Features

At a time when the world has been preoccupied with the health of seniors, dancer and choreographer Nancy Havlik has continued teaching an unlikely approach to the physical and mental well-being of people over the age of 65 — dance. …

Local Templeton Academy sophomore Miguel Coppedge started a fundraiser last year to benefit children in foster care and families experiencing homelessness. His charity donations are destined for St. Ann’s Center for Youth, Children and…

“On the day my grandmother caught him fondling me, I was wearing my favorite pink cotton dress. Now pink is a trigger for me.”Roz Overstreet-Gonzalez Growing up, Roz Overstreet-Gonzalez lived a typical life in San Bernardino,…

Heidi Ellis, 36, was taught early in life to love reading, to love her culture, and to love herself. In her home, bookshelves were filled with powerful stories about Black women and Latinx women like her. Ellis, who identifies as lesbian…

Growing up in the District’s foster care system, Lisa Cohen bounced among 13 different families over 19 years. Now 52, Cohen — a motivational speaker and former boxing champion who lives in Northwest DC — never had a birthday party as a…

Marjan Naderi, DC’s youth poet laureate in 2020, had long worried that poetry was dying. After years of expressing herself through poems, winning slam poetry contests, and even publishing her own book, Naderi wondered whether her craft was…

At 15, Tamika Spellman got a girl pregnant. Born a boy in Buffalo, New York, she’d had a pretty “typical childhood” growing up with her parents, she said in a recent interview. But it was around the time Spellman’s girlfriend got…

Six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, DC club and restaurant owner Aman Ayoubi was struggling. Tropicalia, his eclectic global music room and bar in a basement at 14th and U streets NW, had been closed since March, and Local 16, his…

The DC Lineup was created to build community within the District. We’re a citywide news source that highlights neighborly events like PTA meetings and community festivals. During the second week of March, our initial list of things to…

As Fat Tuesday gave way to Lent, 500 revelers showed up last week at Union Market to partake in authentic New Orleans fare and music at the fourth annual Mardi Gras Extravaganza. The event is the brainchild of David Guas, noted TV chef…

The 108-year-old gift of more than 3,000 cherry blossom trees from Tokyo to Washington, DC, finds fresh life in a vibrant new keepsake book from Smithsonian Books, Cherry Blossoms: Sakura Collections From the Library of Congress. The slim,…

When Jason Reynolds was introduced earlier this month onstage at Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress, a packed audience of middle and high school students from DC erupted into a standing ovation. Reynolds, in turn, assured them…

As a newborn fresh out of the hospital and the last of five children, Sandra Jackson lay in a bassinet in her family’s home on S Street in Northwest, her parents and siblings huddled around her. Jackson tears up as she recalls the story…

It can take just one wrong step, one incorrect diagnosis, to change someone’s life. Xavier Justice’s time in the U.S. Army was cut short when he fell headfirst while doing vertical push-ups at his workplace. The accident left him…

Margie Clarke — one of four DC teenagers who formed the R&B girl group The Jewels in 1961 — had her biggest recording success three years later when their song “Opportunity” rose to No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100. A petite woman who…

In his backyard in Congress Heights, Nathan Harrington has a collection of bowling balls. He found them in the woods. He doesn’t know for sure how the 10 or 12 colorful spheres ended up out there, but he guesses it has something to do…

After six years covering Capitol Hill for a Los Angeles public radio station, Kitty Felde found a way to branch out to a new audience: middle schoolers. Once a month on her talk show, adults would be “thrown out” and students would come to…

Just a few blocks east of the Anacostia River, an unsuspecting row house in Ward 7’s Fairlawn neighborhood is being transformed. On Saturday, the Nicholson Project, a new artist residency program, will host an exhibition and celebration…

A middle-aged man in a T-shirt and rumpled khakis sits on a bench in the vestibule of the First Congregational United Church of Christ at 9th and G streets NW. Looking dejected and worried, he says that he recently blacked out at a men’s…

For DC tour guides accustomed to sharing details about the White House, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial with visitors to the nation’s capital without much knowledge of local DC and its history, Cultural Tourism DC’s annual…