive microhabitat that it is. Yet with more than 20 years in the field, Moles quickly picks out three different species of mussels ensconced in the sandy substrate of the mussel bed.

NATURAL STATE NATIVE: The Arkansas Fatmucket is a threatened species found nowhere else in the world but the Ouachita River and its tributaries.

SCENES FROM THE SALINE: From left: Kendall Moles assesses the situation via snorkel; Moles (right) and his technician Asa Chism carefully lodge each mussel in the streambed; Chism holds two threatened species — a red-tagged Ouachita Fanshell and a bluetagged Arkansas Fatmucket; and dozens of newly propagated fatmuckets are now at the mercy of the river.

Arkansas is home to roughly 80 species of freshwater mussels — the most of any state west of the Mississippi River — all built similarly. Their soft bodies are encased in two matching shells connected by a hinge and are generally the same neutral hues as the surrounding rocks. Viewed from the right angle, though, you can see them siphoning in water to filter food and oxygen. “Look for the rocks with a crack,” Mole advised.

Most of the mussel species in Arkansas can live 20-30 years in the wild with some species reaching 50-75 years old. Few survive to that age today, though, thanks to a host of threats from human development, some of which date back to Arkansas’s early days as a state. Garment manufacturers in the U.S. had long fashioned pearl buttons from saltwater mussels, but technologies adopted in the late 1800s allowed the industry to make buttons from freshwater mussels widely available in tributaries of the Mississippi River, causing the industry to boom along the White River until around World War II. In the 1960s and ’70s, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and municipal water agencies began constructing massive dams for flood control and drinking water reservoirs but inadvertently destroyed critical mussel habitat. Urban expansion across populous regions of Arkansas has boomed, drastically redirecting the way water flows across the landscape.

Over decades of urbanization, Arkansans have laid a lot of pavement in cities and cleared vital riparian vegetation to make way for scenic river vistas. So as water rushes off paved urban centers down denuded streambanks,

it brings along a dangerous volume of gravel and debris. This coarse sediment can both kill mussels outright and also destroy their habitat for future generations. “The biggest threat to freshwater mussels in Arkansas is from sedimentation,” Davidson said.

So the fatmucket and other mussels live and die by the mercy of the river — and the human hands that shape it. These trials and tribulations were too much for some species, including the turgid blossom pearly mussel that was declared extinct in 2023. As rivers continue to unravel, more mussels could be lost in the fray.

MAKING MORE FATMUCKETS

One strategy to boost fatmucket numbers is to augment populations of mussels in their remaining habitat, which means Moles needs more mussels.

The life cycle of a freshwater mussel is surprising for an animal that lives most of its life buried in the sand. During the breeding season, males broadcast sperm so that it’s carried downstream for awaiting females to fertilize their eggs. The larval mussels that emerge are smaller than a grain of salt, but they can no longer grow alongside their mother. Instead, they rely on a symbiotic fish partner to complete their development. So female fatmuckets use a specialized lure to attract the attention of bass to ferry her young to new beds. Though the host fish are unharmed by their parasitic hitchhikers, its gills encapsulate the larval stowaway in soft tissue where it can safely continue its development for several weeks or months. When it reaches maturity, the juvenile

fatmucket launches itself from the host fish and settles into a new section of the streambed where it will spend the rest of its life.

To raise mussels in captivity, Moles and his colleagues have found a way to partially recreate that life cycle. It’s a time and labor-intensive process that includes collecting both females teeming with larvae and also their symbiotic fish partners. He then sequesters them together within special enclosures on Lake Ouachita, Greers Ferry Lake and other facilities across the state. By catching juvenile fatmuckets as they disembark from their bass host (all of which are released afterward), Moles can raise them in floating cages until they are large enough to return to the wild with a numbered data tag. His team’s mussel propagation program, which encompasses multiple imperiled species, has now restocked more than 50,000 individual animals to mussel beds across Arkansas.

Even a successful propagation program can only do so much to stabilize the declining fatmucket population when their habitat continues to disappear — not only because mussels are slow to grow and reproduce, but also because their streambeds have to support symbiotic fish, too.

RIVER RESTORATION

Though the average Arkansan may not notice the animal’s decline, those who own riverfront property are experiencing other losses. Brian Nalley, a Saline County native who has floated and fished on the river for many years, has noticed big changes along the Sa-

line during his lifetime. He owns property near Lonsdale that includes fatmucket mussel beds. In the mid-2010s, Nalley became particularly concerned about severe bank erosion and reached out for help from the AGFC to prevent more land from washing away.

“One of our biggest goals is to improve water quality and habitat for imperiled species,” Tim Burnley, the AGFC’s stream habitat program supervisor, said. When it comes to aquatic species in Arkansas, he said that “sediment is the number one pollutant in the state.” Unlike oil spills and chemical runoff that can be linked to a single location, sediment pollution can arise at many points along a waterway. Because 90% of the land in Arkansas is privately owned, any effort to conserve the state’s 137,200 miles of flowing water requires cooperation from property owners, Burnley said.

So Burnley’s team helps private landowners develop plans designed to restore their stream’s natural sediment transport and reduce erosion. They also help connect landowners with funding opportunities to help offset the costs. In Lonsdale, the stream team built a structure called a barb that directs the river flow back toward the center of its natural channel along about a quarter-mile of land. Nalley said it cost about $130,000. “It’s amazing how it worked,” he remarked. Since the project was completed in 2019, the previously dilapidated quarter-mile of stream bank now grows lush with fertile silt and new vegetation.

The success of restoration on Nalley’s land inspired him to create the Saline River Watershed Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to

The Arkansas Fatmucket is one of more than 40 mussel species of greatest conservation need — including 14 species federally listed as threatened or endangered — in Arkansas alone.

the conservation and protection of the river for wildlife and outdoor recreation. Now the group’s president, Nalley said his team is educating other landowners and city managers on what they can do to protect the Saline River with the help of partner agencies like the Game and Fish Commission, The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Moles said that conservation groups like the Saline River Watershed Alliance are an example of how community-led support for habitat restoration can help sustain whole ecosystems regardless of the individual species they host. He also reiterated that freshwater mussels are often the first animals to take a hit from ecosystem-level changes. “Mussels are the canaries in the coal mine: As they go, others will follow,” he said.

Back at his field site near a popular boat ramp on the Saline, Moles was doubtful that any of the folks swimming and fishing on the river that day had any idea they’re within 100 yards of one of the region’s rarest animals — or if they even knew that mussels live here at all.

When asked who will mourn the Arkansas Fatmucket if it goes extinct, Moles’s answer was somber but matter-of-fact: “Just a handful of the people who knew it ever existed.” He is hopeful that as Arkansans become aware of the plight facing these underappreciated animals, they’ll be inspired to support conservation efforts in their own way – big or small. For his part, Moles donned his snorkel, scooped up a half dozen of the fatmuckets he reared, and went back to planting them in the river — one by one.

As Northwest Arkansas booms, residents are asking: Does Fayetteville still belong to them?

BY JORDAN P. HICKEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY NOVO STUDIO

tIwas mid-December 2023, and the halls of Fayetteville’s historic square were fully decked. More than 500,000 lights had been hung for the 30th annual Lights of the Ozarks, which drew an estimated 300,000 visitors over a six-week run. In that light, Fayetteville looked every bit the “Best Place to Live” it’d been named in national rankings for eight years running.

A few blocks north of the square on Block Street, that festive atmosphere was still present, though slightly more subdued. As ugly-sweatered revelers warmed their vocal cords before entering Big Box Karaoke, Hannah Withers and I sat on a stoop talking about the city's appeal.

Withers said she felt happy to see so many people she knew and loved downtown, shopping locally, skipping larger chain stores in favor of smaller businesses. But like most locals who are in tune with their city and willing to be honest about it, Withers’ focus drifted to the challenges associated with the city’s growth. Namely, Fayetteville’s housing crunch, and the growing fear among longtime residents that what makes Fayetteville special is disappearing, driven out by skyrocketing rent costs and new development.

“Deep down, I have a fear that most of us aren’t going to be here in another five years,” Withers said, shortly before we stepped back into Maxine’s Tap Room.

Withers, who runs Maxine’s with her husband, Ben Gitchel, has had a front-row seat to downtown Fayetteville’s development bubble. Just across the street there was Little Bread Co., which the couple opened in 2007, renting the space for $700 per month. They sold in 2014, and Withers said that it was renting for around four times their original lease. Ten years ago,

Withers said, she and Gitchel bought a home within walking distance of the bar for $108,000. In 2024, their neighbor’s house sold for $850,000. Even the building outside of which we’d been sitting, Bob’s Photography — a squat, brick box built in the early 1970s — had been scooped up. It sold in October 2022 for the princely sum of $1.35 million.

“I'm an optimist,” Withers said when we met again at Maxine’s in January 2025, just a few months before the bar’s 75th anniversary. “I think that there are good things that can come out of anything. There are usually good alternative music scenes and good alternative art scenes that are reborn out of places that become gentrified or that shift this quickly. I’m thinking that Fayetteville can do that, too. But I’m not seeing it yet. We’re just seeing more places go away.”

ESCAPE VELOCITY

In some respects, the cynic will say, none of this should come as a surprise. Fayetteville is, after all, a growing city with a growing university in a growing region, with all the growing pains that come when any small town wakes up one morning and realizes that it’s not so little anymore. It’s the same story playing out in so many places across the country. There are worse things than “growth” and “success.”

And yet, that narrative is hard to push when you start hearing from people who feel that Fayetteville is no longer for them.

In these conversations, you hear about bartenders who’ve had to move three times in two years because their landlords keep selling. You hear about service workers living six to a house. You hear about servers making the decision to forgo health care and internet access, because at least one of those things you can get

“There are usually good alternative music scenes and good alternative art scenes that are reborn out of places that become gentrified or that shift this quickly. I’m thinking that Fayetteville can do that, too. But I’m not seeing it yet. We’re just seeing more places go away.”

— HANNAH WITHERS, CO-OWNER OF MAXINE’S TAP ROOM

at the bar. And yes, they would love to buy a house in town, but $11 an hour isn’t going to cover the cost and upkeep of a $350,000 house.

“I don't know that people who are buying buildings and doubling people's rent understand that exactly,” Withers said. “Where do our creatives work? Where do our hospitality people [live]? … Where do they go?”

The short answer is: They’ve turned inward. There’s the underground whisper network of lower-priced rentals that never make their way onto Zillow. And there are organizations like the Fayetteville Independent Restaurant Alliance, which since March 2020 has distributed more than $100,000 in emergency funds to local hospitality workers who need it most. Still, there’s only so much that love for a place can do.

Fayetteville was once a town that pulled people back in after they’d left to sample other cities — once they’d achieved “escape velocity,” as the great Arkansas writer Charles Portis put it. But for many residents — those who work the kitchens, the bars, the bookstores, who moonlight as creatives, who make the place weird in the best way possible — the gravity of this place isn’t applied equally. It’s difficult not to wonder who exactly the city is exerting that pull upon, and who’s being allowed to drift away.

‘A GRAVEYARD OF A CITY’

Eryn Brothers knew that AM/PM Bar was on borrowed time. Since the self-proclaimed “bar wench” stepped into the makeshift DIY space on Center Street (“This is a cool bar,” she told the owner. “Can

PRICE HIKE: A squat, brick box built in the early 1970s, the Bob’s Photography building in downtown Fayetteville sold for $1.35 million in October 2022.

I play movies here?”), she’d known it was likely not going to last. The area was growing. The land was too valuable. The owner, Denele Campbell, had already entertained several offers in her three decades of ownership.

That didn’t make it any easier to see it go. Fayetteville's Planning Commission voted to replace the Trailside Village quonset hut buildings with a student housing complex in October 2023. The area is now a construction site.

The Alley, as Campbell’s Trailside Village quonset hut buildings were called, “was so much more than AM/PM,” Brothers said. “It was Backspace [a Local DIY venue]. It's where people started bands, it's where people made friends, it's where people fell in love, it’s where people got engaged. There are so many things about The Alley that are so special. Like, May Bell Music, there was a bike shop there, band practice space, art studios.”

Brothers, who grew up in Fayetteville, remembers a time when there were venues on top of venues. “Good Times: A History of Night

Spots and Live Music in Fayetteville, Arkansas” — penned, as it so happens, by Campbell — provides a history of the dozens (and dozens) of venues that have hosted music over the decades.

“The Fayetteville I moved to embraced weirdos with open arms,” said Roger Barrett, who arrived some 25 years ago and now runs On The Map Shows, an independent music booking and promotion project. At the time, he said, one of the great attractions had been the opportunities for places where you could fail miserably — bomb a concert set or a standup routine — and still have people offering to let you play their venue or even borrow their gear. “You could do anything you wanted to hear. You could live cheaply. You didn't have to think about how [your] art was going to make money for someone else.”

