Categories
Blurb Books

Memphis Reads Dave Eggers

Memphis Reads, the city-wide book club, has chosen What Is The What by Dave Eggers as its next community read. 

Memphis Reads selects one book annually to be read by the Memphis community at large. 
The month-long event consists of discussions and related arts events, and culminates in an event with the author on November 5th. All events are free and open to the public.

What Is The What is an epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children, the Lost Boys, was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, while crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges.

Eggers, born in Boston, is also the author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), the novel You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), and the story collection How We Are Hungry (2004). He founded McSweeney’s, an independent book publishing house in San Francisco which puts out a quarterly literary journal, the monthly magazine The Believer, the website McSweeneys.net, and a DVD quarterly of short films, Wholphin. With Ninive Calegari, he has written Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers.

Memphis Reads began as a program from Christian Brothers University as part of their “First Year Experience” wherein all incoming freshman participate in the reading of a selected book and hold discussions and other events throughout the school year. In 2014, the University teamed up with local partners, including Memphis Library, Rhodes College, and Facing History and Ourselves, to expand the program city-wide.

Last year, Memphis Reads featured The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu.

For more information on the program and all events, please visit memphisreadsbook.org.
 

Categories
Book Features Books

The Mid-South Book Festival overcomes the odds

For the number of problems Memphis is said to have, we don’t deserve the arts scene that we have.” So said Dan Conaway, public relations stalwart, city bard, and a cousin of mine. We were talking among a group of writers at the recent Well Read Reception, the party to kick off what, by all accounts, was a rousingly successful Mid-South Book Festival. Put on by Literacy Mid-South, an organization whose mission it is to stamp out illiteracy in our area, the weekend welcomed 80 authors and 5,000 attendees.

And despite those problems, the arts scene and community in Memphis continues to thrive. And not just thrive, but become accessible to people of all walks of life. The book festival was free, and there were activities for kids, books given away, and workshops for wannabe writers. What Literacy Mid-South executive director Kevin Dean has done is bring a community of readers and writers together. With 120,000 adults reading below a sixth-grade level, Dean says, “the time is now to begin to actively engage the community and provide more access to the literary arts.”

While a festival won’t eradicate such problems, it does wonders to lift the human spirit. With such a turnout this year, there’s no telling what next year might bring.

And speaking of community . . .

Author and chair of the English department at Morehead State University in Kentucky, Tom Williams, released a collection of short stories last August. Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales (Texas Review Press) is, at its soul, a search for identity and the community that might go along with the discovery. Williams, the son of an African-American father and white mother, writes in “Who Among Us Knows the Route To Heaven?,” “For I’d already determined that someone like me was always treading a narrow and treacherous path — not unlike the tightropes stretched over Niagara Falls, with jagged rocks to one side, angry, churning water to the other.” Those rocks and that water would be the children the character had grown up with, those who demanded he live up to the ideals of whichever race he chose to identify as.

Williams was raised in central Ohio and said recently by phone, “I felt like there was an urge on my point to belong, and I could do that to an extent, but not fully, or not completely. I felt like if I’d said, ‘I’m one with y’all,’ there’s a lot of people that would’ve said, ‘Well, not quite.'”

In “The Hotel Joseph Conrad,” the community isn’t racial, but professional, as the protagonist, Maurice, a writer on assignment, searches high and low for a hotel by that name. What he finds is a fraternity in the search itself, and a common bond with writers the world over.

In the title story, “Among the Wild Mulattos,” the main character is a biracial anthropology professor who hears of a community of mulattos living in the Arkansas Delta. He sets out on a quest to find them and, when he does, is assimilated into their fold. He learns that, just because it’s a community of like-minded, like-skinned people, a utopia it is not. This story brings the reader to Memphis, part of the outside world the members call “Two-Box” (“as in the two boxes one had to choose from on applications and the like: ‘White’ or ‘Black.'”). He even teaches the secluded, teenage boys about the Grizzlies.

Williams knows a thing or two about Memphis. He worked in Jonesboro, Arkansas, for a time, and he and his wife visited at least once a month. “Every time I visited there, there’s something that just puts me in a state of awe somehow,” he said. “There’s a kind of historical reverence that I feel there when I think of all the things that happened, there’s a certain literary reverence because Richard Wright passed through there, Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor.”

Categories
Blurb Books

Upcoming book events for the remainder of September 2015

Taylor Kitchings
Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015
6:30 p.m.
The Booksellers of Laurelwood

Taylor Kitchings will be discussing and signing his new middle-grade novel Yard War

It’s 1964 in Jackson, Mississippi, deep in the civil rights movement, and the one black person 12-year-old Trip Westbrook knows well is Willie Jane, the family maid, who has been a second mother to him. When Trip invites her son, Dee, to play football in the yard, Trip discovers the ugly side of his smiling neighbors. Even his loving grandparents don’t approve. But getting to know Dee and playing football, being part of a team, changes Trip. He begins to see all the unspoken rules he lives by but doesn’t agree with, such as “respect your elders.” What if he thinks their views are wrong? This engaging, honest, and hopeful novel is full of memorable characters, and brings the civil rights-era South alive for young readers.

Taylor Kitchings’ roots in Mississippi run many generations deep, though it took him a while to circle back to them. As a college freshman, he recorded the original album Clean Break, now considered a collector’s item. As a junior, he wrote music for mallet and giant Mobius strip, and performed at Manhattan’s Café La MaMa. In the years between his BA from Rhodes College and MA from Ole Miss, he traveled from Memphis to New York to Europe, writing and performing songs on piano. He and his wife Beth have two children and live in Ridgeland, Mississippi, where he teaches English at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. His short story “Mr. Pinky Gone Fishing” was published in the collection Tight Lines from Yale University Press. Yard War is his first novel.

Audrey Taylor Gonzalez
Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015 2:00 p.m.
The Booksellers of Laurelwood

Memphian Audrey Taylor Gonzalez will be discussing and signing her coming-of-age novel South of Everything

Set in 1940s Germantown, South of Everything is a magical coming-of-age story about the daughter of a plantation-owning family, who, despite her privileged background, finds more in common with the help than her own family. She develops a special kinship with her parents’ servant Old Thomas, who introduces her to the mysterious Lolololo Tree, a magical, mystical tree with healing powers that she discovers is wiser than any teacher or parent or priest. Her connection with the Lolololo Tree opens her eyes to the religious and racial prejudice of her surroundings, and readers will root for her to fight against injustice and follow her heart to meet her fate.

Reverend Audrey Taylor Gonzalez was born in Memphis in 1939. In the span of her long career, she has been a journalist, TV host, art gallery owner, racehorse breeder, mountain climber, world traveler, breast cancer survivor, and the first woman to be ordained to holy orders in the Southern Cone of South America at Uruguay’s Holy Trinity Cathedral in Montevideo. She’s a philanthropist, mother, and grandmother to her own children, as well as many people in need who have crossed her path over the years. As a deacon at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, Audrey received the prestigious Juvenile Court Judges Award for Outstanding Service in 2012 and 2014, and she was selected by the governor of Tennessee as a Commissioner on TCCY (Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth). She is the author of three books, the fictional memoir The Lolololo Tree and two collections of writings and homilies, Sermons and Such and The Shady Place. South of Everything is her first novel. Gonzalez resides in Memphis.

Categories
Cover Feature News

20 < 30

This is the sixth year of the Flyer᾿s annual 20<30 issue, and this year᾿s crop of young movers and shakers is a diverse and impactful group. They are taking on the city᾿s major issues — poverty, food deserts, education, and the lack of young leadership. They are enriching the city — with dance, music, art, crafts, and entrepreneurship. They are the future, and they have a common denominator: They each want to make Memphis a better place. These young people have studied, practiced, and traveled. Some have moved here from elsewhere; some have returned to a place they᾿re proud to call home, Memphis. They are faces you᾿ll be seeing and voices you'll be hearing in the coming years. Pay attention. You᾿ll want to know them.

Special thanks to Tommy Peters, Betsy McKay, and the staff of the Cadre Building.

1. Alex Middleton

the bridge builder

Photos by Justin Fox Burks

Memphis has its fair share of problems. The hard-luck issues facing the city are well known and well-documented. But there are those organizations working to turn it all around: places like Bridges USA, which works with youth to bridge the gap between cultures, races, and faiths. And there are people like Alex Middleton, a recruiter for the organization, working to bring the youth to a place of better understanding.

Alex joined Bridges while a junior at the Hutchison School and worked there the summer after graduation. She attended college at Sewanee, studying anthropology and women’s studies. Her plan wasn’t completely formulated, but, she says, “I knew that my passions were definitely social justice, race issues, and gender issues, and just trying to find something that kind of combined those interests and passions of mine.”

She knew, too, that she wanted to work with students, and found her way back to Bridges after college. “I felt like a transplant,” she says about her return. “So I fell in love with the city in a totally different way.”

And now, as a recruiter, she’s working to turn the negative image around and help create stronger leaders. “I don’t really think there’s any other program that’s like it that focuses on so many different issues and really develops the student so holistically,” she says. “There’s the push to become a stronger leader, but also to really understand how to embed yourself and engage yourself within a community of people that you may not know to really help you understand the importance of diversity.”

2. Briana Brown

the ballerina

Briana Brown holds the distinction on this year’s list of being the only person to get up close and personal with First Lady Michelle Obama. The 18-year-old ballerina with New Ballet Ensemble (NBE) visited the White House last November and says, “It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Standing in one of the most important places in the United States was something I never would have thought I would be able to do — just being a student of the arts, just being a dance student coming from Memphis.”

But that day she wasn’t “just a dance student.” Briana and NBE Executive Director Katie Smythe were there, along with teachers and students from across the country, to accept the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award on behalf of after-school programs.

Briana has been involved with ballet since she was 7 years old and says, “It’s been a really good experience doing performances and taking classes and having rehearsals, and actually having something that, instead of school activity, I do for an extracurricular activity. It’s something I take seriously.”

A senior at Immaculate Conception High School, Briana is looking forward to beginning Christian Brothers University in the fall to study applied psychology with the thought of one day becoming a speech pathologist.

Until then, she’ll keep dancing, of course — almost 25 hours per week. The training keeps her strong and has filled her with confidence. She’ll use those strengths to one day be a teacher of dance, and more. “I would like to become a choreographer,” she says, “traveling to different studios, teaching my own technique of dance.”

3. Iris Mercado

the organizer

While most kids were sent to camp to paddle a canoe, hike through the woods, and avoid poison ivy, Iris Mercado spent her summers at the Workers Interfaith Network doing clerical work, stuffing envelopes, and mailing letters. Her parents have always embraced activism and fought social injustice, and this apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

Iris was born in Argentina and moved to the United States at the age of 8. She and her family moved around, finally landing in Memphis, where Iris graduated from White Station High School. She attended Bridges USA while in high school and became active in youth organizations.

The senior at Rhodes College worked as the West Tennessee Organizer for the Tennessee Immigrants and Refugees Rights Coalition until last December. Beginning next month, she’ll be working with the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center as an organizer for Memphis United, a coalition of grassroots organizations, community groups, and residents confronting structural and institutional racism.

Going forward, she hopes to stay active with the fight for social justice both locally and nationally. “It’s what I’m most passionate about.”

4. Lance Draper

the entrepreneur

Someone once told Lance Draper, “It’s not how much you make, it’s what you do with it.”

He took that to heart and he’s run with it, buying up houses in foreclosure sales to become somewhat of a mini-land baron. On the face of it, it’s not so impressive. Lots of people buy houses to then rent out. Lance, though, bought that first house with money he’d saved from working as a grocery cashier. And he was 18 years old when he signed the mortgage papers.

Since then, he’s bought six more homes and a 16-unit apartment building in the Greenlaw community of downtown Memphis.

His capitalistic tendencies come from his maternal grandparents, who had a small shopping center with a grocery store, laundromat, and market. His charismatic ways and outgoing nature, his ease with people, are traits he says he picked up from his grandfather, Lafayette Draper, the legendary bartender who was the namesake of the recently reopened venue in Overton Square.

Lance graduated from Mitchell High School and attended the University of Memphis, but a persistent illness kept him from completing his studies. “It just wasn’t meant to be.” He takes his successes at such a young age in stride. “You sacrifice while you’re young and able, and then later on in life you can relax,” he says.

His legacy is one he’s proud of, but this young entrepreneur is looking to make his own way and leave his own mark.

5. Anita Norman

the poet

Not many people — even those twice

her age — have the confidence that 18-year-old Anita Norman exudes on stage. “It comes with practice and understanding the power of the words,” she says.

The Arlington High School senior won the Memphis Grizzlies Poetry Slam in February 2014 and, in April, the Poetry Out Loud competition in Washington, D.C., a national event where she took on more than 50 competitors.

The contests, she says, are “not acting and not spoken word, so you have to find this happy medium between really imparting the meaning of the words into your own life experiences — how you bring the two together — but also that you’re speaking to bring it to life and to tell the author’s story.”

Anita came to poetry in general, and spoken word specifically, through her family’s small church in Little Rock, where getting up and contributing was a requirement. She was in middle school and says, “I liked the way that my voice sounded, how you could make the words mean something. … I get into it and I kind of lose myself in the words.”

She moved to Memphis in the 5th grade and later became involved with Bridges USA. After graduation this spring, she’ll be attending Yale.

Anita doesn’t just read other people’s poetry. Her poem “Mama Memphis” was written about her adopted hometown and the way she perceives it.

The acclaim of winning, and the prizes that came with those winnings, are special. But the greatest prize following the Grizzlies competition came later, when Anita’s hero,

Maya Angelou, retweeted a media story written about her.

6. Hillary Clemons

the girl scout

Hillary Clemons learned to be a leader in the Girl Scouts. Now, this Washington, D.C., native is the regional program specialist for Girl Scouts Heart of the South, the local division of an organization that encompasses 59 counties with 9,300 girls and 3,100 adults. She plans educational programs for girls in kindergarten through 12th grade.

This isn’t your mother’s Girl Scouts. “It’s changed,” Clemmons says. “People think it’s all cookies and sewing and crafts, but it’s definitely 21st century now. We have a digital platform to sell cookies, we teach girls computer coding, we have a ‘good credit’ badge for high school girls. We teach entrepreneurship and leadership — and really, whatever a girl wants to do.”

While Girl Scouts do still camp and sell cookies, the value of Scouting these days lies in the girl-led programs, meetings, and trips, in which the Scouts themselves set the course for what they want to achieve.

“It was what attracted me to the organization [Heart of the South],” Hillary says. “I wanted to give back to something that made such a big difference in my life.”

She came to the University of Memphis to study music and, she says, “I fell in love with the city and the university and I just knew this was where I need to be.”

Oh, and her favorite cookies? They’re new this year: the Rah-Rah Raisins.

7. Breezy Lucia

the photographer

Action!

Breezy Lucia knew she wanted to work in photography from the time she was 13, growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, and got her first camera. “I fell in love with the art, so I did everything I could with it in high school.”

She went on to the University of Missouri and studied photojournalism, eventually transitioning into fine art.

After moving to Memphis to work with the nonprofit Service Over Self, she found her soulmates. “I just really liked the film community in Memphis and I decided to stick around,” she says. “The longer I live in Memphis, the longer I want to live in Memphis.”

Breezy moved from photography to videography and said the transition was a natural one. She has since worked on films such as Melissa Sweazy’s The Department of Signs and Magical Intervention and Morgan Jon Fox’s web series Feral, as well as videos for Alexis Grace and Amy LaVere.

What does she do on set? Whatever it takes. “I wear a bunch of different hats, just kind of helping out in any way I can.”

She works with social media civic booster Choose 901 as a videographer, showcasing the best parts of the city. It’s a collaborative effort, and she enjoys meeting the people she works with and getting to know why they love Memphis.

She has dreams of making her own film and is keeping her eye out for just the right collaborator. And when it comes to moving versus still pictures? “Photography is my first love,” she says. “I’m still a photographer at heart.”

8. Tim Jordan

the middleman

Like many of us, Tim Jordan loves watching basketball. Like most of us, he roots almost exclusively for the hometown Memphis Grizzlies. But like almost none of us, Tim works side by side with the likes of Mike Conley, Tony Allen, and Zach Randolph.

As the senior community investment coordinator for the Grizzlies, Tim acts as a liaison with the players and the community, directing nonprofits to players and vice versa.

