Kate Quarfordt

It's a Tuesday after ninth period and I'm walking down the hallway of my South Bronx school toward what looks unmistakably like a fight. A tight circle of high school boys are gathered around two other boys on the floor outside of the classroom where I teach theater. One of...

A few days ago I got an email that changed everything.

It's been a full month--and a seemingly endless succession of graduations, end-of-the-year recitals, awards ceremonies and fundraising benefits--since the kids I teach in the South Bronx put on our school's annual spring musical, the 1950's classic, Guys and Dolls....

In case you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2 of our 100-day countdown to opening night of last week's performance of "Guys and Dolls" in the South Bronx. What follows is the saga's final chapter:...

By the end of Part One of our 100-day countdown to opening night of Guys and Dolls at Bronx Prep, 30 percent of our cast members -- including the talented 12th grader who plays Sky Masterson -- are on the verge of being kicked out of...

After eight years of making theater with urban teenagers and witnessing how challenges can be turned into fuel for creativity, I know that Orson Welles was onto something when he said that "the true enemy of art is the absence of limitations." That's all well and good, but I'm pretty...

"I can't do this, Ms. Q. These kids hate me," says Ruth, my 11th grade theater student, as she presses her forehead to the wall in the corner of the art room and sighs.

When my colleague Andrew Simon and I teamed up with Ruth and several other high...

"Wait--what? I thought you were Buddhist, Ms. Q," says Simone, a talented 9th grade member of the theater program and speech team I coach at my South Bronx school.

"Nope," I say. "I do a lot of yoga, but that doesn't automatically make a person a Buddhist. Technically, I'm Jewish."

"Cut!" hollers Sahirah Johnson, an 11th grader at Bronx Prep, the fifth through 12th-grade school in the South Bronx where I teach theater. The actor she's working with, a seventh grader named Maria who has never acted before, sputters to a stop mid-sentence and looks down at her fingers.

We're...

"What do we love?" asks 17-year-old senior Tiffany McLarty, her face shining under the florescent lights in the parking lot.

The eleven teenagers surrounding her reply in unison:

"We love to speak."

It's 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night. Three...

I'm no stranger to burning the midnight oil in a hotel room the night before a big speech. But usually I'm in coach mode, helping the kids on the Bronx Prep Speech Team get ready to...

The children at Bronx Prep are clamoring for vegetables. Not fries soaked in hot sauce from the Chinese take-out across the street from the school on Third Avenue in the South Bronx. Not ranch-drenched iceberg lettuce from the Wendy's down...

This is the second in a series of posts about putting on Rogers and Hammerstein's classic musical The King and I with a cast and crew of Black and Latino youth at Bronx Prep Charter School.

It's 11:30 on a Friday night and I'm in a...

Room 201 is packed with sweating kids. The youngest are in fifth grade, the oldest, twelfth graders on their way to college in a few short months. Outside the fogged-up windows, the students who are not auditioning for the spring musical The...

Denisse Polanco and I first met in a small trailer that served as our theater arts classroom when Bronx Prep Charter School was spilling out of its temporary home at Our Lady of Victory on Webster Ave in 2003. I was feeling pretty beat down; my first two weeks of...

A few years ago at right around this time of year, my Bronx Prep theater students decided to put on a bake sale. We were trying to raise $30,000 to buy a lighting system and convert the bare stage in our school's gym into a fully-functioning theater...

A few weeks ago something really amazing happened at the school where I've taught for the last seven years. It was "College Application Mail-Out Day" at Bronx Prep, a tradition that began on a cold fall day in 2006 when our first class of seniors came down the steps of...