Unfortunately, that no longer holds true in Fayetteville. As of this writing, with the recent shuttering of Smoke and Barrel, and the recent acquisition of JJ’s by a Fort Worth-based company, the number of locally owned Fay-

etteville venues outside of the now 97-year-old George’s Majestic Lounge has dwindled to a handful, at most.

“You know, it sucks to walk past kind of like a graveyard of a city every day on the way to work,” Barrett said. “It gets hard when you just walk past relics of what you used to enjoy about a place — and nothing has taken their place.”

That lack hasn’t been lost on creatives. Arkansas native singer-songwriter Bonnie Montgomery, for example, moved to Fayetteville in 2022, taking advantage of the Northwest Arkansas Council's Life Works Here grant, which came with a $10,000 check and a mountain bike. “But I learned quickly that there weren't really a lot of resources for a working freelance artist in Northwest Arkansas.” She initially blamed it on the pandemic, but work never picked up. “I was having to satellite out of there to keep busy and work. I actually worked more in the Little Rock area than I did in Northwest Arkansas.”

It hasn’t just been musicians, either. One

GOING THROUGH CHANGES: Roger Barrett (left), who runs On The Map Shows, and Bo Counts (right), the owner of Pinpoint. Counts’ apartment complex (center), the Beverly Manor Apartments, was recently sold to make way for the construction of student housing.

of the more exciting food concepts in recent memory, a food truck called Margaret’s from Juan Rose Food Consultants, had been looking at brick-and-mortar spaces to rent in Fayetteville. But co-founders Taylor McEntee and Juan Alberto Rey, who moved to Fayetteville from Austin, were unable to find any spaces that would fit their budget. Instead, both owners had to take on second jobs to make their rent.

The city has certainly made gestures toward preserving the arts: A recently released Arts & Culture Plan makes several mentions of community members’ concerns about affordability. On the first page of its “Key Findings,” it notes the top three concerns of Fayetteville artists and creatives: “Artists/creatives not earning a living wage. Lack of affordable venues to work/create/practice. Housing affordability/ artists and creatives getting priced out.” In February of this year, the city was in talks with nationwide nonprofit arts developer Artspace to determine whether Fayetteville would be a good candidate for a mixed-use building ded-

icated to housing and work space for artists.

And yet, it’s an open secret that many artists are looking elsewhere, if they haven’t left already:

Montgomery moved to Austin in July 2024. Brothers did the same in August.

McEntee said she and Rey have been eyeing Minneapolis.

Barrett says many people he knows have “two-year exit plans.”

“It really does feel like a model of everything going wrong all at the same time,” Brothers said. In the next breath, she conceded, wary of letting despondency overshadow determination. “It will become a lot more hopeless if we continue to be married to our hopelessness.”

'A WEIRD, DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP'

The reason Fayetteville has found itself at this particular crossroads is as multifaceted as a duffel bag full of disco balls.

There are bigger-picture issues — like a state Legislature that appears bound and de-

termined to cull any hints of self-governance. There are still-big-but-not-as-big-picture issues like the matter of the city’s zoning, which relies on a 1970s-era zoning plan prioritizing large single-family homes on large pieces of land, and which, as its detractors argue, works exactly as it was designed. Or the fact that county property records show that half of all single-family residential properties are owned by non-Fayettevillians (or at least those who don’t have a Fayetteville mailing address). There’s the fact that median house values in the city have more than tripled in the past 25 years, while the median income hasn’t quite doubled. Even parking poses its own issues.

“At the end of the day, the only way to fix this problem is to make room for people to live where they want to live — and where people want to live is in neighborhoods like classic downtowns,” said Matthew Petty, a city planner and former member of the Fayetteville City Council. “And until you have so many neighborhoods like that — until that actually becomes like the default neighborhood — there

will be this huge gentrification machine, this inertia, this momentum where people of higher means, are segregating themselves into those walkable places and people are being pushed out and having to find a place where they drive till they qualify.”

And while there is very little about any of this that is unique to Fayetteville, it is difficult to ignore a certain razorback-shaped elephant in every room where housing is being discussed.

On Dec. 17, 2024, after 16 years in office, outgoing Mayor Lioneld Jordan presided over the Fayetteville City Council for the last time. After Jordan received the key to the city, after the photos were taken, and four full rows of people holding signs that read “THANK YOU MAYOR” and “DON’T YOU JUST LOVE THIS MAYOR” shuffled out of the Fayetteville City Council chambers, the meeting began in earnest.

Among the first items on that evening’s agenda: ordinance 6800. Originally proposed by the Mayor’s Housing Crisis Task Force, which had formed after the city officially declared a Housing Crisis in April 2024, it would have restricted the amount landlords could charge prospective tenants for rental application reviews and background checks. The overarching concern was that the state government might find fault with this city ordinance — as the Legislature had done when Fayetteville tried to ban single-use plastics, or when the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the city’s ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity — and shut it down. Ultimately, after much debate, the council decided to seek an attorney general’s opinion to avoid possible violation of state law. The council voted to repeal the ordinance in March. (At the time of publication, Arkansas lawmakers appeared ready to pass a bill that would outlaw such caps.)

At the end of the discussion, some members of the public were allowed to speak. Among them was Bo Counts, owner of Pinpoint, a pinball bar down the street from Maxine’s, which, he noted, had brought in “almost $40,000 in tax revenue last month, so you’re welcome.”

“I'm a business owner and a renter,” he said. “I love living downtown, but maybe you guys have heard where I live just got sold for $13 million for student condo development, so I'm effectively going to be homeless within the end of the year. So guess what I had to start doing recently? Applying to apartments.”

Later, Counts explained that he’d found out about the loss of his apartment from a Zillow listing, which read, “Attention student housing developers: Seize a rare opportunity to construct student housing within walking distance of the University of Arkansas.” The

building at 7 S. University Ave. — the Beverly Manor Apartments, where the average rent has been a fixed $650/month — was being sold for student housing.

That’s not to be confused with the neighboring Flats on Hill, which will also be demolished to make way for future development.

Or the Summit Terrace Apartments, roughly a block southwest, which — along with most of the other neighboring buildings along the street — will be cleared for an 847-unit student housing complex.

Or the block of houses and apartments along the eastern edge of Fayetteville High School, which are also on the chopping block.

Or the former site of the AM/PM Bar and quonset huts, which are being replaced by a 764-bed student housing complex from Indiana-based Trinitas Ventures.

Or the seven-story student housing complex at Block and Dickson streets, also from Trinitas Ventures, the plans for which were recently advanced to the Fayetteville Planning Commission.

Or the ground lease that Trinitas Ventures recently signed for the former site of the Powerhouse Seafood and Grill at 112 N. University Ave.

Much more could be written about student housing projects, or the influence the university exerts on the city. As a member of the Mayor’s Housing Crisis Task Force said during a January meeting: “It’s on the tip of the tongue whenever you talk about housing.” But notably, the scale and scope of the University of Arkansas’s growth was considered excessive even just over a decade ago — by the university itself.

In November 2011, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published an article with the headline “UA looks at putting brakes on enrollment.” The story reported that “leaders at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville will consider in the next year whether to take steps to slow or cap growth as enrollment nears 25,000 students.”

“We feel that we could go larger,” then-Chancellor G. David Gearhart told the Democrat-Gazette. “But we want to be cautious. We want to do it through careful planning.”

Not quite two years later, in another article published in the same newspaper, the university announced that, for the first time, enrollment had topped 25,000. The article noted that UA Fayetteville had seen a steady increase in enrollment since 2008, when 19,194 students began the fall semester. “Our new goal is 28,000 in the next few years and then stay there,” Provost Sharon Gaber said.

In September 2024, the university enrolled a whopping 33,610 students, announcing that, “for the fourth consecutive year, the University of Arkansas has set an overall enrollment record.”

All those students need places to live. There

R.I.P., THE ALLEY: Also known as The Alley, the Trailside Village quonset hut buildings, which once housed beloved bars, venues and shops, are now a construction site for a new student housing complex.

While there is very little about any of this that is unique to Fayetteville, it is difficult to ignore a certain razorback-shaped elephant in every room where housing is being discussed.

are avenues for the city to have an open dialogue with the university — namely, the Town and Gown Committee — but whether those dialogues are effective is unclear. The committee is “worthless,” according to Sonia Harvey, a former city council member who was forced to step down after her landlord sold her house and she couldn’t find another home in Ward 1. “Feel free to quote me on that,” she said. “The whole point of that committee is to make a working relationship between the university and the city, and I just didn't see it.”

“We need them, but they're also killing us,” Harvey said of the university, putting a finer point on it. “It’s such a weird, dysfunctional relationship.”

The university did not respond to a request for comment.

‘WE

WANT TO GET STUFF DONE’

There might be reason for some cautious optimism about the city’s trajectory. The new mayor, Molly Rawn, campaigned on the promise of addressing the city’s housing issues.

“Whenever I have a conversation and people want to talk about housing, it is very, very clear to me that that means different things depending on my audience,” Rawn said. For some residents, that might mean renter’s rights or the unhoused population. For others, that might mean a long approval process or a lack of housing inventory. “And so what I want to try to stress for people is that we’re working on multiple different fronts to tackle this issue,” she said. “They’re all connected. I know it’s hard to see that. I'm hoping people can be patient and see how they all flow into one another.”

The Fayetteville Flyer reported in February that Rawn is channeling her new-sheriff-intown energy into increasing the fees charged to developers seeking building permits, in turn using those funds to create more staff oversight in the planning and engineering departments — an additional urban forester, for one, tasked with making sure new developments meet the city’s tree canopy requirements.

There is the Mayor’s Housing Crisis Task Force, which, despite some early hiccups — namely, the fact there were initially no renters on the Task Force (one renter was later added) — has provided the city with a slate of possible ideas. There’s the cap that the city imposed on short-term-rentals, allowing only 475 rental units to operate in the city, (though news recently broke that 155 properties had been operating illegally).

And there’s public momentum around halting Trinitas Venture’s construction of the seven-story complex at the corner of Block and Dickson Streets, a 611-bedroom student housing development that, as an online petition with more than 2,300 signatures states, “poses a serious threat to our community character.”

It was difficult to muster much hope that Fayetteville could, as Austin once solemnly swore to do, stay weird.

DISPLACED: Sonia Harvey, a former city council member, was forced to step down after her landlord sold her house and she couldn’t find another home in Ward 1.

At a meeting in late February, Fayetteville’s Planning Commission elected to hold off on rubber stamping the development until a more extensive, and accurate, traffic study was conducted. (“It’s a mess, it’s problematic, I don’t believe anything that it says,” Commissioner Mary Madden said.)

While that project was still at a yellow light when this publication went to press, there’s little reason to think that it won’t go through. Despite some of the Planning Commission’s concerns, and despite the public outcry, the project has cleared most of its legal and technical hurdles: It does not require a zoning variance (Fayetteville’s zoning laws don’t distinguish between multifamily and student housing), the fire marshall says it’s good to go, and the one house touching the property is an office, not a residence. It’s just one project, but it’s difficult not to view it as a bellwether for the direction of development in the city.

“What is frustrating is the time to be outraged by that was years ago,” Rawn said, meaning there’s little the city can do if someone meets requirements. “What we have to be thinking about is two years, three years, four years, five years, 10 years out,” she said. “What do we want to change those requirements to be now, so that the next time something like this comes, we can decide what we want to see built there.”

Will that strategy work? Sitting in Maxine’s, hearing Hannah Withers talk about how so much of what we’d discussed the previous year — the soaring rents, the exodus of long-term residents downtown, the departure of so many friends — it was difficult to muster much hope that Fayetteville could, as Austin once solemnly swore to do, stay weird.

“We were here during a really special time in Fayetteville,” Withers said, “and I hope that other people get to experience it, too.”

Still, as Rawn noted, that nostalgia has to contend with reality.

“I can relate to the nostalgia that we have about our town — I came here 20 years ago, fell in love with it. It is very different today,” Rawn said. “We aren't that anymore, and I am choosing to no longer live in that space of regret and pain around what we lost. I am choosing to look forward and say, ‘OK, this is the deal: We are in a town now with a university of 30,000 students. What the hell are we going to do about it?’ That's the reality, and I don't have the luxury of rolling back the clock and making us the sleepy mountain town that we were 30 years ago. We aren't that anymore.

“We can't oppose every single new housing development that comes in while at the same time being upset that there isn't enough affordable housing. We can't have it both ways.”

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JOIN US FOR THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY

TASTE OF LITTLE ROCK

We are honoring RJ Martino for his longtime support to UA Little Rock while sampling exquisite dishes from premier Little Rock restaurants.

Proceeds from Taste of Little Rock support student scholarships, so secure your spot for a memorable evening of culinary exploration and making a difference!

Tuesday, April 8 • 6-8 p.m.

WELL-ROUNDED: Ethan Chen, a senior at Maumelle Charter High School, plans to pursue both of his passions — music composition and computer science — at Brown University in the fall.

NERD ALERT!