“I help players with anything they want to do personally in the community,” he says. “If Zach Randolph wants to give away coats or turkeys, I try to figure out a specific location that works well for him, a community he wants to give back to, and then set it up with a partner organization, school, or community center in that neighborhood.”

Working as the go-between for multi-millionaires and the community they represent is a tall order. Tim and the Grizzlies are setting the bar high among NBA franchises. The Grizzlies organization is a major giver, and arguably the team most engaged in its community in the league.

Like many kids, Tim grew up with dreams of playing for a living. That didn’t pan out, but, as he tells school children on career days, “I may not be playing for the NBA, but I’m still living out my dream. I’m still in the NBA, I still work for the NBA, and I’m making a positive impact on my city at the same time.”

Just like those he works with, Tim is keeping his eye on the ball and his heart in the community. “It’s great to work for this team at a time when we’re winning on the court and winning off the court.”

9. Taylor James

the growler

Taylor James is a leader in the craft beer explosion in Memphis. His growler station in the Cash Saver on Madison Avenue in Midtown was the first of its kind in the area.

“Memphis is a great place for food — everybody loves the food here — and you apply that to beer and it’s kind of the same idea. Craft food, craft beer — it just works.”

The St. Benedict High School graduate left home for the University of Kentucky and returned to work for A.S. Barboro, the local Miller and Coors beer distributor, and then for Budweiser. “I loved it, I love the beer business, but I wanted to work for my dad,” he says.

His father owns the four Cash Saver grocery stores in the area. Taylor started in the dairy department, but, he says, “I kept sticking my nose over in beer.” When he first began suggesting craft beer to management, something was lost in translation. “They didn’t understand why I’d want ‘Kraft’ beer.”

It was on a trip to Virginia and a stop at a brewery that Taylor’s dad first saw a growler. “I could see him get a little excited, and I thought, ‘Okay, that’s cool, that’s all I need.'” He opened his growler station not long after, in December 2013.

Taylor loves nothing more than talking beer and educating his customers on what’s available. He doesn’t want anyone to feel intimidated by the selection and is always learning himself. “You’re talking beer all day long and it’s great when people ask questions. We do our best to let them know everything we know about it.”

He’s at home on Madison, and it’s a family home. “It’s awesome; me and my dad will just sit there firing off ideas at each other all day.”

10. Jerome Hardaway

the veteran

For Jerome Hardaway, serving in the military was somewhat of a birthright. “I come from a long line of people who went into the military,” he says. “I just wanted to do something good for the world.”

As part of the Phoenix Raven Security Forces, he’s been deployed in some of the world’s hottest zones over the past six years, and he’s seen his share of action. But the fight didn’t end once he came home. “From all of the veterans I spoke to, they all had problems within the first two years of their transition [into civilian life]. The biggest problems are non-transferrable skills, which added more stress on them, and poor health care.”

His weapons now are a computer, a telephone, and the charisma and knowledge that enables him to get people to listen. Jerome started the nonprofit FRAGO with partners Adrian Friday and Lex Brown. The group takes a proactive stance, helping to arm veterans with skill sets that can be quickly applied and integrated into their lives — such as coding and web development.

The organization is making waves with veterans and the community from its distinctive home in Central Gardens — Ashlar Hall, better known as the Castle, on Central Avenue.

11. Gil Worth

the podcaster

Gil Worth played in bands for years, at one point playing in five at the same time. Music was his passion. Then he became burned out and let it all go within the span of a few months. “I felt really thrown off the horse, so I stopped listening to music and I only listened to podcasts,” he says. “And that’s when I decided to start one.”

In 2012, he started his own. That podcast led to producing casts for friends. Gil’s wife, Carla, now hosts “901 Paranormal,” and he is on the microphone for the popular “The Game Show” (two guests, two teams, board games, and adult beverages).

Altogether, there are eight in the OAM Audio network (OAM is an acronym for the first letters of his children’s names: Owen, Adia, and Mia), making Gil a media mogul of sorts. Other offerings include “Records, Ruckus, and Wrasslin,” “Black Nerd Power,” and “Dinner and a Newbie.” Special guests have included D.L. Hughley, David Allen Greer, and the Dead Soldiers.

All podcasts are produced by Gil and recordings are guerilla-like, with mobile equipment and shows that have been broadcast from garages, living rooms, the Cooper-Young Festival, and even the basement of Minglewood Hall.

Podcasts have become wildly popular lately, especially with the recent media frenzy surrounding “Serial.” Gil chalks up the popularity to “freedom of content, being able to say whatever you want to say. It’s grown into this thing that’s more than just a conversation, you can make art with it.”

12. Gabriel Fotsing

the facilitator

Gabriel Fotsing moved to the United States from Cameroon in 2000. His family settled in Houston then, and that’s where he completed high school. He had one, all-encompassing goal at the time: to go to college. But how? His family didn’t have college money, so Gabriel set out to find some. “I come from a low-income family and knew my parents could not pay for it,” he says. “So my job in high school was to figure out a way to go to college for free.”

He read, he researched, he questioned. And what he came up with was the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, meaning that since his family was making below a certain amount each year, he could go at no cost. And what he has now to show for it is a Harvard diploma, with a major in economics and a French minor.

He also has his own nonprofit. He started The College Initiative in 2012 to help others like him follow in his footsteps. His organization provides students with the “tools, support, and mentorship to, not only apply to college, but also graduate from college.”

The creation of a nonprofit for Gabriel was a grassroots effort. “I never really knew what the nonprofit world was or how to start one, so I read a book called How to Start a Nonprofit.”

Gabriel is looking ahead, planning to impact 500 kids in the region this year, and later hopes to take the College Initiative to a national level. He also hopes to relax more, with a goal for 2015 of reading “at least 30 books that have nothing to do with my work.”

13. London Lamar

the politician

While most people in their 20s might recall watching Nickelodeon or silly sitcoms for hours on end while growing up, London Lamar has memories of watching State of the Union addresses. And she’s always been civically engaged.

“My mother took me with her every election to go vote,” she says. “I knew being politically aware was a part of everyday life. It was just the norm in my family.”

While at Central High School, she was active in class elections and enjoyed history and government civics classes. By the time she got to college — predominantly white, predominantly conservative St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana — she could read her calling as easily as a mid-term ballot.

“St. Mary’s allowed me to take it to a different level, I wanted to see an African-American presence among the student body.” She got involved, joined the student diversity board, the African-American club, and started a young Democrats organization.

She brought that boldness back to Memphis. “I saw an open door for young people and myself in politics in this city; I ran through it.”

Last summer, she ran for the Tennessee Democratic Party State Executive Committee, the governing body of the Tennessee Democratic Party. Though she lost, she was the youngest person on the Shelby County ballot and considers it a success that she “made the political scene respect young people.”

Her goal for the future is simple: “I want to be a U.S. Senator by age 50.” She’s had a good start to realizing a goal that began in a voting booth as a child. “This is what I do,” she says. “I eat, breathe, live politics.”

14. Jodie Cherry

the recruiter

As a talent acquisition specialist in human resources for ALSAC, Jodie Cherry is directly responsible for the recruitment of marketing professionals who will generate $600 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

More than simply recruiting them to the hospital, though, Jodie’s job requires her to make those applicants fall in love with Memphis. That’s not such a difficult task for the transplant from Northeast Arkansas. In just two short years, she’s fallen in love with the city herself. “Memphis is a city of opportunity,” she says. “No matter who you are or what you love, there is an opportunity for you here, and it’s really what you make it.”

Jodie came to town to work for the University of Memphis as assistant director of internships. While there, she worked closely with area companies, students, and interns. She’d been on a tour of St. Jude while in college and knew ALSAC would be a great place to work. “I’m a marketing girl,” she says. “It’s a marketing person’s dreamland.”

She talks about the slogan for an upcoming recruitment marketing campaign and says it sums up the way she feels about her work day-in and day-out: “Do what you love, but love why you do it.”

15. Matt Crewse

the director

Matt Crewse cofounded a theater company … because of television. After watching the second season of the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows, set in a fictional Shakespearean festival, Crewse says, “I just really needed to put on a play. So I picked one and I did.”

It was in the middle of that first play that Threepenny Theatre Company was founded, producing classics by Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill. “We try to do classics and those in the public domain, because it saves on royalties.” Threepenny is a resident company at TheatreWorks in Overton Square.

Where did it all begin for Matt? Act One: High School, interior. “We were reading The Odyssey aloud in class and my English teacher, who also ran the theater department, suggested I try theater, and so I did. I remember getting my first laugh, and it’s all been downhill from there.”

The plays that interest him have been holding audiences captive for centuries — A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Macbeth, and Hamlet.

Since that day at Lexington High School (stage right from Jackson, Tennessee), he’s been aching to see what happens when the curtain rises. He went to the University of Memphis where he studied theater and now works at Mainstage Theatrical Supply on Broad Avenue.

His life is steeped in his art, and, when he’s in the middle of a production, he says, it is nothing for him to be going 100 hours per week. The downside? It doesn’t leave much time to sit in the audience — or to watch any television.

16. Bennett Foster

the advocate

“I spent the first decade of my adult life playing music and organizing a band,” says Bennett Foster. That band was the popular Magic Kids, and Bennett and his mates toured far and wide. With downtime on the road, he read all he could on issues and politics affecting Memphis. And when the road became too tiresome, and his intolerance for the injustices became too much, he says he “couldn’t look away” any longer and decided to get involved.

He now works for the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center as organizing coordinator for the transit justice and neighborhood alliance programs. In 2012, Bennett helped found the Memphis Bus Riders Union, an organization structured as a labor union and made up by those who depend on public transit to ensure they “have a seat at the table” with MATA and elected officials.

Bennett is a lifelong Memphian who didn’t go to school to learn compassion or to earn a sense of social justice. He picked it all up through his own readings and with his own inborn empathy. He’s an autodidact who looks up to his father, local artist and entrepreneur Tommy Foster — a “natural organizer,” Bennett says. “He was never very political but was always kind of making things work DIY-style, and I definitely learned a lot just about using the small resources you have to make something happen.”

17. Matt Ross-Spang

the musician

Matt Ross-Spang is living the dream. The musician has always been a fan of Memphis music — Stax, Hi Records, American, Ardent — and now he spends his days as head recording engineer and producer at Sun Studio. It’s where it all began, on analog reel-to-reel recording equipment, and Ross-Spang has worked long and hard to return it to its glory days. In a feat of reverse engineering, he’s taken out the digital and returned the studio to glorious analog.

“We record just like they did back in the day,” he says. “It was all done with your hands and as a group, all these great session guys playing together at one time without headphones. It wasn’t chopped and edited and copied and pasted.”

He’s worked with some big names: Jerry Lee Lewis, Jakob Dylan, Jim Dickinson, Justin Townes Earle, Mark Ronson, and T-Bone Burnett, to name a few. For the 60th anniversary of Elvis Presley cutting “That’s All Right Mama” — the one that truly started it all — Matt recorded a version of the song with Scotty Moore and Chris Isaak. Four-hundred vinyl pressings were made on the original Sun logo.

But it’s not all the past for Matt. Songwriting in the 21st century is alive and well, and he rattles off names of performers one might see at the Hi-Tone or Buccaneer any night of the week.

Still, there are those producers of the past: Willie Mitchell, Sam Phillips, Chips Moman. “To this day, everything I do is in their shadow,” he says. “I’m always stealing from those guys.”

18. Brit McDaniel

the potter

By her own admission, Brit McDaniel didn’t have much direction in her early college days. “I was sort of a late bloomer,” she says. “I didn’t take art in high school until my senior year, and I loved it. But I always just thought it wasn’t very practical and I didn’t have a lot of direction early in my life at all.”

She found her direction after what she calls a “quarter-life crisis” and that direction now might be round and round. She spends hours at her potter’s wheel each day, creating some of the most delicate and beautiful pieces of pottery around.

Or, her direction could be straight ahead, because that’s where her career has gone ever since she found practicality in her art and settled on the craft as a way to make a living. That was in August 2013. She’d known before that, though, that she had no interest in being a starving artist. “I was going to have to think of it as a business.”

It’s paid off. Last year she was featured on the popular blog, Design*Sponge; took part in the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago; was a finalist in the “Martha Stewart American Made Awards”; and a runner-up in Garden & Gun‘s “Made in the South Awards.” Her wares are also found at Anthropologie.

“Last year really took me by storm,” she says, “so this year I’m trying to be more methodical and say no to things I need to say no to, and keep the focus on the quality of my work and be where I need to be to grow responsibly and sustainably.”

19. Schuyler Dalton

the grower

Schuyler Dalton hails from the Northeast. It’s difficult for a Southerner to understand how someone from the frozen tundra might find an interest in agriculture, yet Schuyler did. She hails from Massachusetts, spent a high school semester at a farm school in Maine, and studied sustainable agriculture at college in upstate New York.

She came south on a lark in 2013. “My best friend from college moved down here for Teach for America and had all these cool things to say about it,” she says. “I didn’t have a job and I said, ‘Hey, I could move to Memphis.’ I was looking for an adventure and I love it. I’m so happy here.”

Once here, Schuyler worked with Bridges USA before meeting Mary Phillips Riddle (20<30 class, 2011), founder of Roots Memphis. The match was a perfect one. As the marketing and outreach coordinator for Roots Memphis, Schuyler’s duties include coordinating the community supported agriculture program, recruiting potential farmers for training, and public relations. “I’m kind of a Jill of all trades.”

The farm recently moved to 10 acres at Shelby Farms Park and an integral part of the program now will be to get fresh fruits and vegetables to those in low-income areas, those places on the map known as “food deserts.”

20. Martavius Hampton

the coordinator

Martavius Hampton came to his work with the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center (MGLCC ) through volunteerism. He began working early with organizations such as Friends for Life. When the opportunity to work at MGLCC came up, he jumped at the chance.

As the HIV program coordinator now, he directs testing, outreach, HIV program research, education, and intervention efforts.

What Memphis needs, he says, is more awareness. “People still have their personal fears for why they won’t get tested, because of stigma or they don’t think they have it or they don’t want to know. But I do think people are doing a better job at getting tested for HIV even within those high-risk communities.”

MGLCC served about 7,000 people last year, but the number of those in greatest need is still growing. Martavius’ goals include more advocacy, education, and research. He has collaborated on two articles for journals looking at the “gay family” structure — families of choice where those in the community, especially gay men of color, might find comfort — and how that structure might affect HIV prevention efforts.

A graduate of the University of Memphis, Martavius is back at the school, working on a graduate degree in public health. His tasks are symbiotic, applying presentations to both, he says, “I do work for school and school for work.”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Charles Lloyd: Arrows Into Infinity

In one of the first scenes of the 2012 documentary Charles Lloyd: Arrows Into Infinity, recently released on DVD and Blu-ray, the saxophonist tells a radio interviewer, “I’m a Pisces, the water sign . . . When I was born, when my mother was pregnant, there was a big flood in Memphis. This thing was set up for me to come.” The quote is followed by a few bars of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It may seem an odd way to begin a film about a jazz saxophonist, but Lloyd is nothing if not enigmatic. With him, a change was always sure to come.

Born in Memphis in 1938, Lloyd attended Manassas High School and earned his chops playing with the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King. His parents would put up Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine when those stars passed through town. Lewie Steinberg, the original bassist for the MGs (that’s him you hear on the 1962 recording of “Green Onions”) says, “The first dollar I ever made was with Charles Lloyd, bless him.”

Charles Lloyd

Lloyd eventually moved to New York where, during the 1960s, he managed crossover success that few have experienced in any genre. Having first migrated from blues to jazz, he then ventured into the pop and rock worlds. San Francisco bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were eager to play on bills with him. “He captivated all of us,” says John Densmore, drummer for the Doors.

Pianist Herbie Hancock calls Lloyd a “jazz rockstar.” Lloyd played both jazz and pop festivals and was the first jazz artist to play live at the iconic Fillmore Auditorium. His 1966 album Forest Flower, recorded live (without his knowledge, he intimates on camera) at the Monterey Jazz Festival, is still considered one of the great jazz LPs of all time.

By the ’70s, Lloyd, a deeply spiritual man, had had enough of the music business and the demands it placed on him. He simply walked away and, like Greta Garbo and J.D. Salinger, became famously reclusive on a plot of land in Big Sur, California. “You can’t shoot an arrow into infinity if you’re always in motion,” he says in the opening scene. “You have to pull the bow back, then the arrow can fly.”

