Where can you read a profile of former Portland Trail Blazer CJ McCollum, an interview with Oregon playwright and actor Anya Pearson, reflections on Portland fashion, and a firsthand description of what the last two years have been like for students during the pandemic?
It’s all in the new issue of Black Student Magazine, written by middle and high school students from Oregon and Southwest Washington, with mentoring by undergraduates at the University of Oregon.
Black Student Magazine was created by middle school and high school students, with support from University of Oregon undergraduates.
Courtesy Black Student Magazine
UO senior Jael Calloway served as the editor-in-chief and also mentor to some of the writers. She told Think Out Loud that one of the main reasons she got involved in this kind of project was because she didn’t have anything similar growing up.
“And now that I’m in journalism, it’s even more important to me to give students and give other journalists of color a place where they feel like they belong, a place where they see people that look like them, that speak like them, that have the same experiences as them,” Calloway said. “That feeling of ‘Oh my gosh, I do belong here,’ was everything.”
Battle Ground High School sophomore Alex Fredrickson was one of the student writers Calloway mentored. Fredrickson interviewed Anya Pearson, a Portland-based writer, actor, playwright and poet.
“I definitely took away [from Anya] that being Black isn’t fully a struggle and that we can get into these spaces that otherwise we feel like we couldn’t,” she said.
Fredrickson said writing for Black Student Magazine gave her the experience she hopes young people get reading it.
“Where I’ve grown up, there’s really no Black people around, and I’ve struggled a lot with my identity,” she said. “Being able to relate to Anya [about] that and hear how she grew out of that kind of limbo of who she was, was really inspiring to me.”
Ed Madison is an associate professor at UO’s School of Journalism and Communication and the executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, from which the magazine grew. He says the publication has a simple goal.
“The very expectations that colleges and employers have today benefit from some of the skills that come with journalism: the ability to write well, to synthesize information, to advocate for your ideas,” he said.
“And so that’s why the work that we do is about supporting kids in developing those skills so they can be more successful in life.”
Madison says and he hopes to expand the project to Southern Oregon, and is already working on the next issue.
Listen to a discussion about Black Student Magazine: