Jodi Gwendolyn Hernandez
Jodi Gwendolyn Hernandez was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She reads most everything she comes across when she has the time. When she was a child visiting her grandmother, during summers in Grass Valley, CA, her grandmother would set her in front of an old typewriter and tell her to write stories. While Jodi dreamed of writing, it seemed an unattainable goal. She continued to write poetry even to her husband when they first met, but not as much after raising two daughters and volunteering in their schools.
Jodi decided to return to college for a teaching degree. There she rekindled her passion for the written word. She has helped to organize World Book Night’s and book exchanges, is a founding member and current president of the Yuba College Literary Arts Club, developed and presented the writing workshop “Step Out of Your Box and Into Ours” at Butte WordSpring 2016, and developed an alternative library for middle school students. She is a recipient of the Yuba College Academic Excellence Award in the Language Arts division for 2015-2016 and a 2016-2017 recipient for Sociology. Her past interviews are available at lehab.org.
Evelyn Williamson
Evelyn Williamson was born in Phoenix, Arizona. Finding Phoenix to be too large for her, she moved to Yuba City as an adult after getting married. Once her three children became school age, she decided it was time for her to go back to school as well. Studying at Yuba College, she is getting the education she has always desired. When her schooling is complete, she plans on becoming a full time college professor of English while she writes from home. Evelyn is well on her way to finishing her first novel "The Bucklah."
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In her book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, German theologian Dorothee Soelle wrote that all of life is interrelated. “Life is a mystery of being bound up with and belonging to one another,” she wrote. Realizing our interconnectedness is a result of seeing with God’s eyes and hearing with God’s ears.
I experienced this interconnectedness one noon as I was walking down the streets of East Los Angeles, toward the public library. This street also housed the sheriff’s department, the East L.A. courthouse and a large health clinic. During the lunch hour the street is densely populated with people leaving for their lunch breaks or picking up a burrito or taco at the La Cocina food truck on the corner. As I walked toward the library I saw some young men gesticulating at one another while the young women with them tried to separate them. I instinctively crossed the street and kept looking ahead. But a middle-aged woman coming toward me watched the young men and began to say, “Hijole, hijole,” roughly translated is, “Oh, my God, oh my God.”
She crouched down behind a parked car and I followed her example when I heard the first shot. I too began praying, “Oh God, oh God, Oh God.”
A few more gunshots were fired. Then silence.
I kept my eye on the woman who said to me in broken English, “Its okay.” I got up and looked around. No one was hurt and people began walking toward their original destination. I walked quickly into the library, toward the back stacks and crouched down on the tiled floor, trembling and catching my breath as I tried to calm myself down.
Twenty minutes later I returned to work. Everyone was talking about the shooting, trying to figure out which gangs were involved, but to no avail. One of my colleagues, Mercedes, a Latina slightly younger than me, came up to me and put her arm around my shoulder and said, “You’re