Directors Jeffery Morse and Dorothy Darr, who is Lloyd’s wife, do a masterful job of capturing the artist’s life in motion. There are beautiful shots of him walking along forested roads and surf-beaten beaches as well as in recording studios and onstage — all environments where Lloyd flourishes.

Through Darr’s personal connection, it’s obvious she knew the questions to ask and of whom to ask them. Interviews with the likes of Hancock, the Band’s Robbie Robertson, producer Don Was, and Darr herself give us an intimate look at a man who flew through the air like an arrow before going away to recharge.

He came back to the world in the late ’80s after a near-death experience that is mentioned, though not expanded upon. “I came out of that, and I rededicated myself to this beautiful tradition,” he says.

With the help of longtime friend, jazz drummer Billy Higgins, he began recording and touring again. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, Lloyd wraps a blanket around his old friend’s shoulders as Higgins, suffering from liver failure, nears the end of his life.

This is an important film as Lloyd is a bridge between the music’s architects – Ellington, Basie, Coltrane, Bird – and today. “It’s the wisdom of the ancients with modernity,” Lloyd says of today’s jazz. “It’s arrows into infinity.”

Categories
Cover Feature News

20<30

Special “thank you” to Jimmy Ogle and Dorchelle Spence of the Riverfront Development Corporation for allowing us to photograph the 2014 20<30 honorees at Beale Street Landing!

Justin Fox Burks

Bernice Butler

1. Bernice Butler

“It’s about finding what makes you great and honing that, so that you can be the best you possible.”

Bernice Butler has nomadic beginnings. She grew up in Warrenton, Georgia, attended school in Atlanta, and worked for Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington D.C., before moving on to Saginaw, Michigan.

But, she says, “I’ve honest-to-God fallen in love with Memphis.”

It was while working in Michigan that a mentor pointed her in the direction of the White House’s Strong Cities/Strong Communities Fellowship.

Butler’s education and experience made her a natural fit for the position. Since moving here in August 2012, she has worked toward a fellowship with Leadership Memphis, found a church she calls home, and volunteered with the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis.

She’s also looking out for the leaders of tomorrow. Calling on her past as a foster child, she’s begun a crowd-sourcing effort to raise scholarship funds for other foster children. Through Youth Villages, she’s hoping to recruit 100 people to donate $30 by her upcoming 30th birthday. The funds are in honor of her two foster mothers, one of whom passed away while Butler was in her care.

To donate, visit facebook.com and search for “Bernice’s 30 by 30 Birthday Campaign.”

Justin Fox Burks

Peter Colin

2. Peter Colin

“I’ve got tons of memories already just from working with students; it’s great.”

Peter Colin, like so many of us, had “rock star dreams” when he first became interested in music. His career path, though, has led him into education and back to his alma mater, Munford High School, where he is choir director and assistant band director.

This isn’t to say that Colin hasn’t spent some time in front of the footlights. He’s taken the choir to sing at Carnegie Hall, Live at the Garden, FedExForum, and across Europe. “Those are things that are going to make these kids’ lives; they’re things that make my life.”

The high school’s marching band won the 2011 United States Scholastic Band Association National Championship. In the summer of 2012, Colin was able to tour a country normally off limits — Cuba — with other educators.

He credits past teachers, those whom he now calls colleagues, with setting him on this path. Colin used his talents to gain access to further education, and he finds his reward in helping his students do the same. “So many kids need a means to get out of the situation that they were born to and into better things.”

Justin Fox Burks

Jeff Dreifus

3. Jeff Dreifus

“We realized that Memphis is a great place to be a young adult, to be a recent college grad.”

Jeff Dreifus left Memphis for Washington University in St. Louis to pursue an education in economics. He found his fellow classmates to be idealistic, wanting to change the world for the better. While their hearts were in the right place, he felt that their heads could use some real-world experience.

“My goal was to find a business where I felt like I was making a positive impact on the environment, but doing it in a way that made economic and business sense.”

Last October, Dreifus left a relatively comfortable job with Raymond James for a job with Evaporcool, one of the fastest-growing energy efficiency companies in the country.

“I thought the experience I would get working for Evaporcool would far outweigh the job security and the money that I’d be giving up at Raymond James.”

The environment isn’t the first beneficiary of Dreifus’s beneficient outlook. He’s worked with the nonprofit Camp Dream Street since high school and when Temple Israel approached him about the low number of Jewish college graduates returning to Memphis to pursue careers, Dreifus and some friends started a fellowship to facilitate internships with some of the largest companies and nonprofits in town. Last year, they garnered 10 fellowships with 15 planned for this year.

Justin Fox Burks

Gayla Burks

4. Gayla Burks

“Had I known Memphis was this cool, I would have come back sooner.”

After graduating from White Station High School, Gayla Burks, director of marketing and partnerships for the Crosstown redevelopment project, left town for Smith College in Massachusetts, where she majored in art history. After graduating, she worked in public programming at the Studio Museum in Harlem, for the congressional campaign of Clyde Williams, and for the financial investment advisory firm East End Advisors.

It was while visiting family in Memphis that she attended an art history lecture at the University of Memphis and met Crosstown co-leader Todd Richardson, who asked her a simple question: “What are you passionate about?”

Her answer would brush up against Crosstown’s roots, — art and economic development — and that meeting turned into a job that melds Burks’ passion and experience. It’s work that sees her as a liaison to the surrounding neighborhood while keying in on the best way to “conceptualize and actualize how we’re going to build this identity for the building.”

As a child, Burks’ only connection with Sears was through the company’s Wish Book, which she’d peruse before the holidays. These days, she’s helping Memphis realize one of its longed-for wishes by revitalizing the Crosstown building and renewing a neighborhood.

Justin Fox Burks

Graham Winchester

5. Graham Winchester

“I just keep drumming.”

Graham Winchester has Memphis and music in his blood. He’s a descendant of city co-founder and first mayor, James Winchester, and kin to singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester.

After studying jazz drumming for two years at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, he returned home to finish a degree in communications from the University of Memphis and to broaden his hometown musical base.

He has done just that, playing the skins behind such local favorites as Jack Oblivian, The Sheiks, John Paul Keith, Beauregard, and The Maitre D’s, a Booker T. & the M.G.’s tribute band.

Winchester’s mission is not only to play the music of Memphis but to share it with the world. He’s traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe with Oblivian and The Sheiks. He also has a vision to teach Memphis’ music history at a local college and act as an ambassador for the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Winchester is a fund-raiser as well, and he started Memphians in Support of the Mentally Ill, holding benefits that bring the city’s musicians together to raise money for institutions that treat the mentally ill.

“In a city where there are so many hospitals to treat the physically ill, I just wanted to help with the mental-health resources.”

Justin Fox Burks

Danielle Inez

6. Danielle Inez

“Be true to yourself.”

Danielle Inez has a talent for networking. The young entrepreneur majored in marketing management at Louisiana State University, returning to Memphis to create her own public relations company, first known as dipR Consulting Group, now rebranded as ding! Marketing Studio.

Among her clients are the Mid-South Gastroenterology Group, Salon 22, the National Association of Black Journalists, and several local entertainers. She works closely with the Memphis Urban League of Young Professionals, Common Ground, Leadership Memphis, New Memphis Institute, and the Junior League of Memphis. She is co-founder of Take 2 Mentors Group, a mentoring organization for preteen girls.

“I love, love, love Memphis,” she says, and it’s in part due to her extensive network and easy access to city leaders, many of whom are only a phone call away. “I appreciate the fact that we have a lot of support, and if you’re willing to put yourself out there and pursue something, it’s easy to find the contacts here who are going to help you make that happen.”

Justin Fox Burks

Kimberly Romanaw Guthrie

7. Kimberly Romanow Guthrie

“I love being on the line.”

When Kimberly Romanow Guthrie came back to Memphis after studying graphic design at the University of Alabama, it was with plans to become a chef. She channeled her creativity into further schooling at L’Ecole Culinaire.

“With art and computers, there’s no limit to it, and it’s the same thing with food,” she says. “You can use ingredients whatever which way and discover new ideas.”

Her parents had an interest in cooking, with nightly family dinners around the dining table. Now, she’s gone straight to the top, working in the kitchen at Restaurant Iris, one of the hottest eateries in the city. It’s a kitchen that “is always busy and there’s always something new with different events.”

Guthrie’s talents have created fireworks in the Memphis foodie community, and she is now in charge of the Lexus Lounge and Fly Lounge at FedEx Forum.

Guthrie has a number of other pots simmering on the stove. And in addition to her work at Iris and the Forum, she’ll soon be heading up the catering arm of the Kelly English empire. Have your bibs at the ready.

Justin Fox Burks

Claudine Nayan

8. Claudine Nayan

It’s like everybody’s drinking the Memphis juice; it’s great.”

To stand near to and talk with Claudine Nayan is to put yourself at risk of catching the infectious positive energy she has for her city and for the work she does as director of special events for the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Memphis.

“Teachers have the ability to touch lives when they’re in school; we have the ability to touch lives after school. … We give them a safe place to be.”

The Filipino native — she moved here at age 9 — began volunteering with Camp Good Times at age 15. The one-week residential camp for developmentally disabled children and adults was such an influence that she took her mother’s car without permission to get herself, her friends, and the necessary gear to the camp.

Volunteering comes naturally to Nayan. “Although I can’t give financially,” she says, “I have the time and the capacity to do it.” As a mentor with tnAchieves, she works with high school seniors to guide them through the college application process.

She coordinates the Boys & Girls Club’s annual “Party With a Purpose,” and works closely with board members and corporations to raise sponsorships and funding.

“When I first started this job, I was crying at all of the board meetings because the directors would tell me about the programming that was happening, and it’s so incredible what this organization does.”

Justin Fox Burks

Elle Perry

9. Elle Perry

“It makes me very optimistic about the city’s future to work here.”

Elle Perry is coordinator for the Teen Appeal, a publication facilitated by the University of Memphis Journalism Department, paid for by the Scripps Howard Foundation, and run by high school students. The group’s weeklong summer camp is a “crash course in journalism,” Perry says, and she works with them to come up with story ideas and to edit the eight issues published throughout the year.

The work makes for more well-rounded students, says Perry, who majored in journalism at the U of M.

“I always liked writing, and I liked to read everything,” she says. “I wanted to know everything that was going on, and I always liked that journalism helped me meet different people.”

She hopes to pass along that sense of curiosity and wonder, and, though she’d never worked with kids before, she enjoys seeing them come out of their shells.

She says the young people she’s worked with during her three years on the Appeal are the “best students in Memphis,” adding, “They inspire me. They’re surprisingly together.”

Justin Fox Burks

Rebecca Dailey

10. Rebecca Dailey

“They have complete control to do good, green, great things for themselves.”

When Rebecca Dailey began working with the Shelby Farms Park Conservancy in 2011 as an intern, she designed and ran the first summer camp curriculum for the park. The camp won the National Health and Fitness Award, and Dailey won a job in communications for the Conservancy.

It’s work, she says, “that I have absolutely fallen in love with. Being able to tell the park’s story is a really incredible job to have.”

Dailey grew up in Midtown Memphis but never visited Shelby Farms or even nearby Overton Park. She was introduced to the outdoors while a student at Maryville College in the mountains of East Tennessee.

“It was so special for me that I wanted to make sure that kids here could have a similar experience, because it really shaped what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

The majority of the children Dailey deals with are from underserved and at-risk neighborhoods, and this is their first experience going into the woods or gardening. The 4,500-acre park is in the midst of an overhauling master plan that excites Dailey, particularly the doubling in size of Patriot Lake. The outdoors has won her heart. She enjoys walking the grounds and practicing photography in her spare time.

Justin Fox Burks

Derrick Dent

11. Derrick Dent

“I’m really curious about the world around me.”

Illustrator Derrick Dent has been drawing since elementary school. His first models, he said, were the dinosaurs he saw in the movie Jurassic Park.

“I always had a habit of drawing,” he says. “It always was a running constant in my life.”

When it came to school, there really was only one choice for Dent. He attended the Memphis College of Art and got a degree in illustration. As a freelance illustrator, he’s worked locally, regionally, and nationally, and can be seen haunting the city’s coffee shops with sketchbook in hand.

His artwork has a graphic look to it, shades of gray and black, with deep shadows, reminiscent of certain comic books. But Dent was only a casual fan of comics, growing up. Instead, he says, while admitting it loses him “hipster points,” he absorbed the comic pages in the newspaper, Garfield being a particular favorite.

As the world becomes more digital, Dent takes comfort in pen and ink, and the sketchbook that’s always with him. But he’s not a dinosaur, like those that first captured his imagination, just a gifted and disciplined artist.

Justin Fox Burks

Raumesh Akbari

12. Raumesh Akbari

“I don’t think you can fully appreciate the process of a campaign until you’re in it.”

Early last week, Raumesh Akbari was sworn in as state representative for Tennessee House District 91, filling the seat left vacant by the late Lois DeBerry. Her interest in politics sprung from an interest in law, and that may have had its genesis when as a child she watched Clair Huxtable on television.

“I knew that that’s where I could make a difference. I don’t know if it was my exposure to The Cosby Show, honestly, but law was a field I knew I wanted to go into.”

Born and raised in Memphis, Akbari attended Washingont University in St. Louis for undergraduate and law school, and she returned to Memphis to work in her family’s hair product and salon company.

Akbari’s district is one she’s intimately familiar with. It’s where her grandmother lives and where much of her family grew up. “It’s a community I know and love very well, and it just seemed like an ideal fit. I just worked really hard and tried to connect with the community.”

On her agenda are issues ranging from education to workforce development. She hopes to tackle criminal recidivism by creating opportunities for employment and housing for ex-offenders.

Akbari has the regular election this August in the back of her mind, but until then, she says, there’s work to do.

Justin Fox Burks

Lauren Kennedy

13. Lauren Kennedy

“I really love dance. … It’s a pretty beautiful thing.”

Lauren Kennedy grew up in Little Rock, moved to Texas before high school, and then found herself in Memphis to study art history at Rhodes College. The plan after college was to work for a nonprofit arts organization. Specifically, she had a vision of herself “trying to help the arts be more accessible.”

She ended up moving back to Texas after school, but a funny thing had happened during her time in Memphis. “I fell for the city,” she says.

She’d interned at Ballet Memphis, and when funding was raised to create the position of partnership manager, Kennedy was able to return to the Bluff City. The focus now in her new role is on building relationships outside of the ballet and growing the audience.

Much of the company’s outreach is to children, so Kennedy heads up Spark, a free, monthly conversation series hosted by Crosstown Arts that engages adults and the young, creative community.

Though not a dancer, Kennedy has an acute appreciation for the art. “I love being around it … it’s a really special experience to get to be behind the scenes here.”

Justin Fox Burks

JT Malasri

14. JT Malasri

“My primary goal is getting younger people involved and engaged in the city.”

By day, Jittapong “JT” Malasri is a civil engineer who works with MLGW to design utilities for apartments and subdivisions. Engineering is a family business of sorts; his father is a professor of engineering at Christian Brothers University.

Away from work, Malasri helps recruit young professionals to work with the Urban Land Institute (ULI), an organization that helps real estate and development specialists share best practices for a more sustainable city. He created a mentor program with the ULI that gathered together captains in the industry to advise up-and-comers.

When Mark Luttrell was elected Shelby County mayor, a Young Professional Council was put together to facilitate the transition and get the input of a younger demographic. Malasri served as council chair.

He is adamant that younger people need to get involved with the city to ensure its future. He’s excited by the progressive initiatives underway, such as the Unified Development Code, and is eager for his peers to become versed on the problems of the city and engaged in ways to improve it.

“A lot of younger people are starting to become the decision makers and are being put in more prominent positions. … It’s good to see a change of mindset come up into some of these spots.”

Justin Fox Burks

Kal Rocket

15. Kal Rocket

“I wanted to give back.”

Kal Rocket co-founded GenQ through the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center (MGLCC) as a safe and friendly place for 18-25 year olds to gather on Friday nights.

Rocket knows something about community and the necessity of a support group. When the transgender young man came out as a 15-year-old high school student, he said, his friends and teachers were there for him. When he came back from college in Los Angeles, the MGLCC was there for him. “I wanted to give back.”

Rocket is active with the Tennessee Equality Project and has taken a group to Nashville to lobby for the cause. A sought-after public speaker, he’s spoken to church groups, youth groups, and was recently invited back to his alma mater, White Station High School, to address the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. He was also grand marshal of last year’s Pride Parade.

