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Liz Willis is a professional copywriter, hip hop artist (Floami Fly), and Chattanooga Arts Enthusiast residing in Nashville, TN.
“How many of you want to hear me talk about classical literature and poems?” Michael “Arche Divine” Twitty asked a classroom full of eighth-grade boys at The Chattanooga Charter School of Excellence earlier this month.
He surveyed the group, smiling to himself as an onslaught of dramatic eye rolls and grumbled sighs traveled through the room.
“Now how many of you want to hear me talk about making money?”
As a Chattanooga native, graduate of Hixson High School (Class of ’98), and father of two boys, Michael Twitty found himself wanting to do more after seeing the “knowledge gap” proliferating in his community that kept many of Chattanooga’s most vulnerable children in a multi-generational gridlock.
Serving 15 years as an employee of Chattanooga Housing Authority, and two as [residential development] Emma Wheeler’s Community Manager, Twitty has seen the ramifications of institutional poverty firsthand. Recognizing that barriers to entry are steep, he started critically thinking about how he could make a positive impact on Chattanooga’s developing young minds.
While Hamilton County Schools have made historic progress in recent years (in 2019 earning the highest designation across the board for academic growth), underperforming schools like Brainerd, East Ridge, Howard, and Tyner are still struggling to keep up with reading proficiency scores sitting in the tens and teens.
A study conducted by Marzano and Pickering in 2005 found that one of the most important indicators of academic success, standardized test performance, and life achievement is rooted in a child’s vocabulary.
But if, by the age of 3, a child from a lower-income household is exposed to 30 million less words than their middle-to-upper counterparts, the odds are stacked against them before they ever step foot in a classroom. Knowing this all too well, Twitty began a Living Information campaign, with aims to reconstruct the way students approached learning.
Collaborating with the Pop-Up Project (The Sit Ins (2017), Hope (2019)), Glass House, the Muse of Fire Youth Theater Workshop, and serving as facilitator of internationally acclaimed artist Genesis the Grey Kid’s “Words in Grey” poetry workshops, Twitty has made resounding head waves in Chattanooga’s artistic community.
Operating under the pseudonym “Arche Divine"(pronounced ark), Michael has spoken to students at Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy (2015) and The Chattanooga Charter School of Excellence (2020) about the educational power of words. He plans on expanding his Living Information campaign to other area schools, and eventually into all communities, not just those that are underserved across the country.
To summarize his mission, he states: “I don’t want to teach kids how to think, I want to teach them how words can be used as powerful players in their developing conceptions of self and surrounding environments. I tell them: ‘words are like a game. If you only have one hand of cards to play, your odds of winning become much slimmer. But if you have a multitude of words in your arsenal, you can gain access to higher and higher levels of achievement. When you understand the power of words, you can truly leverage your self-worth. Not even the sky’s the limit.”