BY RHETT BRINKLEY, LARA FARRAR, DANIEL GREAR, MARY HENNIGAN, TRICIA LARSON, DAN MARSH, STEPHANIE SMITTLE AND MILO STRAIN

Chosen from nearly 150 applicants, all of whom were nominated by their school counselor or principal, the 2025 Arkansas Times Academic All-Star Team showcases some of the state’s most exemplary high school seniors. Of the 20 students selected for this year’s roster — the 31st group the Times has honored — three received a perfect score on the ACT. Four have already committed to an Ivy League university. Just as many have their hearts set on medical school. Most importantly, however, these students are full of conviction, keenly aware of the world’s heavy load of problems and dedicated to playing their part in alleviating division, degradation and suffering. Read on for an inspiring mix of their accomplishments and dreams, followed by the lists of All-Star finalists and nominees.

KLOEE WOOD

Age: 17

High School: Cedar Ridge High School

Parents: Jimmy and Shanda Wood College plans: Undecided

How exactly did a student with dyslexia who struggled with academics in the first grade become a high school valedictorian with not one, but three associates degrees? For Kloee Wood, it was all in the numbers. With the possibility of medical school ahead and enrollment in a high school that didn’t offer GPA-boosting Advanced Placement classes, “I needed to get a game plan super early,” Kloee said. That plan: Leverage her high school’s partnership with the local community college to get a discount on college courses that could fulfill both college and high school requirements. “I was like, ‘Why not start now and get it over with?” Kloee told us. “It was just a win-win in my head.” Add to that Kloee’s impressive list of extracurriculars and her three part-time jobs — babysitting, working the concession stand at school sporting events and working at the Cedar Ridge Early Childhood Center — and you’ve got a time management puzzle that most adult professionals would find daunting. While rigorous, Kloee’s schedule was made possible partly by the access to community college courses. “I found that balance super quick,” she said. “The college classes really helped with that, because it gave me a flexible schedule, in a way. I could fit my homework in whenever I could.” Sometimes, she said, that meant not going out with her friends, staying home and hitting the books instead. Still, she added, she’s got a close-knit community of colleagues and classmates, something she’s not sure she’d have if she’d attended a bigger school. The Cedar Ridge district “is so small that we're all just kind of like a big family here. I know everyone, sixth grade through 12th grade. I probably know their mom,” she said, laughing. We’re guessing they’ll all be cheering her on toward her college career, where she plans to major in biology or mathematics in pursuit of a job in education or medicine. SS

SIENA FUSCO

Age: 18

High School: Thaden School

Parents: Sandra and Russell Fusco College plans: Undecided

If the last few months have left you despondent about the future of misinformation and disinformation in American politics, take heart for a fleeting moment; Thaden School senior Siena Fusco’s brief conversation with us featured the phrases “echo chambers,” “polarization” and “critical reading.” Fusco, whose discussions with extended family around the Thanksgiving dinner table often left her wanting to escape to her bedroom, has done anything but retreat. In fact, she hopes to pursue a career in political science, an interest that was sparked at the end of her sophomore year. “I was realizing that I was reading news that only sort of clarified my opinions — that didn't contradict anything that I believed or that I was seeing, or any of my assumptions.” Born decades after the Walter Cronkite news era, Fusco said media channels once “had to be more broadly non-partisan and unbiased than now, when there are so many sources that you can choose what to watch. … I've sort of learned as I'm reading sources that the way titles of the articles are written can be meant to cause emotion or reaction, whether it's positive or negative, because they need people to click on them. It's just business.” Devoted to a career that, in one way or another, fosters “empathy and understanding” around social issues, Fusco comes equipped with a wide and diverse range of study and perspective. A descendant of “recent immigrants spanning a geography from Mexico to Syria,” her time at Thaden has allowed her to learn Mandarin, sharpen her debate skills as head delegate of Thaden’s Model UN chapter, perfect her backstroke as a competitive swimmer at Northwest Arkansas Aquatics and fine-tune her violin playing as a member of the Arkansas Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. SS

ETHAN CHEN

Age: 17

High School: Maumelle Charter High School

Parents: Lie and Lucy Chen

College plans: Brown University

One doesn’t usually associate music composition with demonstrable skills in computer programming, but Ethan Chen has found ways of blending the disciplines to reduce stress in people’s lives and make them more mindful of relaxation. “They’re almost on the opposite ends of the academic spectrum,” Ethan said of his pursuits. He’s been recognized nationally for his ability to compose, earning a gold prize for original composition in the PicaSchubert International Music & Art competition. He’s also the first

Maumelle Charter student recognized as a finalist for Arts Across Arkansas. Ethan credits his father, an engineer, and his mother, a singer, with his ability to combine music with programming. “In the morning, I’d code with Dad while sipping tea in front of the fireplace,” he said. “In the afternoon, I’d write music with Mom at the dining table, composing superhero themes and fairytale serenades. Music and programming are my go-to pastimes and my home, a creative lab for bringing ideas to life.” As a sophomore, he founded Glimmer, an outreach through which he hosted over 20 events promoting positive mental health practices. Music, art and journaling were among the relaxation techniques Glimmer offered. To further his love of programming, Ethan also joined the development team of an RPG (role-playing game) that allows him to dive deeper into mindfulness, music and technology. At Brown University, Ethan intends to study “computer science and music composition, intertwining my passions to better the communities important to me and, one day, find a career I love.” DM

MANVITHA VORUGUNTI

Age: 17

High School: Bentonville High School

Parents: Anitha and Chandra Vorugunti College plans: Undecided

Manvitha Vorugunti developed a passion for helping people in ninth grade when she joined the Key Club, a service organization. “I realized you get so much more out of helping people than I expected,” she said. Her Key Club experiences showed her that “when you see someone smile, it can be very fulfilling.” Smiles indeed abounded when Manvitha led a fundraiser for Ukraine that raised $1,000. “We were not expecting to raise that much money at all,” she said, “but that really opened my eyes, and that experience led to other projects.” Manvitha has set her sights on becoming either a skin cancer specialist or a radiologist. Throughout her senior year, Manvitha volunteered and interned at many hospitals and clinics, including a dermatology clinic, where she spotted a disturbing trend. “I noticed that people would come in to be treated for acne or scarring, but the dermatologist would often notice a small mole and ask to check it out,” she said. “Sometimes those moles would end up being dangerous. I was like, ‘Why has this gone so unnoticed?’” With the help of her mother, a software engineer, Manvitha created an AI model that has been “trained for other uses. I diverted it to detect cancer in uploaded images of moles.” She hopes to publish her findings. In her downtime, Manvitha finds a creative outlet in dance, which she also teaches. “I am a huge Bollywood fan, and if you’ve ever seen a Bollywood movie, you know dancing comes with it,” Manvitha said. “I just love working with kids, and I’ve been teaching the same group for about four years now. I’ve seen them go from nondancers to basically professionals, and that just makes me the happiest person ever.” DM

WILLIAM OBIOZO

Age: 17

High School: El Dorado High School

Parents: Albert and Nicole Obiozo College plans: Undecided

“My dad preaches to me almost every day that I come from a bloodline of excellence.” Those are the high expectations that keep El Dorado High School senior William Obiozo — the child of Nigerian immigrants — motivated. Fortunately for William, he “performs better under pressure,” taking those words of stern encouragement and turning them into a 34 on the ACT, a perfect GPA across 12 AP classes, excellence on the varsity basketball and soccer teams, and involvement in National Honor Society (he’s the president), student council, Future Business Leaders of America and quiz bowl, which he’s been part of since elementary school. In everything he does, William — like his father — sees himself as a motivator. “I make sure everybody has that confidence in them. I make sure they’re always putting forth their best effort and being the best person they can be,” he said. “Whether or not they believe it, I believe it for them.” Amidst all of his academic, athletic and extracurricular responsibilities, William somehow manages to still find time to hang out with friends, nurse a budding interest in photography and chip in around the house. “I love to help my mom cook,” he said, especially when it’s one of his favorite Nigerian dishes like jollof rice, which he describes as a “spicy, savory rice that’s a unique experience.” When this magazine went to press, William was still waiting to hear back from all of the colleges he applied to, but his dream school is Duke University (“I’ve been saying I wanted to go to Duke since I was like 6”), where he hopes to major in biology on a pre-med track and play on the soccer team. DG

MILES BATSON

Age: 18

High School: Farmington High School

Parents: James and Jennifer Batson

College plans: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

Farmington High School senior Miles Batson isn’t fazed by the future. While other kids are fumbling their way toward choosing a roommate and freshman-year classes, he’s already thinking far past his college graduation, envisioning an ambitious path for himself that involves going to law school and perhaps even running for public office. The thing he’s most passionate about right now, however, is “social entrepreneurship,” or an intentional blending of commerce — particularly tech —

and social change. He plans to use that lens to one day start his own business. “I think technology is awesome and improvements to technology can really better people’s lives, but it’s so easy for technology to have really negative aspects as well, which we can see from stuff like AI, which steals people’s art and hurts people’s education if they rely on it too much,” he said. “That’s why I think having an angle and a perspective of sociology and political science and morality is so important to figure out how to design and develop and improve upon technology in a way that helps people.” Whether through an eventual legal, political or entrepreneurial career (or maybe all three), Miles hopes to make a positive impact on the incarceration system (he’s a big fan of Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy”), the environment (he’s worried about our society’s reliance on fossil fuels) and political polarization (“A polarized society is an unstable society … If no one can agree on how to continue, nothing is going to get done.”) He’ll begin that journey at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he expects to study business and engineering. DG

JONAH PULLIAM

Age: 18

High School: North Little Rock High School

Parents: Brandon and Britni Pulliam College plans: Undecided

If you looked only at the standardized test results of North Little Rock High School senior Jonah Pulliam — he received a perfect score on both the ACT and the PSAT — you’d conclude that he’s a stellar student. But reading the recommendation of Bruce Maddox, Jonah’s AP Calculus teacher, you get the sense his scholastic prowess is on another level: “Jonah is quite possibly the number one student that I have taught in any course in over 20 years in education.” Jonah flexes his teaching muscles through a math tutoring business (pbtutoring.com) he started with a friend. “It’s been pretty successful. We’ve had clients in pretty much every math subject, from Algebra 1 all the way to AP Calculus and AP Statistics,” he said. “We helped a kid raise his ACT math score from a 26 to a 35 and we’ve helped a few kids get merit scholarships.” When Jonah’s not in the classroom, he’s a varsity athlete on the cross country and track and field teams, a North Little Rock High School Ambassador, and an avid buyer and seller of high-value sports cards, an obsession he hopes to one day parlay into a career in investment banking. Where he’s going for college was still up in the air when this magazine went to press (Columbia has already admitted him; fingers crossed for an acceptance at Harvard or Yale), but he hopes to double major in mathematics and economics. DG

Arkansas Arts Academy is the only PreK-12th grade open enrollment charter school district in the state that operates with the mission of arts integration within all core content areas, along with a dedication to arts pathways that lead into workforce/

ALI IMRAN

Age: 17

School: Ozark High School

Parents: Ali Raza and Assma Shahzadi College plans: University of Arkansas - Fort Smith

Ali Imran’s family moved to Ozark from Gujrat, Pakistan, when he was 7 years old and only spoke Urdu. Described by his high school counselor as an extremely motivated and tenacious student, Ali picked up English quickly and has since excelled academically and built an impressive list of achievements, including being ranked first in his class. “School is one of the most important parts of life if you want to do something,” Ali said. Straight As, extracurricular activities, volunteering: Ali does it all and still finds time to work at his father’s convenience store, closing up shop every night and often getting his homework done on the job. “I’ve always been good at math … I’m currently taking calculus in 12th grade and doing great,” Ali said. President of the math club at his school, Ali won first place in the precalculus and trigonometry category in the Arkansas Council of Teachers of Mathematics regional contest last year and took home second place in the calculus category this year. He’s set to compete in the organization’s state competition this month. Ali’s counselor said he’s a “bright spot” at Ozark High School and reported that he often, without prompting, “goes to the whiteboard and starts teaching students calculus concepts.” Ali said he’s “more passionate” about math, but his career plans lie in the sciences. After getting a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith, Ali plans to attend medical school, possibly at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, to become a general surgeon. One of his ambitions, he said, is to build a hospital that can provide free health care. When he isn’t working or studying, Ali stimulates his brain by reading books in his free time. MS

PATRICK ESAU

Age: 17

High School: Cabot High School

Parents: Jessica Esau (mother) and Kenny Esau (grandfather)

College plans: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

Since he first picked up a stick in seventh grade, Patrick Esau has lived and breathed drumming, and he’s already built a resume that would make most college music majors jealous. In 10th grade, Patrick started playing on the drumline at Cabot High School, and “it’s just kind of skyrocketed from there,” he said. Now a senior, Patrick has excelled as a musician, making the All-State band three years in a row and providing percussion lessons for several younger students. He takes pride in the moments when he says something “that maybe resonates with them more than I thought it would” and hopes he can have a positive impact with teaching. Patrick plans to major in music education, though he’s also interested in law and political science. “I’m just gonna kinda feel it out as I go,” he said. Since 2023, he has performed with Lotus Percussion, an independent marching percussion group in Benton, and spent last summer on tour with Memphis Blues, a marching group that competes in Drum Corps International competitions. During the summer between graduation and college starting, Patrick will play with a Nashville-based group. On top of all that, Patrick has maintained a stellar academic record and held down a job at a Sonic Drive-In, working about 25 hours a week. He is in the top 1% of his class; an AP Scholar with Distinction; a member of the National Honor Society, for which he has logged dozens of volunteer hours; and is completing his Eagle Project with the Boy Scouts of America. At the end of the day, though, Patrick said he just hopes he can do some good for the world. MS