His sights are set on the future with plans to work in nonprofit and to engage in more trans-specific work with youth, with a vision of a seat on the Memphis City Council one day. Until then, he’ll work to make LGBT youths feel welcome and loved.

“There are a lot of homeless trans-youth, a disproportionate amount,” he says. “And we need to work for better shelters in Memphis.”

Justin Fox Burks

Jayme Stokes

16. Jayme Stokes

“We’re all the same in those moments.”

Jayme Stokes got her first taste of ballet at the age of 2, when her parents looked for a more constructive way to focus her high energy. She’s been a lover of the art ever since.

Born in Memphis, she grew up in Corning, New York, began her professional training at age 7 with a Russian master and continued for 10 years before moving to Beverly, Massachusetts, where she continued to dance. Now, she says, she’s more of a teaching artist than a performing artist.

Still passionately creative, she directs her energy toward her students at New Ballet Ensemble & School. At the studio on York Avenue in Midtown, Stokes says she sees “the whole spectrum of every type of student.”

Through community outreach, she takes her lessons into schools such as Dunbar Elementary, and to children who may never be exposed to ballet any other way. She imparts the message to students that, although they may come from different economic backgrounds, “we come together in this one building through this one art form, and we’re all the same in those moments.”

Justin Fox Burks

Brit Fitzpatrick

17. Brit Fitzpatrick

“There are 15 million kids who want and need mentors but aren’t matched with anyone.”

Brit Fitzpatrick left Kentucky, bound for the University of Memphis. She was immediately smitten: “Memphis has the nicest people in the country; everyone here is so friendly.” At the same time, she admits she was “attracted to the grittiness of the culture.”

It’s this combination — this grit and grind and the synergy that it creates — that has kept her here. She found work as communications coordinator for the Ronald McDonald House, where she developed an interest in technology as a way to advance social causes.

In 2013, she began MentorMe, an online platform that connects mentors with mentees via personality profiles to ensure a compatible fit — a sort of eHarmony for mentoring. The daughter of a single mother, Fitzpatrick was mentored while growing up. She’s now been on the giving end of that cycle for the past seven years for organizations such as Start Co., Girls Inc., and the YMCA.

Since MentorMe’s launch, about 30 mentors have signed up. Fitzpatrick plans to have a few hundred before the year is over.

“My overall, audacious dream is to be able to provide a mentor for every kid who needs one.”

Justin Fox Burks

Justin Merrick

18. Justin Merrick

“We’re building a family over at Stax, and we’re continuing a really powerful legacy.”

“Music has always been home for me,” says Justin Merrick, vocal director and director of operations for the Stax Music Academy. This from the son of a military father who kept the family moving from place to place.

Merrick started in gospel at the age of 10, and later toured the world with a boys’ choir while living in Hawaii. He majored in music education and sociology at Hampton University and received a master’s in nonprofit management in opera from Indiana University.

At Stax Music Academy, Merrick is giving kids chances they might not have otherwise known. More than learning the legacy music of Stax, they’re creating their own and taking that music around the world, including a visit to the White House last year.

For the first time ever in 2013, a GRAMMY award was given for music education, and Merrick was nominated. Though he didn’t win, he was humbled by the nomination and its process. “It was when the parents spoke about what the students are getting and how it’s helping to change their lives. … And it’s not just the students’ lives; we’re transforming families’ lives as well. Because it’s a giving thing, it brought me to tears.”

Justin Fox Burks

Jon Roser

19. Jon Roser

“The ultimate goal for the show is world domination.”

Jon Roser grew up loving sports, specifically basketball. But at 5’9″, he figured a life spent on the fringe of the court would be “the next best thing.”

He began his career in radio broadcasting as a journalism student, interning from 5 a.m. to noon for ESPN 730 AM. When he was hired by the station, he soon left the classroom behind. “I learned by getting an internship, and watching the person that was teaching me how to do everything.”

Since 2006, Roser has been the producer for the the Chris Vernon Show, now on 92.9 FM. Roser is responsible for booking guests, assembling audio clips, laying out the day’s broadcast itinerary, and lining up commercial logs.

Roser also wears the cap of assistant program director, producer, and post-game analyst for the Memphis Grizzlies broadcasts.

He’s found a job that is a slam dunk. “I love my job,” he says. “When I wake up in the morning, I can’t wait to go to work. I love it. I am one of the luckiest people in the world.”

Justin Fox Burks

Emmanuel Amido

20. Emmanuel Amido

“I would not have been able to do what I’m doing anywhere else.”

When Emmanuel Amido’s family escaped war-torn South Sudan in Central Africa, they moved first to Egypt, then finally settled in Memphis. Amido graduated from Central High School and then from the University of Alabama.

As the founder of Amido Productions, his view of the American dream can be seen one frame at a time in the flicker of the big screen. He works on corporate films and commercials, but it’s a documentary about one of the city’s most storied neighborhoods that is gaining him increasing attention.

The 67-minute, Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community, has been shown around town on Malco screens and at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, where it received the Soul of Southern Film Award, and it will be included in an upcoming festival in Ohio.

Amido says he’s always enjoyed being behind the camera. He is motivated by his childhood and his family’s struggles, and is inspired by his new home.

“What really drives me, in a lot of ways, is an appreciation for this opportunity that I know so many people across the world would do anything for — to come to this country. There’s something here that everyone wants a piece of.”

Get to know the 2014 20<30 class a bit better via our video interview below - created by the talented Edward Valibus - and be sure to come out to the Hi-Tone tonight (Thursday, January 23rd) from 6-8pm to meet and celebrate with the honorees.

Details can be found here on our Facebook event page!

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The Blokes of Summer

It’s the stuff of childhood. A boy stands in the green grass, sun on his face, dust in his eyes, and awaits that pitch to come screaming down the line. He’ll grip the bat, aligning it with anticipation and hope to get the big knock that will give his team the lead. It’s the same scene the world over, though we’re not talking baseball. This is cricket, and these are the blokes of summer.

Cricket in Memphis means weekend days filled with intense play for the nearly 250 men of the eight Memphis teams, part of the Ark-Tenn Cricket League governed by the U.S.A. Cricket Association, which is, in turn, overseen by the International Cricket Council.

It’s a Saturday morning in Bartlett, and the early September sun is already scorching the neatly clipped grass. The players for the Bartlett Youth Cricket Club (BYCC) and the Memphis Cricket Club (MCC) are prepared for the heat with oversized, floppy hats providing shade and faces slathered in sunscreen. Nearby, tennis matches are in full swing as a farmers market is set up in the parking lot. A children’s football game gets under way, and the aroma of a family reunion cookout wafts through the air. Players lounge in the shade of a portable canopy with Gatorade, bottled water, and Marlboros to trade tips and strategies in their native languages, as unfamiliar to the casual observer as a baseball catcher’s hand signals.

Sal Samana is an officeholder of the BYCC, whose members, many hailing from Pakistan, as he does, wear the green of that country’s national team. Samana makes a point to mention the city of Bartlett, saying he “appreciates the opportunity for a place to play the game.” The city, when contacted by the league, was willing to set aside the field and create a pitch for the teams to play on. Another field was created by the city of Memphis behind the Hickory Hill Community Center on Ridgeway at Winchester.

Cricket is somewhat new to Memphis, but elsewhere around the globe, there is evidence of cricket being played as early as the 16th century, sometime after Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the earth but before the Gregorian calendar was adopted. Its popularity was later spread throughout the British Commonwealth of Nations into every outpost under royal rule. Today, it is played by millions in 106 countries, second in world popularity only to soccer.

Justin Fox Burks

Cricket had its heyday in America in the early 1700s, when it was known as America’s pastime. Really. A match between the United States and Canada in the 1840s was attended by 10,000 fans and is regarded as the first international sporting event. It was around this time that America’s current national pastime — baseball — was invented, and its allure would soon surpass that of cricket.

Organized cricket came to Memphis in 2006. It’s a game still on the fringes in this country, yet there it is, every weekend between March and November, on the fringes of Freeman Park on Bartlett Boulevard just outside the Memphis city limits.

There are several incarnations of the game, the most commonly referred to being Test cricket, where a single match can take up to five days to play. In Memphis, you’ll find the much shorter game of Twenty20 played. And because it might make it easier for Americans raised on a steady diet of ESPN to understand, let’s get to the similarities between cricket and baseball: Twenty20 cricket is played in innings (only two); there are batters (two as well, on the field at the same time) and a pitcher (he’s called the “bowler”). There you have it. There are no mitts or time limits, the batsmen are dressed like catchers, and a ball stays in play for 360 degrees around the batsman.

Despite the worldwide popularity of cricket, devoted spectators in Freeman Park are scarce. Dog walkers, parents following children on bikes, and joggers stop to watch the action from time to time.

Justin Fox Burks

Amer Aziz of the BYCC is quick to ask a curious visitor if he has any questions and explains the rules. His attention, however, stays with his team, and he stomps away to stalk the sidelines like a coach and encourage his team on the field. “Keep the pressure on!” he shouts.

Ashish Vaidya, 33, is originally from Bombay, India, and grew up playing the sport, as many of his countrymen do. He moved here in 2005 and manages a nearby Comfort Inn. He points to the orange cones around the perimeter and explains that a cricket field is an oval with boundaries placed at 200 feet from the pitch, a 22-foot-long strip of concrete with outdoor carpet stretched along the top. At either end of the pitch are wickets — three upright “stumps” with pieces of wood known as “bails” balanced across the tops. The safety zone in front of the wickets is called the “popping crease,” and this is where the batsmen stand and inside of which they are safe while running.

Points are scored after a ball is hit and the two batsmen — the one batting is “on strike,” the other a “runner” — run to their opposite wickets. As they pass each other, one run is tallied. The batsmen may run back and forth as many times as possible before the ball makes it back to put down the wicket, resulting in an out. If a batted ball flies to within the 200-foot boundary and then rolls out, it’s four points; if it crosses over that boundary in the air, six are counted.

Justin Fox Burks

A batsman is out if the batted ball is caught on the fly or if the ball is pitched and hits the wicket without being batted and the bails are knocked from the top.

The duration of a Twenty20 inning is 10 outs or 20 overs, whichever comes first. An “over” is six legal balls pitched in succession. The pitch itself is a spectacle, the bowler uncoiling his body with a half-dozen leaping steps, his arms windmilling until the ball is released at the arc’s apex. The ball, heavier than a baseball, bounces on the pitch before screaming in at knee-height. The batsman hopes to alter its trajectory with a flat bat made of English willow.

It’s a slower game than baseball, if that’s possible. George Bernard Shaw said, “Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.” But there is no denying the excitement when a big run is scored. The batting team is uproarious as their man makes contact and the ball sails out of bounds for a six. Aziz is on his feet, trilling the “d” and “r” together as he shouts, “Good run!”

Despite such bursts of action and enthusiasm, an hour into this Saturday match and there are only eight overs and two outs. The score is 67-0.

Justin Fox Burks

Saravan Chaturvedi, originally from Hyderabad, India, is a programmer for MLGW and member of BYCC. His play predates the local organized clubs by nearly 10 years. When he first came to Memphis in 1997 for graduate school at the University of Memphis, there was no Ark-Tenn Cricket League. Instead, he and a ragtag group of fellow students — “usually hungover from late Friday nights,” he said — and a few professors would gather in a parking lot on Southern Avenue, alongside the tennis courts at the school, for a Saturday afternoon match. Dividing themselves into two teams made up largely of engineering students, Chaturvedi said, they would “take a tennis ball and tape it with duct tape so it would last longer and the bounce would be similar to that of a cricket ball.”

It was a way to stay connected to their culture and foster camaraderie among those far from home. And it was a little risky; the asphalt of the lot hindered any diving catches to make an out. In professional cricket, the ball might be bowled at more than 90 mph. Though it’s not quite that fast for these weekenders, they remain vigilant, as balls are caught barehanded by the 11 men in the field. With the ball in play anywhere, there is always the possibility for injury. Before the game on this September Saturday, a cricketer was taken to the emergency room for five stitches in the face after being hit by a ball deflected off his bat.

The Memphis players grew up playing their version of sandlot cricket and following their favorite professional teams. The majority are from India and Pakistan, though Vaidya said he’s played with folks from Australia, South Africa, and England. Ali Iftikhar of the BYCC grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and is a devoted fan of the Pakistan national team. (The team is currently ranked 6th in Test match by the International Cricket Council.) Iftikhar came to the United States in 1992, eventually making his way to Memphis to manage Shoe Time stores. He gravitated to the recreational sport, he said, because “we don’t go out clubbing or to bars or stuff like that, so, for us, we needed something like this.”

Samana, a car salesman, was captain of his high school cricket team and played in college. He’s lived and played in Pennsylvania and Chicago, places with much more participation and more than 40 teams. He said cricket keeps the young men out of trouble: “I’ve had mothers tell me, ‘My kid was going to clubs. Now he worries he has to get up and play.'”

Iftikhar lived for a time in Miami and is a big fan of the Dolphins and Heat. He said the Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant of Pakistani cricket is Imran Khan, a former cricketer and popular politician. “A lot of youngsters support him,” Iftikhar said. “He has a lot of seats in the [Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf] party, and other countries support him too.”

“There’s still that pull and identity that you feel,” said Chaturvedi, describing his devotion to the India national team (ranked third by the ICC). As a fan, he maintains that the best current batsman is India’s Sachin Tendulkar. It is universally accepted, though, that the best Test cricket batsman was Sir Donald Bradman of Australia, who played from 1928 to 1948.

Another Australian, Darren Beazley, is the new CEO of the U.S.A. Cricket Association (USACA). Though the popularity of the sport in America has waned since that match with Canada in the 19th century, Beazley is intent on revitalizing it. There are now 32,000 cricket players in 54 leagues around the U.S.

“It’s a niche sport,” Beazley said by phone from Indianapolis, where he was working with that city on hosting the national championships in August 2014. “Some leagues are very well organized, and they run quite big leagues. Ark-Tenn is an example of that. Others need a bit more help. We really feel that, by opening it up and making it broader and getting more boys and girls from all walks of life involved, we can actually start to get more people aware of cricket and understanding that cricket’s not a five-day game. The form that we’re promoting is Twenty20, which is three hours, the same length as a baseball game.”

Justin Fox Burks

Beazley has traveled the country since arriving eight months ago in an effort to broaden his sport’s appeal. He visited Memphis two months ago and was impressed with the city and the cricket community. As coincidence would have it, Memphis is also the home of Beazley’s mother-in-law.

The Cricket World Cup is held every four years, most recently in 2011 in Mumbai and won by India. A pivotal moment in world cricket was 1983, when India upset the long-reigning team from the West Indies.

“The game of cricket changed in 1983, with India winning, and so the center of the political power of cricket gradually moved from England to India,” said Chaturvedi, adding that its governing organization, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, has become the most powerful board in the world. “India went crazy for cricket after 1983.”

Beazley and the USACA have impressive goals for cricket in this country, with a three-year plan aimed at increasing the number of players to 50,000, engaging media outlets such as ESPN to air championship series, and increasing and improving regional facilities.

If the enthusiasm on the pitches in Bartlett and Hickory Hill is any indication, the fever for the sport runs high. With the community of immigrants expanding as more and more international companies look to Memphis, the fervor to play should increase. A sport on the fringe may even begin to hold its own in the land of SEC football and Grit ‘n Grind.

Two hours into the September Saturday match, the farmers market has called it a day, and the football game has ended. With one inning in the books, the MCC ends its time at bat and the BYCC comes on strong. Though they are determined, they’re unable to pull out a win, losing 148-112.

As with any sport, there is a winner and there is a loser, but for these men, there is also sportsmanship, a welcome cultural familiarity, and an attachment to a sporting tradition as old as the calendar and as traveled as Magellan.

It’s fall, y’all. Are you ready for some cricket?

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20<30

These young people have graduated from their teens with a sense of responsibility beyond their years, and it is driving them to do good, to leave Memphis a better place. Within their ranks, there are advanced college degrees and long hours spent learning and perfecting a craft. The members of this group can dribble a ball, carry a tune, cook a meal, tell a joke, take a picture, book a show, raise money, raise awareness, and raise us all up if we put ourselves in their capable, young hands.

Each is an ambassador for our city. They are giving their best to make themselves and their community a better place to live and to visit.

News of violence and scandal can make the future seem bleak, but we can rest easier knowing that these 20 men and women are a part of that future. Keep an eye on them and watch what they can do when they put their minds and hearts to it.

