Corey Olds's Page

In my abecedarian, A Is For Afro: Reading Is Power (2012), the letter “X” is not primarily for xylophone, as it is in so many primers and alphabet lessons. In my book, “X is for Xenophon,” primarily.

As you may or may not know, Xenophon (c. 430- c. 350 BCE) was a young student of Socrates, who later wrote--among other things--a number of Socratic dialogues, some historical tracts, and two books on horses (i.e., Hipparchicus and…

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As the co-founder of the Excelsus Foundation, I wrote A Is For Afro: Reading Is Power in response to two disturbing sets of statistics that impact the mission of Excelsus in particular and American education in general.

First and foremost, 48 percent of African-American and 43 percent of Latino-American students scored "below basic" on reading (and math) tests (for grades 4-8) administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). However, only 17…

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That gray rag covering the morning sky stays in my mind. The traffic from the airport was backed up to China by way of Timbuktu. In the taxi, I called my aunt in Atlanta for some last-minute reassurance.  But I was fooling myself. There was nothing that she could say--there was nothing that anyone could say--to quell the absurdity, the unlikelihood, actually the sheer impossibility of this interview.

Did I want to wait until noon everyday for the smog to…

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Nearly three weeks after visiting Cranwood, I found myself once again at McCarran International Airport. This time I was awaiting a flight to San Francisco. The bomb scare had the TSA surveillance queue backed up like a toilet with a wooly mammoth in it. The line literally descended down the stairs to the ground floor—the departing gates were on the second floor.

Arriving three hours early had proved futile, since I still missed my scheduled flight, as had hundreds of other passengers. My… Continue