CARTER JACKSON

Age: 18

High School: Southside High School

Parents: Audra and George Jackson III

College Plans: Cornell University

Though her high school transcript is void of anything but glistening A grades, 18-year-old Carter Jackson’s decision to trade some valuable Advanced Placement slots for athletics bumped her down a few class ranks. On the flip side, sports helped to improve her school-life balance, she said. For nearly a decade, Carter competed in gymnastics, but a disoriented vault landed her in the hospital with a serious

foot injury a few years ago. She ditched the crutches for a Barbie pink scooter during recovery and, once cleared for activity, Carter transferred her body-flipping skills to the diving board, a sport she hopes to continue at Cornell University. With plans to attend the university’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Carter aims to one day own and manage hotels because “I like to be around people that are happy — and everyone, when they’re traveling, they’re always happy.” In addition to her picture-perfect academic record, Carter is training so that she can one day independently mediate small claims in the Oklahoma Supreme Court and help people in the Cherokee Nation, of which she’s a part. In what free time Carter has between studying, her court mediating internship, diving five days a week and raising money for the school’s Ronald McDonald Red Shoe Club, she loves baking complicated desserts. She said French macarons and pavlovas make her feel accomplished, as does decorating layered cakes. In addition to being her friend group’s “token baker,” Carter has three brothers, which she said has made her “tough.” Carter may be a native Arkansan, but she has her sights set away from the small-town attractions of Sonic Drive-In and Walmart and onto bigger things, like European hospitality. MH

Congratulations to Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts senior Sarah Pham for being selected as an Arkansas Times Academic All Star!

Sarah plans to study mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a 2025 National Merit Scholarship Commended Student, an Arkansas Computer Science Student of Distinction, a College Board National Recognition — First Generation honoree, and a QuestBridge National College Match Scholarship recipient.

ASMSA offers hundreds of young Arkansans an experience that combines the best parts of high school and college in a unique community of learning. It is the only school in the state to provide advanced course opportunities in STEM and the arts in an on-campus residential setting. Discover how you can engage in courses designed to challenge bright minds and grow as a student while earning more than a year of college credit.

HENRY AGUILARORELLANA

Age: 18

High School: Green Forest High School

Parents: Felipe Aguilar and Bertha Villata-Orellana College Plans: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

Henry Aguilar-Orellana is gearing up to be class valedictorian, and he’s not afraid to tell you that he’s nervous about giving a speech to his peers. The 18-year-old is already planning what he will say, a primary mention earmarked for the people who’ve made sacrifices on his behalf. Among those people is Henry’s mother, a custodian at his school who works long hours and has arthritis in both knees. Henry’s mom is from El Salvador, and as the child of an immigrant, he said he feels a combination of added pressure and a spark of motivation. For Henry, repaying his mother’s sacrifice for him and his siblings to succeed includes following his passion of music at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He’ll be the second in his family to attend college and, when the time comes, “of course I’ll look after them, help them. Everything they did for me — I plan on paying back,” Henry said. Henry, a skilled clarinet player, plans to study music education in preparation for a career teaching high school students how to hone their craft. In his years playing with Green Forest High’s school band, its members have become like family to Henry, and he said he wants to help build a similar environment for others. “We can talk to each other about anything that’s on our mind,” he said. “We laugh together, we cry together. We’ve all had this bond. It’s really nice, and I want to give that to other people.” Though Henry initially joined the band because he wasn’t interested in the other electives, his talent was recognized in 2024 with the John Philip Sousa Award, the school’s highest band honor. Henry’s musicianship is also helpful on the quiz bowl team, crushing the competition when faced with niche questions about composers or musical techniques.

MH

PRAGATHI NAGAPPA

Age: 18

High School: Bentonville West High School

Parents: Prathibha Rajashekhar

College Plans: Undecided

Three years after Pragathi Nagappa founded the Bentonville West High School Helping Hands Club, more than 100 members have enlisted to raise money, create craft kits and plan ways to improve the experience of the patients at Arkansas Children’s Northwest. Pragathi, 18, has her sights set on becoming a pediatric oncologist, and Helping Hands is one way to “bring a smile to their faces,” she said. Though she hadn’t decided where to further her education when this magazine went to press, Pragathi’s studies and experience shadowing medical professionals have prepared her for a promising medical school experience. In 2024, she completed an AP Research capstone project she was especially proud of that analyzed changing public opinions of zoonotic disease transmission. Pragathi’s breaks from the science and medical world include tutoring students for the math portion of the ACT, playing volleyball and spending time with her mother and grandmother, with whom she shares her Indian culture. Growing up, Pragathi struggled to embrace being Indian, pretending instead not to know the answer to questions she received from her peers about it. She sometimes asked for a sandwich in her packed lunch instead of the traditional cuisine her grandmother prepared. Now, as a member of her school’s Indian Student Association, Pragathi is championing her culture with others who do the same. One of Pragathi’s favorite traditions is Diwali, or the Hindu festival of lights. She and her family spend three nights celebrating, dressing up, praying, eating a variety of food and lighting upwards of 100 candles. Pragathi is outwardly confident and credited volleyball with helping her “find my voice” and making her who she is today. MH

JACK KRAUSS

Age: 18

High School: Lakeside High School

Parents: Jason and Mandi Krauss

College Plans: Harvard University

With an exceptional GPA, a leadership resume that reads like a university president’s and a passion for research, Jack Krauss is the kind of student who turns ambition into impact. President of Lakeside

High School’s student council, National Beta Club, National Honor Society and Future Business Leaders of America chapter, Jack is as comfortable leading student organizations as he is behind a research desk. His year-long AP Research project on the Arkansas LEARNS Act’s definition of “indoctrination” broke new ground, using a mixed-method comparative mean analysis to gauge student perceptions of AP African American Studies. His findings? Students saw the course as an essential civic education tool — not an exercise in ideology. He presented his award-winning findings to U.S. Senator John Boozman’s Congressional Youth Cabinet, where he served as Chair of Education, advocating for research-driven policymaking in Arkansas schools. While a counselor at Lakeside High School describes Jack as a “truly amazing student,” noting he has taken “the most rigorous curriculum available,” including 15 AP classes, Jack’s influence stretches far beyond the classroom. As a longtime ambassador for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, he spearheaded “Letters of Hope” campaigns and organized care package drives for displaced Syrian families, coordinating efforts with the U.S. military. Closer to home, he’s been an integral part of the Hot Springs Area Community Foundation Youth Advisory Council where, as president, he helps direct tens of thousands of dollars in grants to underserved nonprofits. Accepted to Harvard University, Jack plans to double major in chemistry and molecular and cellular biology, with minors in mathematics and Spanish — his first step toward a career in cardiothoracic surgery. Driven by a belief in education, advocacy and humanitarian service, Jack isn’t just preparing for the future; he’s actively shaping it. TL

AVERY WILLIAMS

Age: 18

High School: Sheridan High School

Parents: Summer and Nicholas Williams College plans: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

If there’s one word to describe Avery Williams, it’s curious. Whether diving into history, natural science or music, the Sheridan High School senior has a relentless drive to understand how things connect. His academic achievements speak for themselves — 11 AP courses, a 4.33 GPA and a near-perfect ACT score of 35. But it’s his passion for discovery that really sets him apart. At Arkansas Governor’s School, Avery immersed himself in interdisciplinary learning, exploring the ways psychology, geography and the arts shape the world. That same curiosity fuels his leadership as captain of his school’s quiz bowl team, where he’s known for his encyclopedic knowledge of fine arts, history, science and literature. But nowhere is his appreciation for structure and relationships more evident than in music. A first-chair trumpet player in concert, marching and jazz band, Avery thrives on the interplay of melody and form, whether performing lead solos or playing flugelhorn in a traveling brass ensemble. Beyond academics, he has dedicated himself to service. As vice president of the National Honor Society, he’s helped organize food drives and community service initiatives. He also mentors younger students preparing for the ACT. “Having scored the highest ACT in my grade, I’ve been presenting methods and tricks that helped me improve my score to a class of around 30 11th-graders,” he said. Of all his accomplishments, Avery is most proud of being named a National Merit Scholar, a recognition holding deep personal significance. His mother was a semifinalist, and following in her footsteps made the achievement even more meaningful. This fall, Avery will attend the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he plans to explore history or the natural sciences. TL

CONGRATULATIONS SIENA!

AUDREY CHUANG-STUBER

Age: 17

High School: Little Rock Christian Academy

Parents: David Stuber and Vivian Chuang College Plans: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

With a 4.7 GPA, a passion for both science and art, and a deep commitment to service, Audrey Chuang-Stuber thrives in spaces where creativity meets precision. At the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, she plans to double major in biology and studio art on a pre-dental track — a unique pairing reflecting both her analytical mind and artistic soul. “Everybody finds confidence in their smile,” she said. “I want to help people reflect that.” Her leadership and academic excellence have earned her numerous accolades, including the Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony Award for leadership and dedication to her community, Distinguished Scholar in English and departmental honors in math and French. Audrey co-founded Book Buddies, a literacy-focused club at Little Rock Christian Academy pairing high school students with elementary schoolers. Inspired by her work with AR Kids Read, she saw a need to make reading more accessible and engaging for younger students. Under her leadership, the club has organized field trips to multiple elementary schools, making books come alive for kids who need them most. An award-winning mixed-media and collage artist, Audrey finds joy in transforming chaos into something meaningful — an approach that mirrors her love of Legos. “Collage is kind of like Legos,” she said. “You take small, separate pieces and create something whole.” That same detail-oriented mindset has also guided her leadership in the Art Society and in the school’s theater program, where she has been part of the makeup crew and ensemble. Whether she’s tutoring young readers, layering pieces into a collage or planning for a future in dentistry, Audrey approaches every challenge with patience, creativity and a belief in the power of transformation. TL

ANN MARIE NGUYEN

Age: 18

High School: Mount St. Mary Academy

Parents: Duong Nguyen and Angela Nutt-Nguyen College Plans: Undecided

At age 10, Ann Marie Nguyen picked up an astronomy encyclopedia on a whim. What she found inside was a vast, intricate universe full of cosmic wonders that would ultimately shape her future. Now a senior at Mount St. Mary Academy, Ann Marie plans to pursue astrophysics, earn a Ph.D. and dedicate her career to uncovering the mysteries of the cosmos. As a National Merit Commended Scholar, an AP Capstone candidate and a leader in multiple STEM and humanities organizations, her academic record is nothing short of astronomical. Plus, she’s conquered 13 AP courses, including AP Physics, AP Calculus BC and AP Latin, the last of which is her personal favorite. “I love grammar and learning about a forgotten language,” she said. As president of the school’s Robotics Club, Ann Marie helped grow the program, leading teams in VEX V5 competitions where students design and build robots to complete complex tasks. At the same time, her Girl Scout Gold Award project — a mobile vegetable garden for students with disabilities — demonstrates her heart for service, a passion rooted in her experiences with her twin sister, who has Angelman Syndrome. Music is another creative outlet for Ann Marie, who plays the piano, clarinet and ukulele. Her favorite song to play on the ukulele right now? “Hidden in the Sand” by the band Tally Hall. Balancing rigorous academics, leadership and service is demanding, but Ann Marie embraces the challenge. “Some of my friends ask why I don’t drop some of my activities, but I genuinely love all of them,” she said. Ultimately, she sees her mission not as proving herself to the universe but as proving the universe to people. “The greatest gift given to humanity is our ability to look up,” she said. And for Ann Marie, the sky is just the beginning. TL

CHARLIE TULLIS

Age: 18

High School: Prairie Grove High School

Parents: Marrianne and Jason Tullis College Plans: Undecided

Playing Carnegie Hall the summer before his senior year was not something Charlie Tullis imagined when he took up the flute after attending one of his older brother’s orchestra concerts as a kid. “I heard the flute soloist and I got hooked,” he said. Already a piano player since the age of 6, he began taking private flute lessons at age 12. By the time he started

middle school, he was able to skip beginning band and made some “amazing friends” that first year, competing in his first All-Region competition. Then the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. “That was really hard,” he said. “What brings me energy is playing in ensembles with other people that I'm close to. So I felt kind of alone, kind of like I was on my own.” He used the quarantine time to work on his fundamentals, and when things opened back up, “it felt really relieving that music wasn’t just about me in the practice room anymore.” As a sophomore, he earned first chair in the All-State Symphonic Orchestra, and as a junior, he snagged the top spot in the All-State Wind Symphony. In addition to his performance at Carnegie Hall as part of the National Youth Orchestra 2, Charlie has played as a guest flute soloist with the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas. He’s even worked concession stands at sporting events to raise money for Prairie Grove’s band program and has spent time giving private lessons and group classes to flute students — all while maintaining a 4.2 grade point average. His plan is to double major in music performance and business. He hopes to continue to teach and one day play in a professional orchestra. So far, he’s auditioned for six colleges and, when this magazine went to press, had been accepted to the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota and the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. RB