1) Victor Sawyer

Victor Sawyer counts Jimi Hendrix among his musical idols. That’s not so unusual for a 25-year-old who’s been playing in garage bands and working to perfect his six-string solo since high school. It’s a bit unexpected, however, for a jazz trombonist.

Victor began playing in band class at Ridgeway Middle School and chose the trombone, he says, for no other reason than that he had the long arm to work the slide. And it soon became his passion. Having moved through the competitive ranks of the high school band room, he still has a lot of respect for those humble beginnings. “Without high school music programs, I probably would have never really gotten into music.”

He studied at the University of Memphis and then went for his master’s at the Manhattan School of Music. New York jazz, he says, “is very cerebral, very technical, but here in Memphis, the home of the blues, there is a very strong sort of passionate element to it, an intangible sort of thing.”

Returning to Memphis, he worked briefly for Leadership Memphis but felt he had to take a shot at giving everything to his music and plays regularly now with several bands while sitting in with whoever will have him. Living the life of a working musician — feast or famine as it is — he may not know what life will hand him from week to week, but, he says, “There’s never a dull moment.”

Victor can be caught playing all over town. Dig it. Twitter: @vdsawyer

2) Tiffany Langston

As online content and public relations specialist for the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau, one of 28-year-old Tiffany Langston’s jobs is to sell Memphis to travel writers and journalists. And one of the best ways she’s found to do that is through their stomachs. Tiffany is passionate about food.

“Memphis has been known for being a barbecue town, and that’s great, but over the past few years, we’ve really increased our culinary variety,” she says. “I want Memphis to be in the conversation with New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, and Charleston.” The Anderson, South Carolina, native has eaten in all of those cities and will put Memphis’ restaurants up against any of theirs.

She keeps a blog (tiffanytastes.com) about her gastronomic adventures and was part of the planning committee for the inaugural Best Memphis Burger Fest and is on The Commercial Appeal‘s Southern Tastes panel.

Tiffany attended the University of Miami before coming to the University of Memphis to study film in graduate school. Her love affair with Memphis began after graduation, when she went to work for the Memphis Zoo. “We really do have the best zoo, it’s kind of amazing,” she says.

A member of MPACT Memphis and the Memphis Urban League of Young Professionals, Tiffany continues to see her city anew through the eyes of visiting journalists. “There’s just something about the energy here. It’s a little gritty, a little rough and tumble, but it draws you in,” she says. “My job is to promote all of the great things that are going on here, and every day I learn something new and awesome that’s happening.” Twitter: @tifflangston

3) Stephanie Bennett

As the new executive director of Mid-South Spay & Neuter Services, Stephanie Bennett, 27, holds the snips that help keep the animal population in check.

“We’re trying to make a change in the whole animal world by trying to save all of the animals that are killed every year, but we’re also trying to see things from an economic standpoint,” she says. The organization offers its services to low-income households, trying to remove economic barriers to being a responsible pet owner.

The numbers she quotes are staggering: 11,000 animals were put down in Memphis in 2011. “Most of those were the direct result of animals that weren’t fixed — and their puppies and their puppies’ puppies. So our goal is to be a proactive prevention for this problem.” Her organization performed more than 4,800 neutering surgeries last year.

Not unexpectedly, Stephanie is an animal lover, with a cat named June Bug. Her most beloved creature, however, may be a certain bear local to these parts. She’s an avid fan of the NBA Grizzlies, attending games when possible and following on television when not.

By working to make Memphis’ pet-loving community more responsible, Stephanie hopes to make Memphis a better place as well. “You can truly make a difference in this town,” she says. “If you show up and work and try to make a change, the city accepts you with open arms.” Twitter: @stephMEM

4) Scott Robinson

Scott Robinson is an Indiana native who’s come from basketball country to Hoops City, where he coaches the men’s basketball team for Victory University and oversees the burgeoning sports program as athletic director.

After coming to Memphis to study business management and play point guard for Crichton College, Scott went to the University of Memphis for a master’s in science and education, focusing on sports science. While there, he worked as manager and graduate assistant under coaches John Calipari and Josh Pastner, both mentors.

After graduation, he proposed an athletic program for Victory in 2010 and was hired as its athletic director at the age of 27. Entering its third year, the program now offers volleyball, cross-country, bowling, indoor and outdoor track, spirit squad, and baseball — a fast rate of growth for a new program.

“It’s all about the people you have around you,” Scott says. “We’ve got great coaches, and our success, in terms of starting the program, wouldn’t be where it is without the coaches we were able to bring in — really high-character.”

Scott is looking for more growth in the future while working to expand the college experience for his student athletes. “Victory University is going to continue to grow because of the athletic department,” he says. “It’s brought a whole new element to our school being able to have that on-campus environment.” Twitter: @CoachSrob

5) Sarah Maurice

Sarah Maurice’s answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was: “neurosurgeon.” But as an undergraduate studying criminal justice at Tennessee State University, she changed that goal to becoming a forensic pathologist. She received an MBA in international business from the University of Memphis, studied in India for four months, and then earned her master’s in health administration from Memphis.

Now 29, Sarah has been chief operating officer of the century-old Campbell Clinic since August. She oversees four clinic locations with 450 employees, 44 physicians, an after-hours program, and a physician’s assistance program.

“Operations is everything — from keeping the big machine oiled and running to interacting with physicians, vendors, staff, and patients,” she says. Sarah is responsible for the big projects, as well — the expansions and additions.

If it sounds like a lot of heavy lifting, that’s okay, because Sarah is at home in the gym as a competitive bodybuilder. It’s a sport she became interested in after trying to drop some weight and get into shape during grad school. “I fell in love with the way it made me feel,” she says.

Exercising is a great way to relax, she says, after a long day helping to manage such an important component of Memphis’ health-care industry.

6) Marvell L. Terry II

Marvell L. Terry II was diagnosed with HIV at 19. He withdrew and “was numb,” he admits. But he came back with a stronger purpose and commitment and the fortitude to found the Red Door Foundation, which educates the community about HIV and AIDS.

“I wanted to start an organization that could save my own life,” he says. “I wanted an organization to resemble me — a young, black, gay male — and I did not find that.”

Now 27, the Kirby High School and University of Memphis graduate sits on state and city HIV/AIDS councils. Marvell says that the biggest problem in the city is a lack of funding. “We’re number five in the country with our HIV and AIDS rate, with 600 new cases every year,” he says.

For his efforts in combating HIV, Marvell was given the Light of Hope Award by the Shelby County Health Department in 2012.

Marvell uses all of the means at his disposal to increase awareness, including social media. He also speaks at conferences, churches, and schools. He is often asked why, with all of the obstacles in his way, he is still smiling. “I have to erase the stigma in this city,” he answers. “So many people have said, ‘Hey, you look like me, you’re HIV-positive,’ and they felt the will or the drive to keep on living.” Twitter: @Marvellous2theT

7) Kelly Miller

Kelly Miller knows she could be making more money — a lot more money — working in the field of engineering science that she studied at Vanderbilt University. But she also knows that there are things more important than money. At least right now, at least at 23.

Kelly chose to come back to Memphis after college and work with the Peer Power mentoring program, an organization begun at East High School to train older students to mentor underclassmen. Kelly was a student mentor and says, “I felt like something was missing and that, when I left school, I wanted more options than just engineering.”

As a student mentor herself while attending East, she came to know the program and to see the value in it. She came back during her summers to work with them and, when it came time for a career, she decided there was no better way to begin a professional life than by giving back. Her duties now include facilitating the 9th-grade after-school tutor program, working as an in-class math tutor, and supervising the college-aged mentors.

She hears from people who only see the potential for bigger paychecks, but Kelly knows from her time in the classroom that some rewards are greater than cash. “I have a love for teaching,” she says. “It’s natural for me.”

8) Jermel “Ziggy” Tucker

People say of his photographic skills that Jermel “Ziggy” Tucker excels in capturing the moment. After a cancer scare last year, when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, capturing the moment has never been more important for this 27-year-old fashion and portrait photographer.

Ziggy’s good with people. He enjoys seeing new faces, making new contacts, and talking (friends began calling him “Ziggy” due to his rapid-fire speech pattern). After graduating with a degree in psychology from Christian Brothers University, he decided that his true passion lay behind the lens of a digital SLR camera his brother had given him and which is ever-present around his neck.

Self-taught, he has toiled long nights in clubs, capturing the movement. His career highlight came last year, when he was given the opportunity to photograph President Obama during his visit to the Booker T. Washington High School graduation. Ziggy stood eight feet from Obama, clicking away. “It was pretty awesome,” he says.

Free of cancer now, his goal is to become a photojournalist. He looks up to local photographers as mentors and says, “I must be doing something right.”

Movement. It’s what Ziggy likes to capture, and he’ll be moving forward in his own way for years to come. Twitter: @loopless

9) Lori Spicer

From a basement office below Jefferson Avenue, Lori Spicer has the reins of the Regional Medical Center’s outreach and community programs as manager of community affairs and engagement/volunteer services.

Lori implements health fairs, taking outreach workers into underserved areas. She also works with the mayor’s office for hospital violence intervention to assess the environment of anyone who comes in with a gunshot wound and the Sunrise Program to educate teen mothers on the importance of prenatal health care. Lori also serves or has served on the boards of Dance Works, Girls, Inc., and Memphis Prom Closet and is the community organizer for Northside High Girl Talk, a mentoring program she developed for high school girls.

Lori received her undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a master’s in mass communications and public relations from the University of Florida. She worked in public relations in Washington, D.C., before moving back to Memphis to work for the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, a job she called “a blessing,” in her attempts to acclimate to the city where she’d grown up. “It allowed me to create a whole new appreciation for Memphis that I didn’t have before I left.”

Her move to the Med was a challenge but has proven to be vastly rewarding. “My job is fulfilling,” Lori says. “It’s very purposeful work, especially considering the health outlook of our city and our community.”

10) Elizabeth Cawein

Memphis music, from Sun Studios to Stax to Goner, is widely seen overseas as the nexus for all that is holy in popular culture. Of her time in England pursuing a graduate degree in contemporary media studies at Brunel University, Elizabeth Cawein, 27, says, “I was like a celebrity.”

Wanting to maintain that energy, she moved to New York for a stint as a music writer before coming home to work with the Memphis Music Foundation. “This is what I really want to be doing,” she says. “I get to work with not just musicians but Memphis musicians every day.”

The job, however, didn’t last, and she began her own firm, Signal Flow PR, in 2011, as a specialty public relations and publicity firm catering to musicians and music businesses.

Beginning with two clients, she has grown to a roster of 15, including the Memphis Rock-n-Soul Museum and Archer Records. Artists under her charge include Chris Milam (on this 20<30 list), Myla Smith, Keia Johnson, and the Patrick Dodd Trio.

She is also an adjunct professor teaching publicity and marketing, distribution, and merchandising at the Visible Music College.

Elizabeth has found her niche in looking after the interests of music professionals and says of the local music scene: “The thing that has never changed about Memphis is the talent.” She’s doing her part to help maintain that talent and to get her clients, the artists, their due. Twitter: @SignalFlowPR

11) Jen Andrews

Jen Andrews is from the small town of Marianna, Arkansas, where she was one of 20 graduates in her high school class. The first-generation college graduate studied English literature at Rhodes College and planned to get her Ph.D. and live her life in a library. But after an internship with Ducks Unlimited, she says, she “met the park.” The park is Shelby Farms Park, where she became the first employee of the Shelby Farms Conservancy in 2006 and is now its director of development and communications.

She’s proud, she says, “to look back at seven years so well-spent, learning and working with talented, committed people, and to see an organization of almost 30 people now, which we created out of nothing — nothing but a couple of women and a big idea.”

Jen speaks of the park as a living thing and is excited by the recent additions, such as the Shelby Farms Greenline and Woodland Discovery Playground. She’s excited about the future extension of the Greenline and expansion of Patriot Lake and all that it portends for the largest urban park in the country.

“It’s not just about the bigness of the park but the bigness of the vision and what that can mean for the city.”

Is there still time to sit beneath an oak tree and read some literature? Well, not so much. It’s a job that keeps her busy and fulfilled. “It’s not hard to stay inspired when you work at a park, and you can look out the window and literally see why you do what you do.”

12) Molly Pearce

We all remember what it feels like to be a child and face the doctor — lying on that crinkly paper while some stranger with a probing light and syringe approaches. It can be scary. Molly Pearce, child-life specialist with Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, works to change that experience. “I help patients and families cope with the stress of being in the hospital,” she says. “We do a lot of explaining things to kids, explaining procedures, explaining diagnoses. We do a lot of emotional and family support.”

It is, she says, the best job in the hospital.

The 29-year-old remembers going to Le Bonheur as a child herself for outpatient procedures. “I was just so scared and so anxious,” she says. She grew up in Memphis and went to Middle Tennessee State University to study child development. When she graduated in 2007, she says, “I wanted to be in Memphis, and I knew Le Bonheur was where I wanted to be.”

As she works to reassure kids that they’re safe and that everything will be okay, it often has the same effect on parents, who may not know how to react when seeing their child treated for an illness or accident. This creates a familial feeling and one that can be carried over for years when Molly sees the child again if they are being treated long-term.

When not working, Molly enjoys spending time with her nephews and friends and volunteering with her church, Grace Evangelical, in Germantown.

13) Chris Peterson

“Seeing garbage turned back into dirt has always been a really cool thing to me,” says 25-year-old Chris Peterson. He loved spending time outdoors as a child and helping his mother with her gardening in Germantown. It’s carried over to his current job as executive director of GrowMemphis and its initiative to bring community gardens to blighted, vacant lots around the city.

Chris has a degree in philosophy and religion from Christian Brothers University and spent a year at King’s College in London for an intensive master’s course in human values and contemporary global ethics. “A program like that is interdisciplinary,” he says. “It focuses on ethical issues but with some influence of law and social science. The situation in London, where you’re around the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] that you’re talking about every day in class is unbeatable for that sort of program.” Traveling was nothing new to Chris, who had previously studied abroad in Argentina and did volunteer work in Nicaragua.

In England, he says, the issue with community gardening is a lack of space. People will get on waiting lists for a spot to open. In Memphis, it is just the opposite. Chris enjoys “empowering people to start community gardens.” GrowMemphis has done so in areas such as Binghamton and Orange Mound and with schools around the city.

His interests lie not just in getting his hands dirty but with farmworkers’ rights and global development. He is the personification of thinking globally while acting locally. Twitter: @GrowMemphis

14) Kevin Sullivan

Kevin Sullivan went to Northside High School and then to college at the “University of Tsunami” with a spatula and ricer replacing textbook and laptop.

Now a chef in his own right, he began working as a dishwasher at Tsunami in Cooper-Young 10 years ago, when he was 17. He became curious about the alchemy happening on the butcher’s block and the stove. “Ben [Smith, Tsunami’s owner] does a lot of things in-house, so seeing the fish come in and then watching all the way to when it hits the plate was interesting to me. I liked watching him cut fish and learning from the guys in the kitchen. They started teaching me and training me, and eventually I was cooking myself.”

But Kevin wanted to branch out and make his own flavor. Ki Kitchen (Ki is Japanese for “soul”), a nascent catering business, marries soul food with an Asian sensibility. Kevin grew up eating the soul food of his grandmother, aunts, and cousins, but the Asian infusion is something he learned as a chef’s apprentice.

His favorite dish to eat is mahi on rice. At home, for wife Stacey, it’s pork chops.

While his heart and loyalties lie with Tsunami, his soul and dreams are behind the wheel of a food truck and maybe a restaurant of his own some day. Someplace funky, where he can marry the food of his past with some spice from today.

15) Frankie Dakin

At an age when most people are just forming a political ideology, learning to paraphrase college professors, parents, or Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, 20-year-old Frankie Dakin has jumped into politics feet first.

The Rhodes College junior was recently elected alderman in Millington, beginning his term on January 1st. “I felt like a hypocrite,” he says, telling people they should work to make a difference in their community when “in the community where I grew up, there were people who needed help as well and needed somebody to step up.”

He attributes his good fortune and interest in being a part of the solution to his studies in political economy at Rhodes and his participation in BRIDGES. “It changed my life,” he says of the Bridge Builders leadership program.

As an alderman, Frankie enjoys addressing local groups and working toward changes and interests close to his heart, such as the implementation of a citizen review committee for the Millington Police Department and creating a new skate park.

