This news from from the Belle Foundation came at the tail end of a two week long bout of the flu in which I was questioning my life choices and what it means to pursue a second shift of artmaking on top of my day job as a sociology instructor. I feel so so grateful for the encouragement that this grant represented to me and am using the grant to develop my printmaking practice and hire an animator for my historical documentary called The Spider Web that is currently in post-production. Since the letter from the Belle Foundation, I also was one of 26 inaugural fellows nationwide awarded a 2019 Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learning Societies Community College Faculty Fellowship, which I will be using to begin reading and analyzing the now 600+ interviews contributed to the 1500 Stories project in order to develop a public sociology podcast about the lived experience of economic inequality in the U.S. It is ridiculously exciting to be facing the prospect of having the time to delve into the stories collected by volunteers in New Jersey, Wisconsin and the Silicon Valley. You can read the abstract for my Mellon/ACLS project here.