BẢO NGỌC (SARAH) PHẠM

Age: 18

High School: Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts

Parents: Phu Dao and Ngoc Bich Phạm College plans: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Born in Vietnam, ASMSA senior Bảo Ngọc (Sarah) Phạm moved to the United States with her parents when she was 12. “I found myself straddling two worlds. I explained bills and school forms to my family [her parents didn’t speak English], even when I wasn’t sure I got them right,” Sarah said. “At restaurants, I ordered for my family, but at school, I hesitated to speak, afraid of my accent. Balancing both identities was challenging, but it taught me resilience, adaptability and the importance of community, whether that’s finding ways to stay connected with my culture or helping others through similar transitions.” Sarah used her talents in math and science to help build community and connect with other students, offering to tutor friends who were struggling in the subjects. “Teaching reinforced my own understanding, but more importantly, it showed me how much confidence and support can change someone’s experience with a subject,” she said. Teachers describe Sarah as possessing “a fearless approach to academic challenges” and “likely the best math student in the class.” But there’s plenty more to Sarah outside of her excellent math skills. She also founded the Vietnamese Culture Exchange Club, which has collaborated with similar cultural groups, like Washington University’s Vietnamese Student Association. “I wanted to build something that fosters connection, representation and appreciation for diverse cultures, especially in a school where Vietnamese representation was limited,” she said. Among her multiple awards and accolades are: Arkansas Computer Science Student of Distinction; ASMSA Outstanding Math Student; Arkansas Seal of Biliteracy for Vietnamese; ASMSA Outstanding Intermediate Japanese Student; and National Merit Commended Student. In the fall, she’s headed to MIT, where she plans to major in applied mathematics in pursuit of a career as an actuary. LF

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EMMA GASTINEAU

Age: 17

High School: Arkansas Arts Academy

Parents: Blake and Rebecca Gastineau

College Plans: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

Bats. Emma Gastineau has been fascinated by the nocturnal creatures since she was a child. That fascination evolved into an interest in caves, and there are plenty of caves in Northwest Arkansas where Gastineau grew up. A participant in an ecology program called Project CAVES, the teenager has devoted much of her time and energy to learning how to restore cave structures, prevent pollution in underground waterways and protect cave-dwelling endangered species, which are an important part of preserving the ecosystems of the subterranean geological structures. This fascination has led Gastineau to pursue a degree at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in environmental, soil and water sciences. “I want to develop more sustainable solutions for our world and for our communities,” Gastineau said. “A major focus in my career would be to work with underground systems and waterways. There are a lot of aspects concerning water pollution and how it impacts our underground water systems.” When not exploring caves, Gastineau has also led efforts to create murals that center on transforming her cross-cultural heritage (her mother’s family is Mexican and her father American) into art. Gastineau created a mural for Northwest Arkansas Community College’s culinary program and partnered with classmates to paint another mural for the University of Arkansas’s production of the opera “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Teachers describe her as “an exceptional student whose intellect, leadership and passion for learning set her apart” and “an absolute joy to teach, bringing energy, curiosity and humor into every classroom she enters.” She also enjoys mixed martial arts, acting, dancing and archery. She made the Northwest Arkansas Community College Dean’s List, scored top marks on AP exams in world history and art history, and won the “First Generation Award” for the College Board National Recognition Program. And, of course, she makes all A’s. “My life goal is to advance innovations on sustainable living and to promote inclusivity,” Gastineau said. “Through dedication and listening to people’s perspectives, I believe that doing so is certain.” LF

Discover scholarships for 2- and 4-year programs at Arkansas Community Foundation at arcf.org.

YAHYA YOUNUS

Age: 17

High School: Little Rock Central High Parents: Kulsoom Shaikh College Plans: University of Pennsylvania

Some may consider providing affordable health care around the globe to be too complicated an undertaking, but not Yahya Younus. At 17 years old, Yahya already has ideas about how to transform health care systems. “There are health care delivery methods that are affordable for everyone that also have financial incentive behind them, and I want to present those to

potential investors,” he said. Yahya plans to flesh out his ideas further at the prestigious Life Sciences & Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania, which only accepts two dozen students nationally and allows them to earn two four-year degrees congruently. The online description for the program describes the chosen students as “exceptional,” and Yahya fits the bill, though he wouldn’t tell you that himself. Beyond Yahya’s impressive first-in-his-class transcript, he’s logged an internship with Bank of America, research opportunities at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences that have already made him a published author, and founded two innovative school clubs. Yahya’s Brain Bee Club trains students to compete in neuroscience competitions, encouraging teamwork to diagnose a sample patient or identify part of the brain through a histogram. The Rocketry Club pushes students to fabricate the entirety of an egg rocket launch to meet specific height and time requirements. The launches are “expensive as heck,” and Yahya has secured $3,000 in NASA funding to compete. His list of accomplishments is long, and Yahya said his mother is his hero. He started high school on the heels of his father leaving the family, and instead of wallowing, he said he turned it into motivation to improve academically and invest in his three younger brothers. When he’s not immersed in the science and health care world, Yahya also makes time for nature photography and competing with the Central Arkansas Fencing Club. MH