Where does he go from here? He may take some time off after graduation before entering law school. He’ll certainly finish out his four years as alderman. No doubt the experience he’s gaining in Millington will lead him further into the political landscape.

First, though, he’s focusing all of his energy on his hometown. “If we can figure out how to solve some of our problems,” he says, “I really think we can create a laboratory for change in other places.” Twitter: @frankiedakin

16) Katie Midgley

Where does a Starkville, Mississippi, native go with a B.S. in psychology and a master’s in criminology? Memphis is a good start. After school at Mississippi State and the University of Alabama, Katie Midgley came to town to work with the Urban Child Institute, a nonprofit that works with researchers, strategists, and practitioners dedicated to the well-being of children. “I wore many hats,” she says. “Not only did I write policy briefs, but I did media appearances, community outreach, and communications for that group.”

Now at the Plough Foundation, the 28-year-old is a program associate addressing the problems of aging. “It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at young children or if you’re looking at older adults, the needs are the same. We all need a caregiver who’s supported, we all need public transportation, we all need a house. Across a lifespan, we all have the same basic needs,” Katie says.

In addition to her work with Plough, Katie sits on the boards of the Wolf River Conservancy and Books from Birth. She’s become “swept up” in the progressive efforts and in all the city has to offer. She and husband Tom live in Midtown and enjoy the Greenline and taking their pug to the new Overton Bark.

When it comes to addressing problems in the city, though, it’s all about a positive perspective for Katie, who says, “A community that’s good for a young child is going to be good for an 80-year-old.” Twitter: @KatieBugMemphis

17) Emily Halpern

Like many of us, 29-year-old Emily Halpern first became interested in art in kindergarten with Crayolas and glue sticks. This interest carried her through elementary school and St. Mary’s Episcopal School. Back in her birth city of New Orleans for college, her interest in art became more focused and led to an art history degree at Tulane University.

During college, Emily interned in galleries from New Orleans to New York, as well as the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis. As Hurricane Katrina raged outside, she finished up her degree before heading to New York University for an interdisciplinary master’s program in visual culture. She met her husband, Joel (20<30, 2011), had a son, Jackson, and moved back to Memphis, where she worked as director of communications for the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.

In her latest role as director of programming and communications for Crosstown Arts, she calls on her experiences in different art markets to bring together neighborhoods and, on a larger scale, the city of Memphis. The Crosstown neighborhood bridges Midtown and downtown, and the arts are playing a revitalizing role there.

“Art can do many things, but what excites me right now in Memphis is its ability to connect people to each other and to places in so many ways,” she says. “As a social connector and shared experience, art becomes a means for communicating information, evoking emotion, and inspiring new ideas and actions. Supporting and facilitating these opportunities is just one step, but an important one, in the process of building community and reimagining spaces, places, neighborhoods, and cities.”

18) Chris Milam

Chris Milam grew up listening to his parents’ music on road trips. His mom liked the soul and funk of Stax; his dad, the lyric poetry of James Taylor. It may have created the impetus for Chris to become a singer-songwriter. The Houston High School graduate got a degree in English with a minor in music from Vanderbilt University — what he calls a “songwriting degree.” He got his “master’s” from playing clubs in New York City for almost two years.

Neither Nashville nor New York ever felt like the right fit, though: “Memphis has always been my first love and home, and it’s where all my favorite people are, so I knew I wanted Memphis to be home base again.”

Chris now spends 100-plus days a year traveling, countless hours in the studio, in addition to belting out lyrics for his fans around town. “I have faith that I’ve got the support system around me, and I’m paying the dues now to hopefully get there one day,” he says.

You can pick up his latest CD, his fifth release, Young Avenue, wherever you buy records. You can see him live every Monday night at Newbys. Twitter: @ChrisMilam

19) Anna Mullins

Museum directors are balding, gray-bearded, fusty old men with dust on their coats and cobweb-shrouded books under their arms, right? Not Anna Mullins, executive director of the Cotton Museum. The 29-year-old has been anything but staid as she’s worked to expand the museum’s offerings, exhibits, and programs since coming on board in 2011. She’s done so with art exhibits and outreach programs that teach the history of the region and city through tales, photographs, and artifacts of farmers and merchants.

Anna’s own history is in journalism, which she studied at the University of Memphis (including an MFA in writing) and practiced as editorial director of niche publications for E.W. Scripps.

She spends her days now at Union Avenue and Front Street on Cotton Row and acts as greeter to the tourists who may have come to town for Elvis and pork but are treated to a history lesson in agriculture and tradition. “A lot of people, both tourists and locals, unfortunately, don’t know the legacy of cotton in Memphis and the way the city was founded as a cotton port. The reason tourists come to Memphis — the music, the history of civil rights, the history of diversity that Memphis is known for — in many ways came out of the cotton field.”

With Anna’s help, visitors weave their way among our past and leave with a better understanding of why we are who we are.

20) Anthony Petrina

When you grow up in Memphis, you come to learn a few things. For instance, there are two mayors; there are two kings; there are two bridges; two school systems (for now); and at least two names for every street.

But there is only one Peabody Hotel Duckmaster, and his name is Anthony Petrina.

As Duckmaster, Anthony is, of course, in charge of the Peabody ducks, escorting them on their daily trips from rooftop to elevator to lobby fountain. And there are also trips to schools and nursing homes. As Duckmaster, Anthony considers himself the ducks’ butler. “Alfred to their Batman,” he says. “While they’re working hard every day — swimming, eating, and sleeping — I’m making sure all of the accommodations and travel arrangements and everything is proper and working for them.”

Despite the unglamorous side of the gig, it is a position that carries the responsibility of being an ambassador for Memphis. Anthony and the ducks greet tourists, Hollywood celebrities, and famous politicians. He’s rubbed shoulders with the likes of George Hamilton, Peter Frampton, and comedian Jim Gaffigan.

At 26, Anthony is an outgoing and theatrical guy by nature and the youngest Duckmaster in Peabody history. He grew up in Memphis and studied hotel and resort management at the University of Memphis, but his first exposure to the Peabody ducks was as a child seeing them on Sesame Street. Now his life has come full-circle. “Elmo, Bert, and Ernie all marched the ducks with me,” he says.

Categories
Cover Feature News

20<30

These 20-somethings are the denizens of a city many of us may not even recognize. It’s a place that we might as well call “New Memphis” for all of the positive changes occurring — the planned revitalization of the Overton Square theater arts district, an Overton Park Conservancy, omnipresent bike lanes on city streets, urban gardens sprouting like weeds, private and government grant money pouring into coffers, and a general attitude shift more powerful than the New Madrid fault. They’re not of an older lineage of “can’t-dos” but one of a new breed: the “why-nots.” Those on the list this year are stepping out and taking risks in careers and community. They’re bettering themselves now to be more productive, creative, and helpful later on.

On this list of 20 people in their 20s are painters, actors, and an athlete. There are musicians, three former members of the military, a handful of radio show hosts, a seamstress, and a conductor of orchestras. They are mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. We have five entrepreneurs, a dancer, an elected official, and those who dream of one day being elected. They write, they tweet, they meet, they talk and preach, and mingle.

It’s a list whose members are as different as dry rub and wet, Isaac and Elvis, Midtown and Germantown. Yet there are common denominators that cut through this list like Big Muddy itself. First and foremost, they’re all Memphians. Though some weren’t born here — Lahna is from Canada, Samilia from North Carolina, Siphne from New Orleans, and Christian from Austria — they’ve made Memphis their home. Even those whose talents and careers could carry them across the country stay here by choice.

And that brings us to the second common denominator: They each want to make Memphis a better place. These young people have studied, practiced, traveled, and returned to a place they call home, New Memphis. They are faces you’ll be seeing and voices you’ll be hearing, whether you buy tickets at a box office, stop in at an art gallery, watch a political debate, or listen to neighbors in your community. Pay attention. You’ll want to know them.

1. William Langley, 21

At an age when most people are plugging a second-hand Fender guitar into a tube amp and wreaking havoc on their parents’ ears, William Langley was forming a wind ensemble as a student at Christian Brothers High School. At an age when many people aren’t sure what they want to do with their lives, William is the founder and director of two orchestras.

Attending a production of The Sound of Music and The Music Man at a young age, coupled with a visit from a middle school band while still in elementary school, set young William on a musical path.

“One of the middle school bands came to play at my elementary school when I was in fifth grade,” he says. “And I thought, I have to do that. I had goose bumps, tears in my eyes. I just didn’t know what was going on as a young kid.”

He was a drum major at Elmore Park Middle School, which led to orchestra and band at CBHS. In his senior year there, he founded the Wolf River Chamber Orchestra and, only a year ago, the Memphis Repertory Orchestra.

William seems to be conducting his life just as he’s always wanted:

“When you end up doing what you want to do at a young age, you don’t think twice about it, you just think this is what I have to do and you stop at nothing to make it happen.”

2. Demarcus Love, 23

It was spring break, and Demarcus Love was running late. At the airport to catch a flight, he realized he had the only key to his apartment and his roommate would be locked out. He tried to call his roommate to meet him someplace, but his cell phone died. The only option was to leave, take the key home, and return. He missed his flight.

He and that roommate (and future business partner) brainstormed upon his return. “If there was something out there with which we could easily and quickly charge our phones, that would be great,” Demarcus hypothesized.

The idea they came up with is Choomogo, a cell phone recharging kiosk with an ad-driven touch screen, so users can stay online and in touch. The product was developed through Seed Hatchery, the startup accelerator program, and a kiosk is already running at Newby’s on the Highland Strip. More will soon be installed around university campuses everywhere.

The Melrose High School graduate is studying finance at Christian Brothers University and says he always wanted to own his own business, but he figured that opportunity would come later rather than sooner. With Choomogo, he learned the first rule of entrepreneurialism: recognize a need and fill it.

The idea recently garnered Demarcus an Innovator of the Year award from the Memphis Urban League Young Professionals.

“I plan on ramping this up,” he says about his future. “I definitely need to graduate college and then continue doing what I’m doing. I think I’ve been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and I don’t want to get away from it.”

3. Travis Green, 29

Travis Green is a team player. It’s something he learned during his time in Iraq with the U.S. Marine Corps and in working on Steve Cohen’s successful 2006 congressional campaign.

The third-generation Memphian and Whitehaven High School graduate was inspired to join the Marines after hearing two influential Memphians speak. During a civil rights project in high school, he had the opportunity to interview former Mayor Wyeth Chandler, who graciously turned a 30-minute interview into one lasting three hours and imparted the importance of his serving in the military to a young Travis. He also heard Fred Smith speak of the leadership qualities he gained in the Marine Corps, which led to his creation of the FedEx structure.

Travis was deployed for a tour of duty in Iraq as an infantryman with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines and has received many awards for military service.

“It gives you a sense of purpose, it gives you an identity, and it gives you a direction in life, no matter where you go,” he says of his military service. “Those things have prepared me and given me a sense of identity more than anything.”

Though he keeps an eye toward politics, where he prefers to operate behind the scenes, these days Travis works for the Office of Government Relations at the University of Memphis and considers himself a cheerleader for the university.

“The University of Memphis is that goldmine in the backyard. It’s that link that ties our community together and moves us forward.”

4. Siphne Sylve, 23

What do you do with the twin pedigrees of New Orleans and Memphis? If you’re Siphne Sylve, you play music and paint, help other artists achieve their dream, and create rallying points for your community.

Siphne grew up in New Orleans and now claims Memphis as home with a fresh degree in illustration from the Memphis College of Art. Hers is a Memphis of inspirations that she’s helping to beautify through her work as a project manager with the UrbanArt Commission.

“It makes a community look better,” she says. “Just to have that type of engagement and encouragement from community members is always fulfilling.”

In addition to facilitating public art in each of the city council districts from South Memphis to Binghamton, this “mural maestro” also designs and paints a few of her own. She recently conceived of and installed the mural on one of Memphis’ most visible new attractions, the Shelby Farms Greenline.

Her vocal talents can also be heard in her work as one-half of the hip-hop duo Artistic Approach. Inspiration, she says, is taken from her first home and her adopted home: “There are a lot of similarities in the way [New Orleans and Memphis] operate and the way things grow and the way things manifest — the people, the music, and just the entire culture — they’re very similar in that way.”

5. Doug Gillon, 29

Two of the things that drew Doug Gillon back to Memphis two years ago are inherently Memphis — music and basketball. Other influences included graduate school at the University of Memphis and helping his mother, Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, with her campaign for state Senate in 2009.

With a degree in journalism and strategic communications from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Doug traveled first to Korea to teach, of all things, physical education and then on to Shanghai and Singapore, where he taught and worked in the video game industry. “It was cool for me to live in a big city for a while,” he says of Singapore.

Though Doug enjoyed the adventure and still misses the food of the regions where he lived and worked, he came back to the land of barbecue and has never looked back. When he’s not getting together with friends to play music, the avid guitarist is working on his master’s degree in journalism, which he’ll complete this spring.

He’s also begun a branding consulting firm, Gillon Creative, and is a freelance writer with a regular beat for MemphiSport magazine covering the Grizzlies. Following the Grizzlies so closely is a job come true for Doug, especially during last year’s winning season.

“Last year was special, and I was really lucky, I think, to be able to be a part of that,” he says.

6. Brandon Burns, 26

The speech of Brandon Burns comes slowly these days, yet it’s best to let his words explain the events surrounding November 9, 2004, as a U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner in the battle of Fallujah, Iraq:

“I got shot in the war, in the head … one-fourth of my brain is gone, the left side of my head was completely gone, and the right side of my body is paralyzed. I died five times and spent two weeks in a coma. When I got out of my coma, the doctors were saying to my parents, ‘He isn’t going to be able to get out of bed, walk, talk, read, write, do anything else a normal American man can do.’

“God had other things in mind. I can walk, talk, read, write, and do everything else, including traveling the world teaching and making disciples.”

Since his travails in the war, Brandon maintains the website marine4christ.com, and he has been to Uganda, Kenya, and Haiti for disciple conferences. He will soon embark on a mission trip to East Asia for 10 days.

Brandon has taken direction from the commander in chief of the armed forces in the past, but he now takes his cues from the Bible and with a faith that has held him up, along with the strength of his wife, Laura, whom he met three years after being shot, and their two sons.

7. Justin Willingham, 28

Justin Willingham started working at WKNO radio as an “unofficial intern” at the age of 15, when his father would drop him off to help set up printers in the offices, man the food tent at the Action Auction, lick envelopes, or do whatever needed to be done.

Justin went away to Indiana University to study political science, and, upon his return, the station needed someone to fill in part-time, which led to a full-time position. He is now the assistant operations manager, a job which he says is as glamorous as getting called in at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day for a technical problem as the station went off-air.

“I really do enjoy working on the radio. I like to edit and put together shows. I think that’s fun.” It’s also a job that utilizes his political science studies, because he’s been called upon to interview prominent newsmakers.

When not at the station, Justin enjoys working in theater. He was in a recent production of Little Shop of Horrors and has worked with Chatterbox Audio Theatre, Playhouse on the Square, and Theatre Memphis. As with his early days as unofficial intern, he’s happy to work backstage, he says, on whatever needs to be done so that the show goes on. Yet he much prefers acting.

According to Justin, “There’s a certain energy that comes with having an entire audience waiting to hear what you’re going to say next or getting them to laugh at the exact right spot.”

8. George Monger, 22

“Go vote.”

It’s what George Monger, the youngest-ever member of the Shelby County Election Commission, would say if given an audience. Even at such a young age, George knows the ins and outs of the election process better than most. In 2007, as a recent graduate of Overton High School, he challenged the very commission he sits on now about a law stating a candidate must be 24 years of age to run for city council. He won that fight but lost the election. (District 8, Position 2 went to Janis Fullilove.)

“I didn’t want to take no for an answer, primarily because if I can go to war and die, I should be able to serve in my local county.”

In 2010, he was a top aide to Shelby County sheriff candidate Randy Wade, a race that ended with a loss and lawsuit.

The election process is one that piqued George’s interest, and he spoke with senators and representatives to express that interest. He was appointed to a two-year term on the commission in May of last year.

George is currently a junior at the University of Memphis, majoring in economics. Through the challenges of 2007 and 2010, his optimism and sense of civic duty has never waivered.

Though he has his sights firmly set on politics and another run at office someday, he’s adamant now that the Election Commission works “to make sure our processes and procedures continue to improve. …We have to be perfect every time. It’s a goal I have.”

