Martin Luther King Jr. Day (MLK Day) is always a time of introspection for many in the community, and Andover’s “Day On” is a chance for students and faculty alike to recognize their place in the world. Rather than normal classes on January 15, students will attend various educational workshops and programs.
Michael Kawooya ’26 viewed MLK Day as an opportunity to lead a workshop on “Blue Bites the Bullet,” which is a student-led initiative on gun violence that he has been working on for the past year. Delving into the history of school shootings within the United States of America, the workshop will open up conversation about gun violence and reform, according to Kawooya.
“I noticed a lack of discussion around gun control and gun violence at this school, [and] I was already working on a separate project that was planning a couple events related to this. When the MLK Day workshop application came out, I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool to be able to talk about it in that setting via [a] workshop?’ [I] decided to focus on school shootings because we are at a school where a lot of these terrible tragedies happen to [other] kids our age, and resonate with,” said Kawooya.
In relation to his workshop, Kawooya has invited Brandon Wolf to give a talk to the Andover community on January 12. As a gun safety and LGBTQIA+ activist who survived the Orlando Nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, Wolf uses first-hand experience and public speaking to advocate for gun safety.
“Brandon Wolf was someone I mentioned a year ago as someone I really wanted to bring to the school to talk to students. I think a lot of students will be curious as to what they can do, and I believe that [gun violence and gun control] is such a mammoth of an issue… [I think] that is a question that we need to answer as a community,” said Kawooya.
MLK Day programming will also feature some faculty-led workshops. Faculty members Camille Torres Haven, Director of Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, Jess Wallis, Research and Instructional Design Librarian, and Anastasia Collins, Instructional LIbrarian and Geographer, will be hosting a workshop called “Banned if U Do, Banned if U Don’t,” which centers around the prevalence of censorship in comic book and graphic novel publishing.
A large component of the workshop will be examining the relationship between author and publisher. Wallis believes that students will find the banning of books particularly interesting.
“We are really looking at the exclusionary processes of the publishing industry through a lens of graphic novels and comic books which have historically been marginalized, and been banned at times…[and] we are also going to be looking at and making a zine which is an alternative kind of thing which doesn’t need to go through a publisher,” said Wallis.
Wallis continued, “[I think students] will have interest in the industry, and how the comic book code has been applied, which is the way people used to produce comics. The history of how we got here is a lot older than a lot of people think, we think of book banning as something that [only] occurs now but it really has occurred since any media has come to be.”
Another workshop, “Revolutionary Poetics” led by K Iver, Writer in Residence, will focus on the intersection between writing, especially poetry, and advocacy.
“I’ve always seen poetry as revolutionary, and I believe that all experience is inherently political, and deals with exchanges of power in some sort. The question of whether the text is political often has to do with who is writing it. W. E. B. Du Bois once said that all art is propaganda, and we’re arguing for the attention of something. Teaching a workshop about poetry as explicitly political just brushes aside false ideas about who gets to write about what,” said Iver.
The workshop will delve into the social influence of various poets and explore the development of self expression through writing. Iver commented on how the work of disabled authors and poets is often “overlooked.”
“The verb ‘overlooked’ makes me think of neurodivergent and disabled communities. It’s difficult for neurodivergent authors to get published, autistic authors especially, and there are efforts being made to remedy that. My publisher has a series called ‘Multiverse’ specifically for neurodivergent, mentally ill, and disabled poets, and those poets have done really well, which is now suddenly visible in their poetry,” said Iver.
In relation to MLK Day, Iver described how poetry, specifically its role in promoting social change and breaking barriers, is reflected in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and his actions throughout his life.
“It’s really important to me how he was actually remembered… Our memory of him is very popular, but when he was alive, he was considered dangerous by the FBI. He was followed, sabotaged, and he did more than just let cops beat him and his friends up. He said some very revolutionary things about not only equal rights, but also the rights of the poor, the working class, and about war and peace, [that] people in power found that very dangerous, and I would say that a lot of my favorite poets have ‘dangerous ideas’… The best poetry is often very dangerous, the best poetry is inherently a spiritual confrontation, any person or entity invested in the status quo can be in danger,” said Iver.