ACADEMIC ALL-STAR FINALISTS

CONNER BANE Buffalo Island Central High School

BRAXTON BORN Huntsville High School

ZACHARY ELLIS

Catholic High School for Boys

BRIAN BRAUN

Paragould High School

ISABELLE CARDEN

Palestine-Wheatley High School

SYDNEY DARE

Central Arkansas Christian School

WYATT PRICE

Haas Hall Academy Fort Smith

RACHEL RICHARDSON Crossett High School

EMILY SELIG

Corning High School

CLAIRE VANCE

Lakeside High School

AMITY

MELISSA VALDEZ Centerpoint High School

ASHDOWN

KAITLYN JONES Ashdown High School

NATALEIGH WHARTON Ashdown High School

BATESVILLE

ISAAC WEHRUNG Batesville High School Charter

BAUXITE

TAYLOR SHELTON Bauxite High School

BEARDEN

KAYLEE HUDSON Bearden High School

LILLY HUDSON Bearden High School

BEE BRANCH

BROOKLYN CULLUM South Side High School

ALI GOODWIN South Side High School

BENTON

ARIEL BRONSON Benton High School

KADE LEWALLEN Benton High School

BENTONVILLE

EMERY BRANDT Thaden School

SIENA FUSCO Thaden School

MANVITHA VORUGUNTI Bentonville High School

ARYA WAIKAR Bentonville High School

AVA WIECZOREK Haas Hall Academy Bentonville

BISMARCK

REGAN PARRIE Bismarck High School

BRINKLEY

KAYLEE HAYES Brinkley High School

ELIZABETH VELASCO Brinkley High School

ACADEMIC ALL-STAR NOMINEES

BRYANT

ETHAN GASAWAY Bryant High School

JACKSON KOON Bryant High School

CABOT

PATRICK ESAU Cabot High School

ELIZABETH ESTEBAN Cabot High School

CENTER RIDGE

KARLEE PERKINS Nemo Vista High School

CENTERTON

PRAGATHI NAGAPPA Bentonville West High School

RONAK PAI Bentonville West High School

CORNING

REID MCMASTERS Corning High School

EMILY SELIG Corning High School

CROSSETT

MAGGIE ALFORD Crossett High School

RACHEL RICHARDSON Crossett High School

DANVILLE

MICHAELINA BELL Danville High School

CASH WILSON Danville High School

DE QUEEN

LANEY GITCHELL De Queen High School

ALTIN KIGHT De Queen High School

DEWITT

NOAH RUFFIN DeWitt High School

EL DORADO

JORDIS BATTISTO Parkers Chapel High School

CADEN MEADOWS El Dorado High School

WILLIAM OBIOZO El Dorado High School

FARMINGTON

MILES BATSON Farmington High School

TAYLOR CONRAN Farmington High School

FAYETTEVILLE

CLAIRE BRANDON Fayetteville High School

SOLARA KOSER Fayetteville Virtual Academy

JAMES TANSKI Haas Hall Academy

DAXTON TESSMER Fayetteville High School

FLIPPIN

ADRIANNE BENEDICT Flippin High School

FOREMAN

MALLORY ABERCROMBIE Foreman High School

FORREST CITY

ROSHAWD WASHINGTON Forrest City High School

FORT SMITH

CHRIS CERNA Northside High School

OLIVER DURHAM Northside High School

CARTER JACKSON Southside High School

STEPHANIE LEGRIS Southside High School

WYATT PRICE Haas Hall Academy Fort Smith

GREEN FOREST

HENRY AGUILAR-ORELLANA Green Forest High School

BRITYN GILLIAM Green Forest High School

GREENBRIER

AMBER BARTOLOTTA Greenbrier High School

SHILOH MAXWELL Greenbrier High School

GREENLAND

DIXIE MOULTON Greenland High School

GRACIE HERRMANN

Greenland High School

HAMPTON

MORGAN OGDEN Hampton High School

KAYON THOMAS Hampton High School

HOT SPRINGS

JACK KRAUSS Lakeside High School

CALEN LONG Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts

BAO NGOC PHAM Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts

CLAIRE VANCE Lakeside High School

HUNTSVILLE

BRAXTON BORN Huntsville High School

LILLIAN SAMUELS Huntsville High School

JONESBORO

JIMENA ESCARCEGA Nettleton High School

WILLIAM HACKER The Academies at Jonesboro High School

EMMA LYLES Valley View High School

GANESH NAIR The Academies at Jonesboro High School

KEDRICK SLOAN Nettleton High School

AHTZIRY ZUÑIGA Valley View High School

LAMAR

KYLIE HARRISON Lamar High School

KORI SANDERS Lamar High School

LITTLE ROCK

MARIAM ALABI Parkview Arts & Sciences Magnet High School

ANABELLE ANGTUACO Mount St. Mary Academy

YASSIN BAHGAT Little Rock Central High School

AUDREY CHUANG-STUBER Little Rock Christian Academy

LUCY CLEVELAND

Joe T. Robinson High School

STELLA COCHRAN

Episcopal Collegiate School

ZACHARY ELLIS Catholic High School for Boys

MAX LESSEL Little Rock Christian Academy

ANN MARIE NGUYEN Mount St. Mary Academy

ROBERT PRYOR

LISA Academy Hybrid

WALKER RITCHEY

Episcopal Collegiate School

LUIS SOLANO DE ALMEIDA

Parkview Arts & Sciences Magnet High School

JOHN TAIT

Joe T. Robinson High School

ANTHONY WHITE

LISA Academy West High School

YAHYA YOUNUS Little Rock Central High School

MAGAZINE

TEMPIEST DICKENS

Magazine High School

OWEN STATON Magazine High School

MANSFIELD

CARTER WHILEY Mansfield High School

CARISSA VAUGHAN Mansfield High School

MARION

JAMARI DAVIE Marion High School

JAZMINE ROBERTS Marion High School

BILLY ZHENG

Marion High School

MARKED TREE

GAVIN TEAGUE

Marked Tree High School

RYAN WAGES

Marked Tree High School

MAUMELLE

MEREDITH DEARASAUGH Maumelle High School

LAUREN JUHL

Maumelle High School

MINERAL SPRINGS

DAYAUNA CHILES

Mineral Springs High School

MA'HOGANI TROTTER

Mineral Springs High School

MONETTE

CONNER BANE

Buffalo Island Central High School

BROOKE WATTIGNEY

Buffalo Island Central High School

MORRILTON

JACKSON BOWLES

Morrilton High School

MULBERRY

JEWEL CHEELY Mulberry High School

NEWARK

KLOEE WOOD

Cedar Ridge High School

NEWPORT

LUCAS SALINAS

The Academies at Newport High School

NORTH LITTLE ROCK

AYANNI BROCKINTON

North Little Rock Center of Excellence

ETHAN CHEN

Maumelle Charter High School

SYDNEY DARE

Central Arkansas Christian School

CHRISTIAN MCGILL

Maumelle Charter High School

TROI MCKINNEYEZEAGWULA

North Little Rock Center of Excellence

GABRIELLE POOLE

LISA Academy North Middle-High School

WILLIAM PRINE

LISA Academy North Middle-High School

JONAN PULLIAM

North Little Rock High School

KYLIE SARTAIN

North Little Rock High School

OZARK ALI IMRAN

Ozark High School

PALESTINE

ISABELLE CARDEN

Palestine-Wheatley High School

RHEALEE MCGRAW Palestine-Wheatley High School

PARAGOULD

BRIAN BRAUN Paragould High School

ANDREW JARRETT Greene County Tech High School

JACKSON KIDD Greene County Tech High School

OSTER WAZENEGGER Paragould High School

PARIS

KAYDENCE FREEMAN Paris High School

GARRETT MASSEY Paris High School

PEARCY

ISABELLA AITKEN Lake Hamilton High School

KAITLIN GUTHRIE Lake Hamilton High School

PRARIE GROVE

CHARLIE TULLIS Prairie Grove High School

RISON

ANNIE DAVIDSON Woodlawn High School

SARAH MELHORN Woodlawn High School

AARON TILLEY Rison High School

ROGERS

EMMA GASTINEAU Arkansas Arts Academy

MAXWELL MAIDT Arkansas Arts Academy

ROSE BUD

CADEN CALHOUN Rose Bud High School

ALANA SARTIN

Rose Bud High School

SALEM

SKYLER PAYNE Salem High School

OLIVIA SMITH Salem High School

SHERIDAN

AVERY WILLIAMS

Sheridan High School

SILOAM SPRINGS

JUSTIN PHU Siloam Springs High School

ANTHONY WLEKLINSKI Siloam Springs High School

SMACKOVER

KATHERINE SMITH Smackover High School

SOUTHSIDE

JAXON HATFIELD

Southside Charter High School

FAITH SHARP Southside Charter High School

SPRINGDALE

ADRIANNA LEWIS Har-Ber High School

SAMUEL MYERS Har-Ber High School

STRAWBERRY

ADDISON DOYLE Hillcrest High School

PEYTON GLENN Hillcrest High School

SUBIACO

ADEN GRADY Subiaco Academy

CONNOR WASIELEWSKI Subiaco Academy

VALLEY SPRINGS

PARKER SPAW

Valley Springs High School

MACY WILLIS

Valley Springs High School

WEST MEMPHIS

TRISTAN BURNETT Academies of West Memphis

WYNNE

SARAH MCLENDON

Wynne High School

April 25 - May 4

Arts & The Park 2025

Arts & The Park, the annual ten-day celebration of the arts in Hot Springs will be held April 25 - May 4, 2025 and will feature a wide range of inspiring and fun creative offerings. From art exhibits, live entertainment, children’s activities and book give-aways, to studio tours, performances, live steamroller printing, the Glover Awards for Songwriting, demos, and more, Arts & The Park will offer a full schedule of engaging events. Produced by the Hot Springs Area Cultural Alliance, the 2025 theme is “ARTventurous” highlighting the excitement art and creativity bring to life.

Arts & The Park will open on Friday, April 25 at 5:30 p.m. with the unveiling of the 2025 Art Moves outdoor art exhibit along the Hot Springs Creek Greenway Trail. Reproductions of artwork selected from the annual entries are mounted on metal panels and displayed along the paved trail located between Hollywood Avenue and Belding Street. The exhibit will be on display throughout the year and is free and open to all.

Visitors can enjoy Hot Springs’ first silent disco, “Atmosphere” on Friday, April 25 at 7 p.m. Individual headphones will be provided with playlists from live DJs. This family-friendly event is free and open to all ages.

An architectural tour at Garvan Woodland Gardens will be held on Saturday, April 26 from 9 a.m. - Noon. A plein air painting event will also be held at Garvan Woodland Gardens from Friday, April 25 - Saturday, May 3 and will culminate in an exhibit displaying the artwork inspired by the gardens at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 4. Garvan Gardens is located at 550 Arkridge Road in Hot Springs and features 210 acres of stunning woodland gardens. Admission is charged.

A live cooking demo with Chef Maria of Cafe Kahlo will be held at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 28. Chef Maria will create a traditional Mexican entree and dessert, with a hands-on portion and tasting for attendees. The cost is $35 per person, only 20 slots available. Cafe Kahlo is located at at 919 Central Avenue. For registration information, visit hotspringsarts.org.

A guided hike with one of Arkansas’ favorite artists and naturalist Gene Sparling will be held on his private nature preserve nestled in the Ouachita Mountains at 10 a.m. on Thursday, May 1. The guided tour offers two difficulty levels, easy and medium. Hikers need to provide their own supplies. Located at the Sparling Family Farm at Forest Path Gallery at 107 Stillmeadow Lane in Hot Springs. The tour is free and open to public.

Visitors can experience the creative process in action during the Arts & The Park’s Studio Tours on Saturday and Sunday, May 3-4 from 10-4. Artists will welcome guests to their studio spaces and discuss their art-making practices with attendees. A full list of participating artist studios is available online at hotspringsarts.org. Admission is free.

“Backyard Discovery” by Cathy Melvin

PHOTO BY LORIEN

PHOTO BY

Don't miss these events:

Art Springs, the free two-day outdoor arts festival, will be held the weekend of April 26-27 from 10-6 on Saturday, and 10-4 on Sunday at Hill Wheatley Plaza and the nearby entertainment district in downtown Hot Springs. Art Springs includes a remarkable array of fine artists, artisans, and performers, along with hands-on activities for children, Chalk Walk, the Glover Awards for Songwriting, Under Pressure steamroller printing, Hot Springs Renaissance Faire experiences, a children’s book giveaway, and much more! Booths displaying the work of fine artists and artisans will be featured throughout the festival, along with live music and performances. The Glover Awards for Songwriting will be held from 12-3 on Sunday, April 27. The Under Pressure steamroller printing event will begin at Noon on the 27th.

Garland County Library will host a series of art events throughout the week, including artist demos, local author features, activities for children, and performances. The library is located at 1427 Malvern Avenue in Hot Springs. Visit gclibrary.com for a full list of events.

IBLA International Musicians and the Hot Springs Children’s Dance Theatre will perform at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 30 at the Grand Avenue Methodist Church, located at 841 Quapaw Avenue. Admission is free to this inspiring collaboration of music and dance.

Wednesday Night Poetry, a weekly event of the Hot Springs art scene for over 36 years, will be held from 6:30-9 p.m. on Wednesday, April 30 at Kollective Coffee + Tea located at 110 Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs. Admission is free.

CockTALE Hour will be held at the Arlington Hotel on Thursday, May 1 and will begin with a tour of the historic hotel at 5 p.m., followed at 6 p.m. with live music by classical guitarist David Perry and presentations by members of the Garland County Historical Society and hotel staff sharing tales of Hot Springs’ storied past. The event is free with a cash bar.

Hot Springs’ Gallery Walk will be held on Friday, May 2 from 5-9 p.m. in participating downtown Hot Springs galleries, studios, and additional venues. Gallery Walk has been held the first Friday of every month for over 35 years and features exhibit openings during the fun-filled receptions. Enjoy meeting the artists, along with entertainment, demos, refreshments, and more! This is a free event.

Support for Arts & The Park includes Arvest Bank, Visit Hot Springs, and others. Funding is also provided, in part by the Arkansas Arts Council, a division of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, and the National Endowment for the Arts, along with the Arkansas Community Foundation, and Elisabeth Wagner Foundation.

EUREKA SPRINGS

MAY FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS 2025 SCHEDULE

“MEET THE MAKERS” AT MAIN STAGE, MAY 2 & 3RD, 11AM-6PM

ARTRAGEOUS PARADE MAY 3RD,  2PM

ES PLEIN AIR FESTIVAL MAY 4-8TH

YOUTH DAY AT ES PLEIN AIR FESTIVAL MAY 4TH, 10-5:30PM

EXPOSED BALLET BY NWA BALLET THE AUD ,MAY 9TH,  7PM

“THE STORY OF EUREKA SPRINGS & THE RAILROAD” EUREKA SPRINGS HISTORIC MUSEUM, MAY 8TH

DRUMMING IN THE PARK MAY 3RD, 6PM

THE GREAT PASSION PLAY GRAND PREMIERE MAY 2ND

NATIVE GARDEN PARTY MURAL REVEAL AND EVENT (TBD)

ARTRAGEOUS PARADE

For decades, the Artrageous Parade has marked the spirited commencement of Eureka Springs’ annual May Festival of the Arts. Renowned for its flair for festivities, Eureka Springs elevates the art of parades to new heights, epitomized by the Artrageous Parade — an annual extravaganza of creativity, music, performance and surprises.

Held each year on the first Saturday of May, this kaleidoscopic procession winds through the heart of Eureka Springs, filling Spring Street with color and imagination, commencing at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 3. Leading the charge is the Eureka Springs School of the Arts (ESSA), which organizes the Artrageous Parade during the May Festival of the Arts, as well as numerous other year-round free public art events, art and craft workshops, and community arts programs.

Art enthusiasts are in for a treat this year as they catch special parade throws — miniature masterpieces crafted by local artists, generously provided by ESSA to delight parade-goers. It’s an opportunity to snatch up a genuine piece of Eurekan art amidst the spectacle!

Keen to participate? ESSA welcomes parade applications until April 25, 2025, or until all slots are filled. Participants stand a chance to win cash prizes and ESSA gift certificates, redeemable for an array of captivating art and fine craft workshops.

For those eager to witness or join the festivities, visit the ESSA website at www.essa-art.org or stay updated through ESSA’s social media channels. This family-friendly celebration promises an enriching experience for all ages — an art-filled affair not to be overlooked!

For more information, contact Kelly McDonough, Executive Director of the Eureka Springs School of the Arts, at 479-253-5384 or via email at director@essa-art.org.

ALL MONTH LONG:

“Signs of Eureka” Vintage and historical Eureka Springs signage and graphic exhibit "Open Book of Eureka Springs” public art display celebrating Eureka’s rich literary culture and history at the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow

Eureka Springs Frottage (texture rubbing) Art Adventure interactive public arts experience throughout town

DON'T MISS THESE!

“Rockin’ Eureka: Elvis Fans and Friends Festival May 16-18 at the Aud

An Evening with Elvis Fiance’-Ginger Alden May 16 at the Aud

“Elvis in Concert” – Tribute Show May 17 at the Aud

Eureka Springs Blues Party Basin Park and all around town May 29-June 15

Blues Fest with Batterhorn & Edward at Gotahold May 31

‘THE

RETURN OF MAGIK’

RWAKE REAWAKENS WITH ITS FIRST NEW ALBUM IN 13 YEARS.

BY DAN MARSH

BAND TOGETHER: Clockwise from left, Rwake consists of John Judkins, Jeff Morgan, Brittany Fugate, Austin Sublett, Christopher “C.T.” Terry and Reid Raley.

Forget what you think you know about heavy metal and any of its various proliferations — thrash, doom, sludge, etc. For me, that’s an easy ask. As I told Brittany Fugate, co-lead vocalist for the newly resurrected Arkansas-based doom/sludge metal band Rwake (pronounced “wake”), I’m not a heavy metal guy. The metal I know and (sorta) love dates back to the 1980s before plaid shirts and angry young men with torn jeans and unwashed hair (lookin’ at you, Kurt) took over MTV and FM radio. I’m talking about Metallica, Megadeth, AC/DC, KISS and other metal-adjacent acts in the Dad Rock category. (Full disclosure: I never liked KISS. Nor should you.)

Rwake sounds nothing like these acts, nor does its first album in 13 years, “The Return of Magik,” released on March 14 via Relapse Records. I’m hard-pressed to define the joyful noise Rwake makes as heavy metal.

“I don’t think there is any one box you can put us into besides Rwake,” Fugate told me. “When I hear people say we’re a sludge band, I go, ‘are we really?’ I don’t think so. If there’s any one word for us, I’d say it’s progressive. That gives us the freedom to do whatever.”

Progressive — or prog — rock should lean heavily on experimentation and virtuosity, right? Genesis and The Moody Blues were prog; Rwake is not prog. Or is it? If King Crimson can classify itself as heavy metal, maybe Rwake can classify itself as prog. But listening to “The Return of Magik” one dark and stormy night on headphones, with nothing but my dog to protect me from any evil spirits the music might conjure, “progressive” wasn’t the first word to come to mind. “Intense,” “visceral” and “holy shit” were among my initial reactions as I sank deeper into a bottle of Japanese wine. You need something to help you get through the night when listening to Rwake. Genesis might be helpful later in chasing away the juju.

“The Return of Magik,” the band’s sixth album, is a trip. I was ready for crushing levels of volume, huge guitars and roaring vocals (check, check, check), but not the surprisingly tender moments of acoustic introspection. The second single, “You Swore We’d Always Be Together,” sounds torn between the soulful blues of its opening bars and Fugate’s spine-tingling screams. It’s heavy shit, but it’s not the stuff of cliche. There’s a tempo or key change every few bars, and the songs, which can run as long as 13 minutes, are never what you’d expect.

“We build songs based on dynamics,” Fugate said. “This album is built around dynam-

ics. We pay a lot of attention to that. There will be this crushing riff that’s so heavy, but it’s be tween two acoustic parts that are so soft and beautiful.”

THE CONSTANT HUSTLE

Rwake consists of Fugate and Christopher “C.T.” Terry on vocals, Jeff Morgan on drums, Reid Raley on bass, and John Judkins and Aus tin Sublett, the newest addition, on guitar. The band members spent some time apart — 13 years, to be exact — but reformed in 2024 with a new mission: to do Rwake “the right way” and play live again.