9. Samilia Colar, 27

Samilia Colar describes herself as “hands-on” and has the goods to prove it. The Memphis College of Art graduate created her own line of handbags, totes, and ties, while living in Philadelphia and sells them at texstyle.com.

She’d drawn up plans for the handbags while a senior at MCA, and those plans kept gnawing at her as she worked a day job in graphic design. “I quit my job and started perfecting what I’d drawn and actually crafting them and selling them in Philly. It slowly evolved,” Samilia says.

When she’s not thinking and planning and envisioning new ways for you to carry your phone, lipstick, and pepper spray, she’s a mother to 2-year-old Liam. Samilia, originally from Charlotte, and husband Ben, from Chicago, met at MCA and make their home now in Midtown. The household, she says, is a creative one, and Samilia revels in gardening, cooking, making her own hair-care products, painting, and just about anything else that involves her imagination. Ben, who works for Red Deluxe advertising agency, is musical, and it’s a talent Samilia sees in Liam already.

“He’ll just mess around on the keyboard, and it sounds better than anything I could play. It’s really amazing.”

With Ben and Liam providing the soundtrack, the lady of the house is free to plan and create and make a happy home. It’s the perfect place to keep her dreams.

10. Kevin Cerrito, 29

Kevin Cerrito wears many hats, and each one might as well be emblazoned with a stylized ‘M’ for Memphis.

The Houston High School and University of Memphis graduate is the managing editor of MemphiSport magazine, the host of Memphis Sport Live radio show, works on the Food Network’s Down Home With the Neelys, and was part of the technical crew for the Oscar-nominated documentary The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306.

This young communicator says of his various pursuits:

Memphis Sport Live: “It’s a lot of fun, and it’s something different every week. You get to talk to a lot of important people, a lot of famous people, and a lot of people who have impacted a lot of lives.”

Down Home With the Neelys: “I started on that from the beginning, and it’s kind of cool to be able to work on a national cable show from your hometown.”

The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306: “When we did it, none of us had any idea that it was going to be nominated for an Oscar. That was a lot of fun.”

Kevin began his career in media by writing for The Daily Helmsman during the heady days of DeAngelo Williams and John Calipari and says of his hometown: “I got lucky to be able to do all the stuff I’m doing in Memphis where I grew up, things that usually people have to move to even try to do.”

11. Shamar Rooks, 26

Shamar Rooks says he’s been dancing since he was able to walk. The hip-hop dancer has been teaching with the New Ballet Ensemble since 2008 and mentors boys from the Orange Mound area in the art of dance. But it’s more than just dance for both him and the boys.

“I try to instill in them the things that I didn’t have at their age,” Shamar says.

He’s talking about not only direction and training when it comes to dance but the confidence to pursue their dreams as well.

Shamar was born in Buffalo, New York; his family moved to Memphis in 1987. Dance and music were, and are, his escape — what he calls his “spiritual sanctuary” and necessary for someone who was teased growing up and made to feel as though he was the one out of step. Quitting dance, however, would have made him feel as though he weren’t being true to himself.

And now, years later, he’s doing what he always said he would: dancing and working with kids. He’s exercising their bodies and “training them as if dance were a sport, while challenging their minds.”

12. John Marek, 29

John Marek was inspired to go into politics when George W. Bush was sitting in the Oval Office. “I first started getting concerned when I started seeing his stance on social issues,” he says.

That early interest in politics would turn into a full-blown passion for the Germantown High School graduate, and he would eventually become president of the University of Memphis College Democrats in 2005 and elected to the Shelby County Democratic Party Executive Committee in 2007 and 2009.

While it was Bush’s election, and John’s disagreement with the invasion of Iraq, that first engaged him, it was Steve Cohen who helped show him the way. He worked on the legislator’s staff in 2006, 2008, and 2010. “I was a supporter of Cohen before I’d even call myself a Democrat,” John says. “His views just happen to sit right along with mine.”

After a bachelor’s in political science, John went on to receive a law degree from the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law and a master’s in political science.

He is as passionate about the law as an agent of change as he is about politics, and he began work as an associate attorney in the Memphis City Attorney’s Office last year.

John won’t rule out a run for office in the future, as long as he’s feeling useful: “I’m very ideologically driven, and whatever it takes for me to get as much effect in the direction I want things to go as possible is what I want to do.”

13. Kate Bradley, 26

Turn your face to the right. Tilt your head this way. Fold your hands across your lap. Now, hold that pose, because Kate Bradley is going to paint your portrait. She’s going to use skills acquired at the Memphis College of Art as a kid, White Station High School, Auburn University, where she was a fine arts major, and at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy.

“It was amazing,” she says of her time in Italy. “They teach the old traditions of art and drawing and painting from life. I learned a lot and I grew a lot, and it’s helped me be a better portrait painter.”

Though she’s held down other jobs to make ends meet, these days Kate is solely a painter of portraits, with an extensive client list. Last year, she was chosen to participate in the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ “10 under 30” exhibition of Memphis’ most promising young artists.

Kate works in oils and looks up to Sargent and Whistler and, locally, Tom Donahue. She describes her work as contemporary realism and is eager to impart her secrets at Flicker Street Studios, where she teaches an intro to drawing and beginner’s oil painting class.

So while you sit there bathed in natural light, unmoving, consider what Kate thinks about painting you.

“It’s wonderful to work from life,” she says. “Just to have that small time where people can sit for me, the interaction. It’s so much fun. People enjoy it, because it’s something out of the ordinary. That is the best part of it.”

14. Christian Man, 24

By his own admission, Christian Man is only “one piece in the story” that is Knowledge Quest, the community center focusing on after-school and summer programming for at-risk kids in the shadow of Soulsville USA. But, by all accounts, it’s one of the most fun pieces, dealing as it does with dirt. Christian is coordinator of the center’s Greenleaf Learning Farm, a half-acre plot of vegetables that feeds kids and neighbors and raises funds at the South Memphis Farmer’s Market.

“Greenleaf Learning Farm is a community garden that has three goals: education, food access, and community development,” he says.

His interest didn’t begin in the ground, though his father always had a garden. Christian’s interest is in community development, which he studied at Covenant College in Chattanooga, and he’s seen pride in the South Memphis community grow along with the beans, tomatoes, and kale.

“I’m interested in ways that gardening can act developmentally for communities, both in tangible ways, such as healthy foods, and in intangible ways, like increasing people’s sense of place and pride about that place.”

Though Christian is the coordinator, he considers himself a learner as well. Many elderly neighbors to Knowledge Quest who grew up on farms lend a hand and help with instruction. Christian is glad to have such experience on his side, as well as so many young helpers eager to get their hands dirty.

15. Justin Jaggers, 29

Justin Jaggers is a pirate but only because it’s the next best thing to being a rock star.

The University of Memphis student and former Army National Guardsman (and son of local weatherman Jim Jaggers) is an on-air personality at the fledgling Radio Memphis, an online station playing nothing but unsigned Memphis bands. The station is made up of a group of music lovers who think of themselves as pirates, broadcasting from an undisclosed location in Midtown.

“I just want to be around music. I either want to record it, or I want to write it. I figured what would make me a better asset to the music industry is to understand both sides.”

That Justin will further his career in the music business, a volatile landscape, is almost a given. He is pursuing a double major in recording technology and music business.

When not studying, filling the airwaves for four hours each morning, or spending time with his wife Marla and their three dogs, he’s playing bass or scouting new bands.

Of Memphis music, Justin says: “It’s an amazing scene, to see all these different genres out there. There are very few instances where I take my headphones off, because I want to listen to the tunes. It’s the ultimate job for me to have, to listen to music all day.”

16. Nick Tutor, 28

When the Memphis Grizzlies were the new team in town, playing ball in a future bait shop and in the shadow of a nationally recognized and playoff-bound University of Memphis Tigers basketball team, Nick Tutor was their number-one fan.

Officially.

“When they were at the Pyramid, they ran a contest looking for the world’s biggest Grizzlies fan, and I won that contest. They gave me a pair of season tickets. They had 23 wins that season. They were terrible.”

Rooting for the underdog, though, is Nick’s passion, which is why he quit a lucrative job selling surgical devices for Biomet to create something called Skirkle in 2009. Skirkle is a discount card accepted by hundreds of locally owned businesses.

“The idea is to get local consumers to recirculate their dollars through local businesses and, hopefully, stimulate the Memphis economy,” Nick says.

The cards also provide fund-raising opportunities for schools and organizations. A percentage of every card is given back to a local charity, regardless of official affiliation with a fund-raiser or not. Currently, 20 percent goes to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, but there have been partner charities that give up to 40 percent back.

Nick has always been an entrepreneur at heart and has vowed to look out for the little guy, the local guy, in his endeavors. “One of the promises I made to myself in the beginning was that I’ll never structure anything that’s not a win-win for everybody across the board,” he says.

17. Lizzy Simonin, 21

For Lizzy Simonin, last fall was “an unbelievable experience,” as her University of Memphis women’s soccer team blew through their schedule of games with a record-setting 22-1-1 season.

“It was indescribable, having 13, 14 freshmen come in. I didn’t know what to expect. We’ve never had that many girls come in before, and me being a senior, we had to tell the underclassmen what to do and they just followed. That’s what made us go so far. They bought into what we were doing. We were a hard-working team.”

Lizzy, a hard-working defender, was team captain and was awarded the Conference USA Spirit of Service Award for women’s soccer, recognizing significant community service, good academic standing, and participation in their elected sport.

The middle child of five siblings, she began playing soccer at age 3 in her hometown of Lee’s Summit, Missouri. She came to Memphis with a full scholarship to play soccer. She’s currently a student teacher at Riverwood Elementary, soon to be at Snowden Middle, and the future is wide open, as she applies to grad school. “I think I’m ready to finish the soccer career. I’m ready to start coaching, either at the high school or college level,” Lizzy says.

As her time in college winds down, she reminisces about soccer:

“I wasn’t expecting to lose that last game against Louisville, but that can’t take away from what a season we had. I just couldn’t be more proud of the girls. I could say that all day.”

18. Jordan Nichols, 26

Almost two years ago this month, Jordan Nichols lay on the floor of a Midtown restaurant with an unknown heart condition, while bystanders worked to resuscitate him. Today, with the aid of an implanted defibrillator and medication, Jordan is singing and dancing his way across stage floors from one end of the country to the other in the national tour of Les Misérables.

The White Station High School grad grew up in a theater family (his father is Jackie Nichols, executive producer at Playhouse on the Square) and says he “never really thought of anything else that I could possibly do besides theater.”

In addition to acting, singing, and dancing, Jordan has choreographed for the stage at St. Mary’s Episcopal School, Hutchison School, and Rhodes College. His plans beyond the current tour include returning to Memphis and his partner, Travis Bradley, to choreograph and direct more. “The acting bug has become a directing bug,” he says. He directed Avenue Q last year at Circuit Playhouse and will direct Miss Saigon next year at Playhouse on the Square.

Jordan has been brainstorming ways to help young people in Memphis become more interested and involved in theater.

“I really want to make people in Memphis aware of how theater can touch their lives. There’s a lot of great theater happening at Playhouse, Theatre Memphis, and Hattiloo, and other smaller theater companies that are blossoming.”

19. Robert Harris, 23

It was the music that opened Robert Harris up to the business world, and, as a boy learning and excelling on the violin, he’s learned to march to his own tune.

The Central High School graduate is now at the University of Memphis, where he majors in music business with a minor in business management. He is also the CEO of Vexel Multimedia Inc., a service provider in different areas of media — entertainment, publications, digital graphics, photography, and media education. He founded the company in 2008 as a not-quite 20-year-old and has worked with a wide range of groups and associations and other businesses both large and small.

“Music opened that door to jump into business,” he says. “It taught me to be great at whatever it is you do.”

Robert’s aim with Vexel Multimedia is to “help small business owners understand that they can expand.” His plans after graduating include expanding his own company and its subsidiaries and more music.

“Memphis has had a huge impact on my sound,” Robert says. “Coming from a background of Christian music and rhythm and blues, mixing that with classical music, it makes for a very interesting sound.”

20. Lahna Deering, 29

Lahna Deering was born in Canada, but for a musical birthright, there is no better locale than Memphis.

Something of a musical nomad, Lahna has been playing since she was 11 and has found her way with guitar and partner Rev. Neil Down from the wilds of Alaska to Los Angeles, from Ireland to Switzerland, and back to the Pacific Northwest. But it was a chance passing through Memphis that showed the duo known as Deering & Down that home is where the art is.

“Memphis is totally captivating, and it can just suck you in,” Lahna says. “The deeper you go, you can find a new corner or a new street, and we just fell in love with the vibe. For me, it’s like walking on sacred ground.”

In Memphis, she’s had the good fortune to work with legendary producer Willie Mitchell (it would be his last album) and his son, Boo. That album is set to be released at the Hi-Tone Café on February 18th.

Whether in Alaska, where she plays at her mother’s coffee shop from time to time, or in a dark dive in the Bluff City, being onstage seems natural for a performer whose voice has been compared to artists as disparate as Rod Stewart and Emmylou Harris. Performing, according to Lahna, is “what I imagine it’s like walking over a rainbow. It really just makes me happy.”

Thanks to Playhouse on the Square for allowing the use of their space for photographs.

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Cover Feature News

20 < 30

The under-30s — born in the glare and glitter of the 1980s, the decade of big hair and big shoulders, that musically metallic wasteland between the death of disco and the birth of grunge. Their newly opened eyes witnessed the fall of communism, the safe return of some spacecraft and the loss of another, and violence against a president, a pope, and a Beatle.

MTV was born, as was Nintendo, the AIDS pandemic, and Marty McFly. And the Yugo was introduced to America. The ill-advised reformulation of Coca-Cola took place square in the middle of their first decade.

Natalie Portman is 29 years old, LeBron James is 27, Thriller turns 29 this year, Madonna’s career is 28, Love in the Time of Cholerais 26, and the Memphis Flyer is 21.

The following Memphians are all in their 20s, all embarking on adventures in business, nonprofit groups, the arts, ecology, society — life. They are positive, community-minded, smart, ambitious. They are seldom singular, choosing instead to come together as collaborators, as collectives of artists and professionals to make Memphis a better place, to make themselves better people.

Born in the shadow of the Me Decade, these young men and women espouse anything but selfishness. They’re coming of age in a time when “hope” and “change” are common buzzwords. Their first choice for media may be social, and they are as likely to be aware of someone in Chicago’s favorite television show as they are of the person sitting next to them in a café. They are embracing the possibility that they’ll feel the flutter of a butterfly’s wings half a world away and that the ensuing wind may carry promise and responsibilites.

Our under-30s are intensely creative and highly engaged. And they soon will be a force to contend with. Keep your eyes on them, Memphis. It shouldn’t be difficult to do.

Justin Fox Burks

1 Mary Phillips, 23

Mary Phillips not only doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty, she craves it.

“It’s honest labor. I’m an energetic, scattered kind of person, and it’s when I’m working in the dirt and able to get messy and exert myself physically that I feel like I’m doing what I should be doing,” she says.

Urban Farms is a three-acre vegetable farm in the Binghamton neighborhood. Off of Walnut Grove and Tillman, near the western entrance to the new Greenline, you can find farm manager Phillips tending the crops, harvesting them, and taking her produce to market. The job came her way as honestly as the work itself. The then-volunteer farmer “begged and pleaded” when the position came open.

Phillips is excited about the opening of Urban Farms’ own farmer’s market on March 26th in the heart of their community, at the intersection of Sam Cooper and Tillman.

“It’s really satisfying to plant a tiny seed, watch it grow, and then watch somebody else eat it,” she says.

Phillips’ favorite produce grown on the farm? Sunflower sprouts.

Justin Fox Burks

2 Shalishah “Petey” Franklin, 29

Petey Franklin was born in 1982, and, by her own account, that makes her vintage. She is the owner of Strange Fruit Vintage, “an online vintage boutique specializing in ’80s and ’90s fresh clothes.”

“I’m an artist … a painter, and with the vintage clothes, I’m going through thousands of clothes and picking the best of them, so it’s kind of the same concept as the curator for a gallery.”

Franklin moved to Memphis from Los Angeles in 1996 with her mother, who was after affordable living and a better way of life for Petey and her six sisters — “the American dream,” Franklin says.

