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Born and raised in Boston, Elvis has developed a profound love for the city and believes it has played an integral role in the formation of his identity. Choosing to stay in Boston for his undergraduate studies at Boston University reaffirmed his love for his hometown and allowed him to get involved in his community. Through working with programs like the Paul Robeson Institute, Upward Bound, and the Boston Debate League, he found his passion for working with youth. Elvis draws his inspiration and motivation from the students he has worked with and hopes to encourage those around him to serve the communities that need it most.
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Born in Sierra Leone, raised in both Conakry (Guinea) and Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Mohamed is accustomed to changing his environment. Before moving to Boston with his wife, who’s doing her PhD at Harvard, Mohamed lived in Antwerp, Belgium with his parents and siblings for the past 17 years.
In Belgium he left his mark as one of the key Black (youth) voices advocating for social change. As a community builder, writer, and social worker, Mohamed enjoys creating and co-creating spaces that foster change or challenge power and shift paradigms. As a result of this effort, Mohamed co-created the City Pirates women’s department of European award-winning social soccer club, working closely with youth, parents and their schools to guide them. With his partner, they initiated and lead Black History Month Belgium.
Moving to Boston and being at WordPowered feels like coming home to a space that combines all these passions that drive him: storytelling, journalism, youth development, systemic change, and joy in creating. Mohamed enjoys coaching youth and building solid relationships and partnerships.
Most of the time you’ll find him smiling and enjoying music (ask him about Nina Simone). If you find any new vegan spots or recipes please do tell him, because next to community work and soccer he loves nature, music, and food.
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Abdi is a curriculum designer, classroom teacher and a former district administrator in the Boston Public Schools with almost three decades of experience. Trained in educational ethnography under the mentorship of Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he has taught students in grades 5-12 in five different schools. He is a founding faculty member of the Boston Arts Academy where for 13 years he co-designed an interdisciplinary humanities program and established a student-led magazine, Slateblue Arts. Abdi also co-created Journey to Brotherhood, a rites of passage curriculum for young men of color to contest capitalist logics of masculinity and to forge solidarity.
Prior to joining WordPowered, Abdi led the largest expansion of district-based teacher preparation and licensure programs for paraeducators, career changers and bilingual candidates. This multigenerational teacher pipeline established teaching apprenticeships for high school and college students as well. With an unwavering belief in the genius of BIPoC, im/migrant and students who are experiencing persistent poverty in the US, Abdi finds meaning in designing mutually humanizing programs in partnership with youth. When not counteracting the hidden curriculum of incrementalism and meritocracy, Abdi is either reading Toni Morrison, who is hands-down the GOAT, dreaming up a serene garden for his family in their Roxbury home, or shopping for fresh produce.
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Meghan has spent her career in public education in and around Boston. Most recently, she was an educational consultant and curriculum writer, working on Mass Insight’s School Improvement Team supporting district-wide equity audits around Massachusetts, as well as creating an ongoing curriculum series for The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden. Prior to consulting, Meghan was the founding middle school Humanities teacher and team leader at a Boston K-12 charter school. Meghan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Education and Linguistics from Brown University and a Master’s in Teaching Secondary English from Tufts University, as well as active Massachusetts teaching licenses in English, History, and English as a Second Language.
Meghan is passionate about systems changes for equity and wellbeing; she is looking forward to being back in schools and working with educators on a daily basis. In her various roles, she works to create educational spaces where all students can thrive as their individual selves and develop the tools to shape the world around them. At home, Meghan enjoys getting involved with her local community and school system, spending time outside, and reading science fiction, but can realistically be found at a playground with her young daughters or discussing the finer points of Bluey.
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Rebecca has spent the last decade working in education, most recently leading the education team at UTEC, Inc in Lowell. She started her career teaching middle school science in New York, then moved to the Boston area where she taught all subjects as a HiSET educator before moving into program administration and coaching. She believes that every young person deserves access to high quality education that centers their experiences and honors their expertise and brilliance. She is passionate about supporting educators in teaching explicitly anti-racist social-emotional skills alongside content to support students in achieving the goals they set for themselves. She seeks to use her coaching work to make educational spaces more equitable for young people and the adults who work with them. When she’s not thinking and learning about how to improve education and outcomes for young people, Rebecca loves to read YA fantasy and sci-fi and spend time in the woods with her family.
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Meredith Moore is an equity-focused educator with over 20 years of experience. With a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University and an M.S. in Childhood Education from Bank Street College, she had the pleasure of spending the first decade of her career teaching elementary and middle school students in three states. As she experienced different contexts, including public, charter, and private schools, Meredith became increasingly concerned about the stark inequities in our current educational system. She left the classroom for a Ph.D. at Boston College, in order to research approaches to making schools more equitable and inclusive. In recent years, Meredith has brought an equity lens to roles as instructional coach, curriculum developer, researcher, and teacher educator. She is also the founder of Kids for Racial Justice, which supports children in developing the commitment and tools to dismantle racism.
