Hi folks,

Apologies again for yet another long absence from this space. Work, family, and travel are all keeping me busy, and as the to-do lists grow the need to update the blog falls further and further down the priority queue. Nonetheless, it is my Grandpa Luckett’s birthday today (he would be 104 years old), so it would be a shame to pass up the opportunity to wish him a happy heavenly birthday!

In any case, as long as I am here, I might as well update you on some of the things happening in my personal and professional life, and hopefully soon I can get my act together and begin elaborating on some of these things:

Grandpa’s Letters update: Good news . . . we have a publisher lined up for Grandpa’s Letters! Last fall I received peer reviews for the manuscript, and my goal is to get my edits done by Memorial Day. I don’t know if it will come out next year at this point, but if the edits are accepted and the contract is finalized then it will probably be approximately a year or so before the book becomes available. More information when it’s ready, but I am looking forward to sharing the final product with the world!

Other writing and research projects: I have not been consistently updating my blog, but that doesn’t mean I am not writing. I have been working on some other things as well, including two journal articles and a book chapter for an upcoming prison education collection. I have already submitted drafts for two of those items, and the third should be finished this summer.

I am also collecting research materials and reading foundational literature for my next scholarly book project, which will explore the cultural history of punishment in Hawaii. As with my approach to horse stealing in Never Caught Twice, I like to tell chronologically sweeping stories: this book will cover the history of punishment on the islands from Polynesian settlement up through the recent reboot of Hawaii 5-0. I’ve been working on this since last summer, when I presented a paper on Queen Liliuokalani’s famous Iolani Palace quilt and its place within the praxis of carceral education at the Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the American Historical Association in Honolulu. I don’t have a timeline for completing it, but I am excited to continue working on it.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that part of the reason why I wanted to focus on Hawaii for my next book is that my family and I enjoy spending time there, but overall it is an appropriate area to combine some of my passions: prison education, cultural and legal history, my family’s attachment to Pearl Harbor and the community we share with other survivor families, and getting a sense of place when I write about something. I felt like I successfully accomplished the latter when I wrote about Nebraska, and I want to replicate that experience with Hawaii.

HUX Program: This probably warrants a separate post, but I have some good news/bad news about the HUX Program.

Let’s start with the bad: due to our university’s budget struggles and my program’s higher-than-average staffing requirements, we have decided to close the program after teaching out our remaining students. This was an incredibly difficult decision for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that as the inheritor of a program that’s over five decades old I am in the strange and sad position of closing it down a second (and most assuredly final) time. This fantastic program, which has functionally been a stand-alone department since its inception in 1974, has graduated over 5,700 students over the years. Moreover, the newest iteration of HUX—the prison education program—will graduate as many as 18 students by this summer. It has a deep, rich legacy that long predates my tenure as program director, and I wish that there was a scenario in which we could realistically keep it at CSUDH.

Well, that was pretty bleak . . . but there is light at the end of the tunnel. The good news is that the administration and I are working together to try to find a new institutional partner for some version of HUX, which I hope will not only continue to operate as a Humanities MA degree, but will help it grow and evolve in other ways that make humanities graduate education more vibrant, desirable, necessary, and urgent. In my mind, 2025 is nothing if not an indictment of the myopic mind . . . K-12 students and adult learners alike need to learn critical thinking, information literacy, civics, and a host of other soft skills that the humanities have historically excelled in teaching. Although I am passionate about prison education for its own sake, my ulterior motive is to help make my carceral classrooms a proving ground for what intelligent, capable, efficacious, and empowered students can accomplish under even the most stark of circumstances. Once these students show the world what they can do, I hope that the world will take notice of what they learned to get to that point.

Besides relocating the program, I am also hard at work doing something that I probably should have been doing a better job of all along: fundraising and finding scholarship opportunities for my students. When we relaunch the HUX program (or when someone else comes along to offer their own MA), I intend for every student to have access to a larger funding ecosystem that does not rely on one basket of money or another. I’ve already laid some of the groundwork, and there will definitely be opportunities for readers to contribute to this effort! More information will be posted here when it becomes available. But for now, please keep it in the back of your mind, and remember that 100,000 people donating ten dollars apiece raises the exact same amount of money as one person writing a check for a million bucks.

The MFT Program: I am almost done with my counseling degree! It has taken me twice as long as everyone else in my original cohort, but pursuing one graduate degree while running a graduate program elsewhere is no easy task. In terms of how I am going to use it, well . . . I already am! Counseling has given me much deeper insight into some of the problems my students face, both before and since their incarceration, and it provides perspective and training on how trauma-informed education can transform outcomes for our students. Some of my recent (yet to be published) scholarly work on prison education pedagogy reflects this new positioning.

Although I am not considering a path towards licensure as a therapist at this particular time, I have recently begun training for and learning about the world of professional mediation. In many ways, this path echoes and builds on the work I have already been doing for years as both a historian and as a prison education program director. However, the addition of my counseling background combines my penchant for systems thinking and creative problem solving with a therapist’s ability (as one of my professors at CSU East Bay would say) to “enter [the] client’s world.” To that end, I recently completed my training to become an officially licensed mediator in California, and this fall I will be teaching a course for the Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacekeeping (NCRP) program at CSUDH. Even though we academics are living in increasingly uncertain times, I hope that between my writing, my prison education work, and my growing experience in conflict resolution and mediation, I will be able to evolve and adapt as needed.

Travel updates: It has been a very busy travel year so far for the Luckett-Wall Clan! In April we visited London and Paris for spring break, and this week we just got back from a brief trip to Fairbanks, Alaska and Denali National Park (my forty-ninth state . . . look out, North Dakota, I’m saving the best for last!). We booked both trips using airline miles (I use The Points Guy and The Thrifty Traveler to get updates on credit card offers, conversion opportunities, etc. . . . pro-tip: if you have to pay for your own tuition for grad school, you can open a new card, charge your tuition to it, collect the bonus points, pay off the card, and then fly your family of three roundtrip to Alaska during the offseason for next to nothing 😁). Later this summer, we will be traveling to Newfoundland for a wedding, and in July we will be driving the Golden Circle around Iceland with the grandparents!

Anyway, they say the best part about traveling is going home, and that definitely rings true for us. We are very privileged and fortunate to be able to have so many adventures, but it is always lovely to come back home and see how excited our dogs are to see us. 🥰

Thanks for indulging me on this long, overdue post . . . and Happy Birthday, Grandpa! I will have some cookies in your honor.

Scruffy and Eddie, snuggling after a long day of doing nothing.