Having attended Overton High School and the University of Memphis, where she studied advertising, she considers herself an arts advocate and uses her education for pro bono marketing work for the Collage Dance Collective.

By day, Franklin is the marketing manager for the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission, an organization with a five-year plan to reduce crime in the community. “And it’s working,” she says. “Crime is down.”

Justin Fox Burks

3 Joel Halpern, 28

Joel Halpern has found inspiration in the artwork of Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, and Egon Schiele. Closer to home, the native Memphian cites White Station High School art teacher Charles Berlin and business mentor Bryan Eagle, of the St. Blues Guitar Workshop, for showing him the way.

The creative services director for WPTY-24 and its affiliate stations, CW30 and FOX16 in Jackson, Tennessee, attended the Memphis College of Art but became dispirited with the curriculum. What the school did teach him, however, was how to sell his ideas, a marketing practice honed later by working with Eagle.

“Art is really just a platform to grow my ability to form ideas and convince people that they’re worth either listening to or looking at,” he says.

Halpern and his wife, Emily Harris, moved to New York so he could give the agency world a shot, but in 2008 they moved back to Memphis when the economy soured. It’s a move he’s never regretted, Memphis being home and “easy,” he says. His plan is to stay with the affiliate stations “until we are number-one in the market.”

Justin Fox Burks

4 Brad Phelan, 25

He’s a Southern boy, he says. It isn’t the Hollywood Hills and glitz that call to him but the slick cobblestones and hometown grittiness of Memphis. Plus, it looks so good through a camera.

Brad Phelan is a filmmaker and web developer for Live From Memphis, an organization created to highlight the area’s art, music, and culture. And Phelan knows the area, having attended Bartlett High School, where he first became enamored with the film process, and then the University of Memphis as a film major, “the best major ever.”

His first big project after getting hired in 2008 was working on Flipside Memphis, a documentary companion piece to MTV’s $5 Cover.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better job at my age and in my profession,” he says. “We film a lot of concerts, and we’re active in the community and the art scene.”

When he’s not behind the camera or developing websites, Phelan is kicking butt with his hobbies aikido and taekwondo, a natural fit considering this filmmaker’s favorite movie: Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Justin Fox Burks

5 Shayla Purifoy, 29

Shayla Purifoy became interested in law through her urban-studies classes and mock trial experience at Rhodes College. As her undergraduate studies wound down, she took the LSAT, she said, “just in case.”

“Just in case” turned into law school and, while a student at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis, she decided she wanted to help victims of domestic violence. Though she admits she could be making a lot more money with a big-name firm, it’s her work with Memphis Area Legal Services that scratches the itch to help.

“I’ve always wanted to do something that helped people, and I’ve seen what domestic violence can do,” she says.

The drive to help and make her community a better place also has led her to volunteer as an attorney coach for Central High School’s mock trial team and volunteer with the Memphis and Shelby County Domestic Violence Council.

Purifoy’s work is intense and puts her on the front lines of domestic violence and fear every day. To decompress, she spends time with her husband and twin sister, bicycles, gardens, and bakes.

Justin Fox Burks

6 Zachary Whitten, 28

Give Zachary Whitten one title and one word, and he’ll give you one story about Memphis — every day this year. This is the premise behind his latest endeavor, Memphis Fast Fiction.

There are other endeavors. There is The Great and Secret Thing, his collaborative website for all things artistic. “If people have the balls to stand up and say, ‘I’ve done this and I want to show it off,’ then we thought that we should give them the place to do that.” He’ll be showing off even more of his work in a graphic novel he’s working on with Lauren Rae Holtermann (also on the “20<30” list). And this is all after hours from his job as an interactive designer for the local agency Combustion.

The native Memphian attended White Station High School, where he found an interest in theater before going to the Savannah College of Art and then farther away to Arizona to design video games.

He returned to Memphis in 2006, making a deal with himself: “You will live here until you feel like you’re in a rut.”

“I’ve been back four years … and I haven’t felt that way at all,” Whitten says. “No other place feels like Memphis.”

Justin Fox Burks

7 Amanda Mauck, 29

Amanda Mauck had never traveled outside of the United States until she visited Haiti a year ago, following that country’s devastating earthquake. The website editor for Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center was tapped as the communications specialist to dispatch stories and photos for the hospital to give the press.

She was chosen, she says, because of her willingness and ability to “go with the flow” and react to whatever situation she and the medical team were put into. Armed with cameras, computers, and satellite phone, she set out on the adventure of a lifetime.

“It was the most humbling and exciting and happy and sad experience I’ve ever had in my life, and I would do it again in a heartbeat,” she says.

Away from Le Bonheur, Mauck is active in the arts, including working with Indie Memphis and the local film scene, and sitting on the planning committee for ArtsMemphis’ Bravo program.

It is her work with Le Bonheur, however, that leaves her fulfilled:

“Le Bonheur is the best organization I could work for, and I feel a lot of pride to be able to tell our story every day.”

Justin Fox Burks

8 Skewby, 22

Last spring, rapper Skewby became the first Memphis artist to be lauded in the “Unsigned Hype” column of The Source, the go-to magazine for everything hip-hop. He is also the only interview on this list that required going through a manager.

Even at such a young age, when most people aren’t sure what they want to do for a living, Skewby is realizing his dreams faster than most. He’s in the studio now and gearing up for a tour that will take him from Memphis to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Florida, Texas, and Cancun, Mexico, to promote his last album, More or Less.

Wanting to be a basketball star at the age of 12, when his parents divorced and he moved to Cordova, Skewby (real name, Cameron Smith) gravitated to music until he made friends in his new environment.

“I always loved music coming up,” he says. “When I spent some time doing it, that’s when I knew I wanted to do it the rest of my life. People really listened to what rappers had to say, and I wanted people to listen to what I had to say.”

Rest assured, Skewby, we’re listening. And so are lots of other people.

Justin Fox Burks

9 Kat Gordon, 29

As a young girl, did Kat Gordon ever see herself as a baker? “Kind of, but it wasn’t like a real possibility. To me it was like, ‘Oh, one day I’ll be a princess.'” And now, Gordon is a queen, the Queen of Cupcakes.

As the owner of Muddy’s Bake Shop, Gordon spends her days making fanciful cupcakes, cookies, and pies. And, in case the dream isn’t fulfilled with sugar and frosting, she dresses up in brightly colored wigs from time to time to make herself and others smile.

The St. Mary’s Episcopal School and University of Memphis grad grew up on the confections of her grandmother, Jayne Bond (nickname: Muddy), who baked for those in need. Gordon took to baking as a hobby. “I was good at it,” she says. Soon, friends and family were requesting treats, and it blossomed into a side business.

When the side business became more than that, she took the plunge and opened Muddy’s in 2008. The treat for her, from the beginning, has been the people she’s met and been able to work with.

“It’s been wonderful,” she says. “That whole aspect of it was unexpected, but it’s become my favorite part.”

Justin Fox Burks

10 Matt Farr, 27

This native Memphian has traveled the world as a teacher, from Costa Rica to China to the Philippines to Singapore. But Matt Farr’s most exciting trek may have been the seven miles from Binghamton to East Memphis he began taking last year.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of the Wolf River, you’ve heard of the Shelby Farms Greenline. As the manager of education and outreach for the Shelby Farms Park Conservancy since last March, Farr’s first task was to handle community outreach and produce the grand-opening events.

The Greenline is an enhancement, he says, that Memphis needs if it is to grow physically healthy and closer as a community. He sees his work with the conservancy as a way to invest himself in the city and to make an impact.

“Having been overseas,” he says, “and having seen how communities work or don’t work elsewhere, and then to be able to come back to Memphis and implement some of that knowledge into a festival or into the opening of a public amenity, it was a pretty special moment.”

Justin Fox Burks

11 Hailey Giles, 29

Hailey Giles has worked on both sides of the camera. As an actress, she has appeared on stage, television, and the big screen (including the locally produced One Came Home) and, on the production side, almost too many positions to list.

She has the utmost respect for the process of filmmaking. “I’m so in awe of everybody around me, because they’re always working so hard — 18-hour days — and I show up, they put makeup on me, I go say some lines, and maybe cry if I have to. But I think the hardest part about acting for film is staying skinny.”

Giles, a graduate of White Station High School, attended Emerson College and the Berklee School of Music in Boston. The acting bug, however, had bitten her earlier.

“I was 5 when I started acting. Of course, I fought it for many years, because I’m a practical Virgo,” she says. “I just thought that I should be doing something other than acting, because it was about the most impractical job I could have chosen. But every time I try to step away, it pulls me back. It’s the only thing in this world that makes me truly happy.”

Justin Fox Burks

12 Clark Butcher, 26

As he’s riding his bike up to five hours a day, Clark Butcher eagerly anticipates the opening of his shop, Victory Bicycle Studio, in Cooper-Young. Again.

After opening day last September, the shop burned 26 days later. “I think we set a world record for losing a business, but we are poised to reopen February first,” he says.

In addition to the shop, which “specializes in products and service for weekend warriors, enthusiasts, and racers,” he also owns Propel Endurance Training, personal and custom training for cyclists, runners, and triathletes of all abilities and all ages.

“There are so many group rides — a social gathering with a marked course,” he says of cycling’s renewed popularity. “It went from being a sport you do on your own to something social.”

Regardless of why, these are heady days for Memphis cyclists, with the opening of the Shelby Farms Greenline and, finally, real discussion of community-wide bike lanes and dedicated routes. And, soon enough, Victory Bicycle Studio will rise from the ashes.

Justin Fox Burks

13 Lauren Rae Holtermann, 22

Let Lauren Rae Holtermann paint a picture for you worth a thousand words about what she’s involved in. The Memphis College of Art senior is majoring in illustration while working as an intern in graphic design at Combustion.

She’s also working on a graphic novel with Zachary Whitten (also a “20<30” honoree). She is senior editor for MCA’s newsletter “Black & White.” You may have come across her bartending outside the Old Daisy on Beale. And she co-founded the Rozelle Artists Guild, a group of “really broke art students,” four years ago when they got together and collaborated on huge paintings. The collective has ranged from seven to 50 artists.

“I think Memphis’ art community is awesome, because the people who are here and who give a shit … they’re at every show,” she said. “Everybody supports everybody. There’s very little competition. Most people are all about supporting anything creative that’s going on, no matter who’s doing it, which is awesome.”

Justin Fox Burks

14 Audra Bares, 27

Originally from Oregon, Audra Bares moved to Memphis just before starting Cordova High School. She considers this her hometown and sees great things on its horizon.

“Even in the time that I’ve been here, there’s a lot more dialogue and more conversation and more people involved in helping. It’s schools and it’s nonprofits and it’s government now — all these different groups that have signed on in a larger capacity to move forward socially, economically, and culturally.”

Working in marketing at Medtronic, Bares certainly does more than just sit back and watch as her city moves forward. The Vanderbilt grad is the youngest board chair at MPACT Memphis, sits on the board for the Memphis Youth Symphony, and is a participant in Leadership Memphis.

“I’ve grown up with a spirit of service, a spirit of giving. My parents are very giving people,” she says. “I feel that in the early stages of my career, before children and family responsibilities, that it’s my time to give back and be involved in the community.”

Justin Fox Burks

15 Josh Belenchia, 28

Buon cibo. It means “good food” in Italian. And this spring it could mean good business for Josh Belenchia. He is the former head chef of Interim who left to open his own restaurant, Buon Cibo, in Hernando.

“It’s going to be a gourmet pizza, sandwich, soup, and salad place,” the Cleveland, Mississippi, native says. “Everything made from scratch every day.”

Food has been a lifelong love, and he grew up with the cooking of his mother and of chef Wally Joe at KC’s Restaurant in Cleveland. With training at the Culinary Institute of America, Interim was his first gig as a head chef and where he learned how to run a kitchen.

He’s excited about his new restaurant and looks forward to the juggling act of ownership and to mixing up his experience with a dash of high energy, a pinch of luck, and a sprinkling of confidence.

“I want to do it all. That’s the type of person I am, and that’s the type of chef I am,” Belenchia says. “I want to make people feel comfortable, and I want to make sure that I’m getting the feedback I need to make people happy.”

Buon cibo, indeed.

Justin Fox Burks

16 Lindsey Turner, 29

Lindsey Turner is an open book, and it’s not just the newsprint on her fingers. The Hardin County native has been blogging since before blogging was cool, since before blogging was even a thing. The popular blog Theology & Geometry started in 2003.

“People have these ridiculous things happen, and there’s no reason to be ashamed. If it can be amusing or make people think or whatever, I see no reason to shut up,” she says, adding with a laugh: “Until I’m told to.”

One thing she’s not ashamed of is her work as assistant art director in editorial at The Commercial Appeal. The position has allowed her to design some of the newspaper’s top stories, such as the True Crime series, which won the Society for News Design award of excellence.

Arranging the elements of a news story and helping the reader to comprehend what the information means is work she finds satisfying: “It combines my need to edit things and pick the right words with the more creative aspect of how I like arranging things and making typography look good. It marries the two very well.”

Justin Fox Burks

17 Elokin CaPece, 27

You know that scene in the movies where a speaker stands in front of a classroom and demonstrates condom usage on a banana? That’s what Elokin CaPece does for a living, and she says it’s a dream job: “I can’t believe I get paid to do the things I do.”

What she’s done since 2007, as director of education for Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis, is go into the community to discuss safe sex and sexual health education with teens and adults and conduct training for professionals in HIV testing and counseling.

She and Planned Parenthood have partnered with the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center to offer HIV screening. CaPece also co-runs the Queer as Youth and Many Men, Many Voices programs, and with Cuidate, a joint program with the YWCA, teaches Latino teens about HIV and pregnancy prevention.

In her travels around a city where STDs and teen pregnancies are rampant, CaPece has found some things surprising and heartening. “We have become more queer-friendly as a city,” she says. “We think we’re more conservative than we are.”

Justin Fox Burks

18 Tal Frankfurt, 28

First of all, cloud technology. “The term ‘cloud’ is used as a metaphor for the Internet. Instead of buying and maintaining expensive servers and software to manage your constituent conversations and information, organizations can use Web-based applications and receive a higher return on their social investment.” That’s how it reads on Tal Frankfurt’s website.

Frankfurt is the founder and CEO of Cloud For Good, which specializes in providing cloud technology to the nonprofit sector. He moved here from Israel in 2009 with his wife, Paige, who is from Memphis. He has managed in that short time to combine his knowledge of technology and the needs of nonprofits to realize his dream.

“The mission of Cloud For Good is to help nonprofits achieve their mission. By helping them to do their work in a more effective way, I’m helping the community,” he says. It’s a community he’s come to love.

“Memphis is a big opportunity. There are great people here,” Frankfurt says. “The thing I like the most in Memphis is the warmth. People are accepting and embracing and trying to help.”

Justin Fox Burks

19 Leila Hamdan, 27

Leila Hamdan has worked for the National Ornamental Metal Museum for the past five years. Before that, she was a volunteer. As the current collections manager and registrar for the museum, her daily grind takes place in one of the most scenic locations in the city, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. But it was more than the view that first appealed to her.

“It was the metal smithing community, the community of people,” she says. “It was a very creative environment and very family-oriented. They had a lot of fun, which we still do. It was a place where they were sharing ideas and teaching one another techniques and processes. More than anything, it was the network of people.”

Though she is not as active in the studio as she was as a Memphis College of Art student, it would be wrong to think that Hamdan is no longer creative. “I express my creativity in other ways, from curating, collecting, iron-casting, and writing to gardening and traveling,” she says. “For me, creativity and expression is about exchanging ideas and putting ideas into action, not creating a body of paintings.”

Justin Fox Burks

20 Sarah Petschonek, 28

Do you think you’re busy? Sarah Petschonek will humble you as she works toward her Ph.D. in industrial organizational psychology at the University of Memphis and, while she’s there, finishes up her M.B.A. Oh, and she works at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in patient-safety research, is a member of MPACT Memphis, serves as a volunteer intern with Le Bonheur’s community outreach center, and teaches a class at Literacy Mid-South to help adults improve their thinking skills.

Industrial organizational psychology is the study of why people act the way they do in the workplace and how to improve that environment. “I’ve always wondered how you could inspire people to make changes for the better, and I liked the idea that you could do that in people’s places of work,” she says. “We spend so much time at work every week that if you’re miserable there it spills over into the rest of your life.”

Petschonek loves the work she does and hopes to stay in town once school is finished to devote her abundant energy to making Memphis a better place.