Through her role as an Instructional Coach at WordPowered, Meredith seeks to enhance teachers’ capacity to foster the brilliance of young people and ultimately to create more equitable schools. In her free time, she can be found practicing guitar, climbing at the rock gym, or encouraging her own kids to question white supremacy, gender norms, and other systems of oppression.
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Hailing from Lil’ Rhody, Cass Clarke is a devout believer in the healing power of storytelling. Like the smallest state in the U.S., they’re made from pint-sized chaos, circuitous directions, and party pizza. They have a B.A. in English Literature from Suffolk University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. As someone who spent their young adult years hanging at slam poetry events in Boston, they’re overjoyed to be working with creative teens as a Newsroom Facilitator and can’t wait to share their work with you.
Prior to working at WordPowered, Cass worked as an entertainment journalist at outlets like Fangoria, Marvel, and Slash Film and is still a proud member of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. In their spare time, they teach Taekwondo to children and publish scary stories.
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Originally from a small town in North Carolina, Katie moved to Boston in 2021 to pursue her Master of Music and Certificate in Arts Management at Boston University. Previously, she earned degrees in Music Performance and Arts Administration from UNC Greensboro. Katie previously worked on the development team for Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras. In her spare time, she practices bookbinding and makes occasional appearances at Boston’s art markets. They’re a fan of maximalism and can’t resist collecting works from local artists, shiny rocks, and odd trinkets.
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Ahlam was born in Boston and was raised in different parts of New England. She holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts: Boston in English concentrating in Creative Writing. She joined WriteBoston in 2024 and believes her new role will allow her to make an impact while pursuing her interests.
On her downtime, Ahlam likes to read, design clothes, fulfill her cat auntie duties, and grab boba with friends.
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Zahra A. Belyea holds a B.A. in English from Boston University, an M.Ed. in Secondary Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College, and an M.A. in Theatre Education from Emerson College. During her years as an educator, she has had the honor of working with many students as she taught and tutored in both writing and literature on the collegiate, secondary, and middle school levels, held the position of Academic Support Specialist for Graduate Students, and was the former coordinator of a writing studio at a university in Florida. As a teaching artist, movement performer, and playwright, she has had the privilege of working, performing, or writing with or for numerous venues, artists, art institutions, and theatre companies such as Open Theatre Project, We Create! Celebrating Women in the Arts Festival, Company One Theatre, Central Square Theater, ArtsEmerson, The Billie Holiday Theatre, Fort Point Theatre Channel, On With Living and Learning (OWLL), and And Still We Rise Productions, for which she was a former Assistant Director. Stepping into the role of Instructional Coach has been the answer to a prayer she forgot she made several years ago. Like WordPowered, she understands that words matter and access to opportunities to lead and have one’s voice heard should not be relegated to those with the means to propagate majority approved constructs.
Zahra first met Shakespeare as a teenager, Hamlet becoming her favorite play. Her relationship with and to the text has changed over the years, growing in ways deep and wide: Since losing her own father in 2015, she better understands Hamlet’s lens of grief, looking at a world continuing to spin without their fathers in it. She is grateful to her sisters, her parents, and extended family and friends who have walked with her along this journey, so that unlike Hamlet, she has learned the gift of love her father left behind and the reality that she lives in community with many people who have suffered loss, learning to see each other and remind one another that we are not alone and we don’t have to be alone.
As she continues to embrace Faith over Fear, Zahra is leaning closer to God, who continues to help her navigate through a life that has not always been what she has wanted or expected, but one which has been teaching her that as long as she stays open to opportunities as they present themselves, remains compassionate to the people around her, and stays humble, she doesn’t need to know where the road will take her.
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JerDrema (Dreme) Virginia Flynt, M.Ed, MBA is an educator, Fulbrighter, systems thinker, practitioner, and entrepreneur. She has worked with the youth since she was 16 years old and has taught formally for almost a decade. Her passion for storytelling with an educational perspective is meant to be interdisciplinary and colorful. She is a lover of justice, an advocate of joy, and a reminder of reality.
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Born and raised in Boston, Cassandra McLaughlin is now a student of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in the History discipline. Despite that temporary distance, she remains committed to her community, having performed a variety of roles working for and supporting the people of our city. A former student of the Boston Public School system, and Dr. Ali himself, she has come back home to help provide the next generation of Boston’s young people with the same advantages she was able to receive.