APRIL

“Most of us have been playing music together for about 30 years,” Fugate said. “In our younger years, we spent a lot of time on the road, building this worldwide fanbase. After doing that for so long, we wanted to take a break and build something at home.”

For the most part, that meant starting families and devoting themselves to other pursuits. “Being a musician is a constant hustle, and that can get exhausting, especially when you start rolling into decades,” Fugate said. As families, including Fugate’s, grew, it became clear that a pause was needed. “I’m an all-ornothing type of person,” Fugate said. “A lot of the band’s business fell on my shoulders, and after I had my second child, I just couldn’t devote the time. So, we took a break.”

That break extended from 2011 to 2018 when Morgan went on “a writing spree,” Fugate said. “He wrote about half of the foundation for [“The Return of Magik”],” she said. A change in personnel led to the band delaying its return a while longer. “Then COVID hit,” Fugate said, “and the whole world stopped.”

The pandemic drove home the reality that some things are more important than careers or music, Fugate said. It also convinced the group that if Rwake was meant to continue, “we were going to make it a priority. We were going to do it right.”

‘THE LISTENER IS US’

Terry refers to himself as a full-time dad. “I take the kids to school, I pick them up, I go to the school when they get in trouble.” Listening to “The Return of Magik,” you might not associate the owner of that full-throated roar as the father of two little ones. But Terry couldn’t be happier taking care of the kids.

Terry is a founding member of Rwake, which got its start in the Levy neighborhood of North Little Rock in 1996 (the only other remaining member from the original lineup is Morgan, though Fugate and Raley have been in the

band since 1999). “I was experimenting with the kinds of music I was listening to, groups like Eyehategod and Acid Bath,” he said. “We wanted to sound like that, but we also wanted to explore and experiment. I liked The Doors, too.”

I hear The Doors — and maybe Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd — when I listen to track four on “The Return of Magik,” a 13-minute-plus opus titled “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration.” It’s anything but a traditional heavy metal song and comes closer to my definition of prog. That’s because the song opens with a spoken-word performance by 77-year-old Jim Dandy, lead singer of the renowned Southern rock band Black Oak Arkansas and friend of Rwake.

“He wrote a poem for us to use in 2012 or 2013,” Terry said of Dandy’s trippy, grav-

el-voiced performance. “The first time I heard it, he spoke it right into my face. He’s an older gentleman but he’s never stopped being creative. It was really the first thing that was done for the new album.”

“We intended to use it at the beginning of the song when we heard it,” Fugate said of the poem. “It’s like an anti-drug PSA. It’s so great, but of all things, that’s Jim Dandy’s contribution: Don’t do drugs!”

Dandy speaks of a “breakdown from hell” and bemoans a generation closed off “in their own minds too many times.” Underneath his incantation, the band lays down a tense, pensive guitar track and a nervous beat as ghostly Spaghetti Western-style winds whisper in the background.

“We write for ourselves,” Fugate said. “A lot of bands try to write for the listener. They try to figure out what the listener would like to

hear. We don’t do that. The listener is us. We’ve never painted ourselves into a corner by saying, ‘This is what kind of band we are.’ That gives us the freedom to have, say, five different genres in one song. We’re writing what we love, we have very diverse tastes. I think that’s reflected in our music.”

Terry agreed. “We’re working on a 16-minute song for our next album that I’m super stoked about,” he said. “Usually, if you hear one of our songs and it’s 8 minutes long, we’ve trimmed it down from 11 or 13 minutes.”

The band’s willingness to go long, build different movements into every track and play around with tempo, timbre and moods within the same song separates the album from the more tedious or predictable examples of the genre. Plus, rather than dig into the usual morbid topics that haunt most forms of commercial heavy metal, Rwake asks the listener

BRIAN CHILSON

BRIAN CHILSON

on its new album to reconnect with the Earth, especially on tracks like “Distant Constellations”: “Before we existed the shockwave ascends / The turning of the seasons / Arrival of spring and birds will sing / From the sign of the crucifix.”

“I think the title suggests a revival of spiritualism,” Fugate said of “The Return of Magik.” “That’s what we wanted in our artwork. We wanted to do something different and build something real out of natural elements. I think this is the first record in all our years where the imagery mirrors the music. It’s dark and evocative, there are elements of death, there’s a delicacy in a lot of the notes. Both the artwork and the music are born of the earth, shaped by

its rhythms, textures and spirits.”

SIGN OF THE HORNS

I wouldn’t want to be caught dead playing air guitar in public. Yet that’s what I found myself doing a few minutes into Rwake’s album release show at the Rev Room. I flashed the sign of the horns — a closed fist with index and pinkie fingers extended — to signal my approval. I wasn’t the only one. Rwake played to a large and appreciative crowd March 15 — the anniversary, Terry told me, of the band’s first performance in 1997. I can’t imagine much fire was lost in the intervening years.

Fugate played a huge part, singing barefoot and contorting herself to belt out her vocals.

The band ripped through material from the new record with such power, I could feel the walls vibrate. By the time Rwake launched into “Distant Constellations,” I had stopped thinking of their music as “heavy metal.” It was all the things Fugate and Terry had talked about, but there was some other element at play. You could feel it as the band transitioned from one musical movement to another, as Judkins swapped his electric guitars for the pedal steel or as Morgan came out from behind the drums to pick up an acoustic guitar. Looking around for evidence of what that might be, I spotted a couple swaying gently on the floor, arms interlocked, as if they were teenagers at a sockhop. They flashed the sign of the horns.

REVVED UP: At left, Christopher “C.T.” Terry howls into the microphone while Reid Raley plays bass guitar during Rwake’s album release concert at the Rev Room on March 15. At right, John Judkins, Terry and Brittany Fugate thrash their heads at the same show.

TRASH INTO TREASURE

THANKS TO A NEW APP FOR ITS VOLUNTEERS, POTLUCK FOOD RESCUE IS DOING ‘MORE WITH LESS.’

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

Hunger relief is a time-consuming job, but a new mobile app from Central Arkansas-based nonprofit Potluck Food Rescue is making swift work of it. Case in point: About 40 minutes ahead of a meeting I was assigned to cover for this publication, I headed to a North Little Rock Little Caesars where an employee casually handed me a comically large stack of 15 boxed pizzas. Somehow making it to my car without dropping them, I delivered them to Potluck HQ for redistribution and returned to the office just as the meeting was underway. A notification from the app congratulated me on being a #foodrescuehero and thanked me for helping to end food waste and hunger. The app that handled logistics for my pizza run was made possible by a partnership between Potluck and Food Rescue Hero, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit offering a mobile platform similar to third-party food delivery service apps. Think: Uber Eats or DoorDash, but for food rescue. Potluck’s new executive director, Chris Wyman, said the partnership is a “revolutionary step for food rescue in Arkansas,” a state facing the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the country, according to a report released last September

from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Potluck Food Rescue was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1991, but its work began a couple of years earlier, when co-founder Florence Haut started organizing food donations in 1989 after seeing employees at a “major fried chicken chain restaurant” throwing out chicken that hadn’t sold that day. Over the past three-plus decades, the company has diverted millions of pounds of food away from the landfill and into people’s homes.

As apps go, Potluck’s is pretty simple. It takes about 5 minutes to download (go to the app store and search “Potluck Food Rescue”) and register. A dispatcher sends out notifications when smaller rescues are available. Volunteers can see where the pickup point is, how much food they can expect to haul and where it needs to be delivered. If there are two rescues nearby, they can select both. Vetted volunteers who are certified in food safety will have the opportunity to pick up temperature-controlled foods. If a volunteer accepts a rescue, they select their preference for Google Maps or Apple Maps and just follow the instructions. There’s nothing tricky about it. If this reporter can

pull it off, you probably can, too.

Apps can be both complicated to build and expensive, so Potluck purchased Food Rescue Hero’s interface with grant funds from the Blue & You Foundation for a Healthier Arkansas, the charitable arm of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The app works in three counties — Garland, Faulkner and Pulaski — but the plan is to expand statewide.

“We have to prove this thing is going to work well — I already know it will,” Wyman said. “As we start to grow, I can talk to Food Rescue Hero and we’ll add more counties.”

Wyman said the app is designed to empower volunteers, keep food in the community and allow the company to “do more with less.” If Potluck sends out a notification for a pickup in Garland County, they will direct the driver to the nearest nonprofit in the area for dropoff.

“Nothing in Garland County will leave Garland County,” he said. “The idea is we’ll never even drive down there. We kind of create a hub without actually creating a literal brick and mortar.”

Wyman said his Potluck predecessor, Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance CEO Sylvia Blain, has been working to secure the app for several years, and noted that even though

DONATION STATION: John Clay of Potluck Food Rescue's warehouse distribution team organizes a load of rescued food at the company's headquarters in North Little Rock.

it’s meant to streamline Potluck’s process, it will not threaten any of the company’s seven employees, four of which are full time. “It makes it to where we’re just doing our job better on the redistribution end,” he said. Wyman said he was jumping up and down in the office when he received the first notification that a volunteer had used the app to pick up a rescue.

THE DONATION CIRCUIT

On a remarkably windy March afternoon, we stopped by Potluck’s modest warehouse on West Broadway Street in North Little Rock. Zach Schuyler, a driver/food coordinator for the nonprofit, was loading up the walk-in refrigerator with his afternoon haul following stops at Fresh Market, Larry’s Pizza, Little Caesars, Trader Joe’s and multiple Starbucks locations. Wyman showed us the intake interface on a computer screen. There were familiar names on the list of pickup locations: Wright’s BBQ, Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, Arkansas Heart Hospital, Raising Cane’s.

And while drivers like Schuyler are out, some of Potluck’s 99 partner organizations are rolling in, visiting the warehouse to pick up donations collected the previous day.

Potluck’s operations manager, Robert Borden, gets to the warehouse around 7 a.m. and warms up the company’s refrigerated “reefer” truck for stops at Edwards Food Giant and Sam’s Club. On the day we visited, he picked up several pallets of out-of-date canned peas from Edwards on Cantrell, one of Potluck’s daily stops. Among the goods stored in the warehouse were scores of bananas — most of which had gone bad, but none of which would go to waste. They are a part of the pigs’ diet at Porch Swing Farms in Perry County.

“Those hogs have eaten a lot of bananas,” Borden said. “They’re going to taste interesting.”

A good amount of Potluck’s compost goes to a Mayflower-based company called Man of the Red Earth, which specializes in vermicomposting, a process using worms to break down organic matter into rich soil.

Borden also gets calls from Bella’s Kitchen + Wellness at The Anthony School in Little Rock regularly, and the chef at the downtown Marriott saves and freezes two full racks of food for Potluck so the hotel’s leftovers won’t go to waste. Potluck provided aluminum steam pans to the DoubleTree by Hilton so if

WASTE NOT: Clockwise from top: Chris Wyman picks up bagels from The Bagel Shop, Wyman and Community Bakery CEO John Brandenberger discuss logistics, Potluck operations manager Robert Borden talks about the day's haul.

they have food to donate, they can freeze it “or call me that day and I will come get it,” Borden said.

Supplementing those regular calls are unexpected donations from restaurants, which Potluck calls ad hoc pickups. When we were at the warehouse, Borden received an ad hoc from Problem Child, the new pizzeria in Midtown on its second day in business.

RIDE ALONG

We shadowed Wyman to see what a more substantive pickup would look like. The challenges of physical distribution, we found, weren’t always the ones you’d expect. Heading to Community Bakery and The Bagel Shop in Little Rock’s SoMa District from the Potluck warehouse, Arkansas Times photographer Brian Chilson’s black fedora was picked up by the wind and flew out into West Broadway traffic.

Potluck and Community Bakery began working together about two months ago. The 70-plus year-old bakery had been donating to about five different nonprofit organizations for years, but Community Bakery CEO John Brandenberger told us that the process of working with multiple organizations became inconsistent.

His wife, Juli Brandenberger, the bakery’s owner and CFO, suggested that rather than continue to deal with several organizations, they focus their energy on one.

After consulting with some of his restaurant owner friends, including Brayan Mcfadden at Brood & Barley and Rich Cosgrove at Whole Hog North Little Rock, John Brandenberger decided to connect with Potluck. He said that since they’ve partnered, the daily 2 p.m. pickup has been like clockwork, even on a recent January snow day.

Speaking to Wyman, John Brandenberger said,

“The fact that we know you take care of those resources and how you distribute, we don’t feel as bad when we have to give you 30 boxes of food because we know it’s going to a good place.”

The Bagel Shop has worked out a deal with Potluck so that if drivers can’t make the 2 p.m. pickup time, they can enter the building after hours to pick up the shop’s leftover bagels. Trevor Papsadora, chef and co-owner of The Bagel Shop, told the Arkansas Times that he and partner Myles Roberson began donating to the organization when they were a newer business doing pop-ups. Now, in their SoMa brick and mortar, business has slowed down so heavily at times that “even with our smallest batch of bagels, we were having hundreds of bagels left over each day.”

