Works for Me: Life After High School

Helping your teen navigate the next stage of their lives after high school can be stressful and overwhelming. Should they go to college? What other options are there? What career path are they interested in? How do they pick a school or program? What’s a gap year? These are important questions to ask, and the Job and Career Education Center at CLP – Main has extensive resources that can help you answer them and feel confident while helping your teen with these big moves forward.


Life on the Other Side of the Fence

Pittsburgher August Wilson wrote his award-winning play, Fences, in 1983. Fences was the sixth of ten plays in his “Pittsburgh Cycle” focusing on the changing nature of race relations and the African American experience. Recently, Denzel Washington directed and starred in a movie version shot in Pittsburgh.



Punitive Measures, Pushout and Pittsburgh

At the same time that Black women are outpacing others in the post-graduate arena, many young Black women are being left behind in public schools, marginalized by punitive and surveillance systems embedded into our education programs and into society at large. Black girls make up 16 percent of the public school population, but represent more than one-third of all girls with a school-related arrest.


Natural Hair Magic

I never knew the true texture of my hair until I was in my mid-twenties. The time I spent at my aunt’s shop meant slapping a relaxer on my hair and smoothing it out until she was convinced my hair would be straight enough for the gods. I never went too long without a relaxer for fear of the new growth or “naps” underneath, a severely flawed fear passed down from generation to generation.


The Pittsburgh Courier

The Pittsburgh Courier used to be a national newspaper with 14 different city editions including New York, Chicago, Detriot, St. Louis and Los Angeles, to name a few. I urge you to check out the documentary Newspaper of Record the Pittsburgh Courier, available on DVD in our collection. It conveys the weight and influence of the paper, as well as its glamour.


Best of BARD: January 2017

New Year, New You. But that doesn’t mean we can’t keep the gritty heavy hitters in our lives, representing the Top Five. I’m not gonna lie, I was tempted to … Continued


Behind the Camera: 5 Female Directors to Watch

It’s also heartening to see that after her snub last year the Academy realized that it had a diversity problem; this year (for the first time) there are people of color nominated in every major acting category and in the director’s category. This is likely the result of a diversified voting pool this year which leads to a more diverse selection of nominees. While this is certainly progress, there still has never been a female Black director nominated for an Oscar. So, instead of focusing on this year’s nominees (love you, Moonlight) I’m going to focus on a handful of films directed by African-American women that you should definitely seek out.



Cons

I love any story about a con artist. From the most grand, slick schemes and cons, to small clumsy ones, I’ve always been fascinated by it. Partially, it’s the psychology … Continued