Last year, The Bagel Shop donated 15,364 bagels, Papsadora said. Many are picked up by a transitional housing facility called the Magnolia Recovery Community, and once a week, a food bank from Jefferson County picks up bagels.

Every item that volunteers or Potluck drivers bring in, whether it’s going to feed families or headed to a hog farm or compost pile, is weighed in. That weight can be used to measure the nonprofit’s community impact. According to its website, the company is redistributing 8,00010,000 pounds of food weekly. In 2024, Potluck redistributed 1 million pounds of food, equivalent to 895,752 meals.

Wyman said weight can also be used to determine their carbon footprint and how much methane they’ve kept out of the landfill. Last year, Potluck redistributed six tons of scrap food for composting, which he said, “then goes towards regenerative [agriculture], which then cycles right back to growing food, feeding a person — it’s all just a cycle.”

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WEED TALES OF YORE

A FORMER SMALL-TIME DEALER REFLECTS ON HIS DAYS IN THE BIZ.

BY JACK A. ROWE

I’m glad weed is legal in Arkansas, or pretty much legal. I realize that, to someone inclined to see it as such, medical marijuana looks pretty much just like regular old marijuana, and everybody in the business or with a prescription looks pretty much just like dope dealers or plain old dopers, respectively. And yeah, sure, weed is still weed and it’s gonna give you a buzz whether you use it to alleviate restless leg syndrome or make your collection of Phish bootlegs tolerable. But a shaking, aching leg and a 45-minute recording of “Tweezer” from Mud Island in 1997 are both indisputably manifestations of ill health, and anybody who thinks “getting well” is automatically negated by “getting high” can kiss my entire ass.

STOWAWAY TRIMMINGS:

fancier than the kind Jack A. Rowe used to peddle, but you get the idea.

I am also very aware that illegal activity, like selling dope, has severe consequences, and that those consequences tend to be much more severe should one find himself or herself to be less white, less middle class and less dude than your faithful interlocutor here (I have, I am sorry to say, hippie-shuffled my way through more than one 45-minute recording of “Tweezer”).

Anyway, I don’t smoke weed anymore, although I used to smoke it like it was my job. Part of my problem back then was a robust streak of self-loathing, and weed helped alleviate that to a great degree. It didn’t cure it outright, though, as evidenced by the fact I’ve long said that, if I had a time machine, one of the first things I’d do is travel back to my 19-year-old self and tell him that, aside from somehow living to the ripe old age of how-old-I-am-now (and counting!), the other big surprise in store is that, in that very same

year of 2025, you can just waltz right into the store (they call it a “dispensary”) and buy weed (they call it — get this — “flower”) like you would a pack of Marlboro Reds. I would wait just a few precious moments to let past-me absorb this wonderful, absolutely mind-blowing information before revealing to him something even more shocking: that, unfortunately, and through no choice of his/ my/our own, I/we will one day no longer enjoy marijuana, despite it being so much easier to procure.

So there you have it: I don’t smoke weed anymore because it makes me paranoid, but I miss smoking it and liking it and it really bums me out that I don’t anymore. That said, I’m not sure I’m as salty about missing out on going to, like, the weed store as I am merely forming a very stereotypical old man opinion about how difficult things should be, and how much better and cooler I am for having lived through something being difficult.

my job. But I went through a few stretches there where I sold weed because it was my job.

Was I a drug dealer, like the kind of drug dealer you see on TV shows and movies and all that? Nope, no way. Did I know a few of those guys? Most certainly. They also tended to have a few more business interests than weed, but that’s another story, and best written under a better pseudonym. But, really, at the end of the day, I couldn’t even turn a decent profit selling grass, which tells you a lot about my business acumen. But beyond making rent and bills (and sitting high upon a throne of grass, naturally), all I ever really cared about — and this, as an older man, is a little embarrassing — was being cool.

Don’t get me wrong: I always liked smoking weed. Like, a lot. From my very first toke on a church canoe trip during the *checks notes* George H.W. Bush (!) administration, I was

sold. But along with introducing me to a new and really awesome way to feel, smoking weed introduced me to a risk I was willing to take, and a stunt I was able to pull off: finding, buying and selling weed.

I got started pretty quick, too. Not too long after that first toke, I introduced my best friend to grass, and he took to it, too. Now, neither one of us had a driver’s license yet, but we lived on the same dirt road and so — owing to parenting norms of that time and place, and also ATVs — we were able to hang out more or less autonomously. And, being a couple of pretty bright and outgoing young fellows, it didn’t take us too long to suss out that the father of one of our other school chums was in fact in the marijuanagrowing business himself, and that his daughter — our pal — was quickly getting into the bag-up-daddy’s-trimmings-and-sell-themby-the-gallon-Ziploc-bag-to-whatever-miscreantsrode-up-on-a-four-wheeler business.

This person was also a very pretty girl, which did nothing to discourage me from my new and exciting lifestyle.

Anyway, as you might imagine, anybody — much less a pretty girl — in possession of homegrown marijuana, mere trimmings or no, and providing it to bored adolescent country boys could command pretty much any price, and she did. And while she did siphon off every cent of our hard-earned hayhauling money for those Ziploc bags of shake, we had a market and a plan. Because, on the other side of the ridge and down the holler past an old cemetery, there was a privately run, faith-based “youth ranch” that made its money warehousing boys from such far-flung and mysterious places as Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis and what have you in order to correct this or that behavioral issue.

We knew these boys because they had to go to our tiny little backwoods school. We also knew they desperately wanted to get high because they told us pretty much every day.

And so my first foray into smoking weed almost immediately became my first foray into selling weed. One big bag of homegrown trimmings was quickly pared and parceled into several baggies (one for us, one to sell, etc., etc.), baggies were stuffed into boots, and fabulous two-stroke steeds were mounted.

Over the river, through the woods, straight past Grandma’s house and down to the home for wayward city kids we went. Being good boys, and local, we were a known quantity to the staff, and my very first drug deal went off without a hitch. We still had plenty of grass for ourselves at home, most of our hay-hauling wages were recouped and — most importantly, at least to me — we were

MY FIRST FORAY INTO SMOKING WEED ALMOST IMMEDIATELY BECAME MY FIRST FORAY INTO SELLING WEED.

basically folk heroes for a minute.

And so it goes, or so it went. That same guy and I went off to college together, and when our first night on campus failed to live up to our movie-primed imaginations, he made a phone call and we were off to another town to meet up with some older boys from back home who had moved off and maybe had someone we might want to meet. It was not long before we were very popular fellows on campus. There was money to be made, of course, but I mainly just savored the feeling of being in the know, of being in on the action.

Being in on the action eventually got me arrested and kicked out of school, and that was not good. But what got me into that mess also paid for my lawyers and fines and court costs, and even after I straightened up and went back to school and realized that I had, indeed, gotten far luckier than I had any right to expect, I’d still go back to the well when money got tight and I needed some cash. Or — again, not so awesome in hindsight — when I just wanted to feel cool, like I was hip to some other world that not everybody knew about.

The last time I sold weed for actual, real money, I looked up an old connection and got set up with a business owner in the town where I was living. I’m not sure if the cops who frequented that business knew the score or not, but the other bookend to me pulling a baggie of shake out of my riding boot at a youth ranch was me walking into a nondescript local shop, envelope of cash in my backpack, nodding to the shop owner and the three cops that were also there doing (presumably legitimate) business, and walking back out with that same backpack full of grass. I sold it all and used the money because I was in a bad spot. But I never did anything quite like that again.

And so it goes, and so it went. And it was not all good, and I definitely ended up, to quote an old-time hymn, swimming too far from the shore. Lesson learned, and all that. But in those years between hanging up my scales, so to speak, and Arkansas finally making marijuana legal — medically, at least — I’d still run the occasional errand for a friend, or a professor, or a colleague, or the friend of a friend. Not to make money — hell, I didn’t even charge a finder’s fee anymore — and it didn’t even matter if I wanted to smoke it myself. I just relished the idea that I knew where to get some grass if I wanted it. Or, even better, if somebody else wanted it.

I mean, it's not like you can just go pick it up at the store, right?

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HERETICS IN THE HEIGHTS

Did you hear it? The collective gasp of Lululemon-clad Bible mommas in Cammack Village ’round about Nov. 30, 2024, when the doors of a witchy boutique just off of Kavanaugh Boulevard called Arkansas Heretic were flung open to the retail public?

We didn’t. Not until much more recently, anyway, when a Facebook post from a taco shop next to Heretic made the rounds, clarifying that the two businesses were unrelated in response to hearing “a lot of questions about our neighbors & people saying they are boycotting us.” The Reddit comments that followed ranged from informative to cheeky:

“Called Heretic. They have a Kava bar and sell Wiccan and other non Christian related items. I’ve found a new gift store! Good on the landlord for allowing it in the pristine prosperity gospel Heights.”

“Yeah, IDGAF what’s going on. Cuban nachos will stay in my life.”

“They should come to Hillcrest.”

Nobody would bat an eye were the store located in New Orleans, a commenter on another platform observed. “Or in Eureka Springs, even,” I thought to myself.

Turns out, maybe unsurprisingly, that “heretic” bit in Arkansas Heretic is probably the most pearl-clutching thing about it, as we found out during a recent stroll through the shop. It’s neat! They’ve got a “secular sobriety” series with an explanatory tagline: “Learn about alternatives to AA/NA — or just hang in a sober space.” They make their own blends of organic loose leaf tea. They’ll sell you a guidebook for reading tarot cards, or a coloring book with a “Moon Magic” theme, or a spicy Taoist treatise called “The Sexual Teachings of the Jade Dragon.” (Do tell!)

The moment before I opened the door, the smell of spiced baked goods wafted into my

nostrils. Inside, moments later, the shop's owner would tell me from within his warm grin that it was an incense variety called “blueberry muffin.” He introduced himself as John and, after letting me wander around the shop a little, offered up a sample of something called kava. Up for any sort of adventure that happens next to a crystal ball (because in 2025 we need every ounce of joy we can muster), I accepted. He grabbed a cup that resembled a half-coconut shell and poured into it a ladle full of a cloudy beverage that resembled chai, noting that I should expect a slight numbing effect. “It’s cold,” he noted before handing it to me, and I was genuinely surprised, expecting something toasty. Kava, I’d learn from a Google search a few hours later, is a tropical shrub with origins in the South Pacific, marketed widely across the world for use as a sleep aid or muscle relaxant. Though it’s a member of the pepper family, my cup was not at all spicy, but rather earthy and slightly starchy, leaving me with the same slight numbness I get from a steamy cup of that Throat Coat slippery elm tea you can buy at the grocery store.

Under soft amber light, I perused the store with cup in hand. There were candles, bells and jewelry. Ouija boards and pentagram patches and bath bombs. Gems and crystals, and a mischievous and marvelously illustrated little bedtime book called “Goodnight Baphomet.” I noted the curio shop vibe, too. Of particular visual interest is an antique electrometer, a fascinating contraption with some historical connection to Scientology that eludes me.

“We’re just trying to build some community here,” John said. Seems like it. They have a warmly lit event space included in the shop’s square footage, which resembles a small yoga studio. “We’re welcoming ideas about how to use it,” John added. I lingered on the wall of loose leaf tea as I was about to depart, and John pulled down a round jar filled with crimson

petals, insisting on sending me home with a sample-sized blend of hibiscus, lemon and cayenne which he said was “a lot more subtle than it seems.”

He’s easy to talk to. I told him I hoped they did well. John said he hoped so, too, and that they’d been pleased so far. “We’ve made a lot of friends,” he said, “and a few enemies,” gesturing obliquely to the online kerfuffle.

Yes, Heretic absolutely has merchandise emblazoned with the logo of the Satanic Temple. And that’s probably enough to ward off some Arkansans for life, despite the fact that the Satanic Temple’s motto is a seemingly pretty harmless and humanistic one: “To Encourage Benevolence And Empathy, Reject Tyrannical Authority, Advocate Practical Common Sense, Oppose Injustice, And Undertake Noble Pursuits.” That’s OK. Kava doesn’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea.

But The Observer predicts, perhaps with a little too much smug satisfaction, that at least a couple of the selfsame church ladies who raised their eyebrows at the thought of the boutique defiling Little Rock’s Mayberryest of neighborhoods might, feeling naughty after two margaritas from the bar down the street, get giggly and decide to duck in. Perhaps they will put their hands on the crystal ball even though there’s a sign asking them not to. Perhaps they will leave with a baggie of hibiscus tea in their purses, or a tarot deck that they will keep hidden in the drawer of a bedside table and break it out on girls’ night after some red wine. Perhaps they will see the handful of hardback copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” cleverly tucked on the bookshelf between newer publications. Maybe they’ll remember the moral of the tale from high school English class. However it goes down, I suspect John will welcome them warmly, and I hope they get the same subtle lift the kava gave me.