As Mad River Theater Works continues to settle into its role in the village and surrounding region, the organization’s locally focused model has been taking shape over the last several years.
What that looks like in practice has been a step back from the national tours the company — which is an artist-in-residence at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College — has traditionally produced in past years, and several steps forward on both producing and hosting a kaleidoscope of programming in Yellow Springs.
One such program is MRTW’s annual summer youth theater camp, which will return to the Foundry Theater for its fourth year the first two weeks of June. The two-week program, open to young people ages 8–17, has in past years focused on devised theater, with young thespians working collaboratively to build an original production from the ground up.
That approach continues, and as Mad River Theater Works Managing Director and Foundry Theater Director Chris Westhoff told the News last month, the camp’s focus is again shifting.
“We learned that music is as much, if not more, of an interest than anything else,” he said of last year’s camp. “So I think that’s part of the inspiration for this whole idea — to center music with everything else that we’re doing.”
Westhoff added that, in contrast to last year’s incorporation of musical theater pieces into devised work, this summer’s program will focus more on popular and contemporary forms rather than traditional musical theater.
Returning to lead the program are Westhoff and playwright Daniel Carlton, along with local musician and theater artist AJ Breslin, who will take on a larger leadership role for his third consecutive year with the camp. Joining the faculty for the first time is Dayton-based musician Kyleen Downes, who is both a well-known performer in the village and has a background in youth music education that Westhoff said will help mold this year’s camp experience.
Downes has, since 2021, co-led youth workshops in Dayton focused on collaborative music-making and performance — experience Westhoff said made her a natural partner not only for the summer camp, but for a new initiative Mad River Theater Works hopes to launch this fall.
That initiative — an after-school music program for young people — is still in development, but Westhoff said the goal is to create a space where students can explore music outside of traditional school structures.
“So not traditional music education, but also not folk school,” he said. “The idea that kids could have a place to go to have an authentic experience with a practitioner of music that they resonate with … and then be supported in putting together small groups or bands is our vision.”
The summer camp will serve, in part, as a testing ground for that concept, with the camp’s teachers using the program to collaborate and refine what a longer-term offering might look like. Westhoff said the aim is to have something in place by the start of the school year.
Alongside its youth programming, Mad River is also continuing to expand its role as a presenter and producer of events at the Foundry, including the upcoming third installment of its speaker series.
At 7 p.m. Thursday, June 5, the Foundry will host “Defining American in the Heartland,” a conversation between journalist and immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas and public health researcher and writer Dr. William Lopez.
Vargas, a longtime writer for the Washington Post and Huffington Post who won a Pulitzer for his reporting, famously wrote a 2011 New York Times piece in which he reported that he is an undocumented immigrant — information he discovered as a child and was forced to keep hidden for nearly two decades. The same year, he founded the nonprofit Define American, which aims to spur dialogue surrounding immigration issues. He has since published the memoir “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Immigrant.”
Lopez’s work intersects with Vargas’: much of his academic research has been around the public health effects of deportation, and his award-winning 2018 book, “Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid,” held a microscope to the impact of an immigration raid on the lives of those in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Last year, he published a follow-up book, “Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance,” which zooms out to show how ICE raids have upended small and rural communities across the nation, and how those communities have worked together to rebuild.
The June 5 event will serve as the anchor for a broader week of programming June 1–6; the News will include more information about the expanded programming, dubbed “Immigrants Feed America,” in future issues.
Westhoff said the speaker series event, and the rest of the programming that has grown up around it since it was scheduled, is an example of the kind of thing that Mad River Theater Works wants to continue to facilitate — something that resonates both with what this community cares about and connects that resonance to the wider world.
He pointed to other recent efforts as examples: last year, Mad River Theater Works supported the development of new works, including “We Were There: US Women in Vietnam,” a community-based production drawing on oral histories; “No Visas,” a hip-hop collaboration connecting artists in Yellow Springs with performers in Palestine and Israel. Last weekend’s performance by The Big Family Business reopened the Foundry Theater to present new work in music, dance and puppetry, led by well-known area artists Sharon Leahy and Rick Good.
“Where we’re really working right now is kind of behind the scenes,” Westhoff said. “Without Mad River here, it doesn’t happen.”
For more information on the summer camp and upcoming programs supported by Mad River Theater Works, go to http://www.madrivertheater.com and http://www.antiochcollege.edu
At their Monday, May 4, meeting, the Miami Township Trustees held a public hearing on the final phase of updates to the Township’s Zoning Resolution, which governs land use in unincorporated areas, and approved a first reading of all amendments to the resolution.
The hearing and first reading are part of the final phase of a months-long process led by the Township’s Zoning Commission and Zoning Administrator Bryan Lucas, with assistance from the Greene County Regional Planning and Coordinating Commission. The update includes 15 amendments aimed at clarifying the Township’s zoning resolution, as well as bringing it in line with state law and land-use practices.
The work to update the Zoning Resolution has been funded through a state grant that expires May 30.
The May 4 hearing focused on text amendments regarding accessory dwelling units, short-term rentals and home-based businesses, following earlier hearings in April on other portions of the code.
A new section of the Zoning Resolution encompassing accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, would allow a second residential unit — either attached or detached — on a single lot in agricultural and residential districts. The stated goal of the section is to “increase housing flexibility, expand affordable housing options and support multigenerational living arrangements.”
A separate amendment sets regulations for short-term rentals, including traditional bed and breakfast operations and those listed through online platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO. According to the amendment, short-term rentals would be allowed as a conditional use, requiring approval and owner-occupancy of at least 185 days per year, site plans and emergency contact provisions.
The final section updates rules for small-scale businesses operating from residences, with the aim of balancing residents’ ability to earn income at home with provisions for how neighboring properties would be affected.
Though the hearing centered on those final sections, discussion returned to language from Section 513, covering temporary uses and public events, for which a public hearing was held during the Trustees’ April 20 meeting.
Property owner Steve Wirrig raised concerns about how the revised language could affect gatherings at his pavilion property, which in recent years has hosted both commercial and noncommercial events, including performances by comedian Dave Chappelle in 2021 and 2022 that required zoning variances.
Under the proposed code rewrite, “public events” are described as “ticketed, non-ticketed, and invitation only events,” including “hosted semi-public gatherings, such as weddings, parties, or other celebrations, for someone other than the property owner or occupant.” Those events would require a conditional use permit and could be subject to limits on frequency, duration and hours.
Wirrig’s concern, he said during the meeting, was on noncommercial uses — such as family weddings, YS High School prom and other gatherings he allows at no charge — which he said had not previously required permits. As written, he said, the new language clarifies rules for commercial events but creates uncertainty for those informal uses that fall somewhere between private and public.
Michelle Hudnell of the Regional Planning and Coordinating Commission said the zoning code is intended to evolve over time, adding that the resolution should function as a “living, breathing document” that can be revisited and refined as issues arise.
At the suggestion of Zoning Administrator Bryan Lucas, Trustees ultimately approved the first reading of the full amendment package; also at the suggestion of Lucas, the Trustees said they would recommend that the Zoning Commission revisit the temporary uses and public events section to address Wirrig’s concerns.
A second reading of the text amendments will be held at the next regular meeting of the Trustees on Monday, May 18, at 5 p.m.
To read all 15 text amendments in full, go to miamitownship.net/zoning-resolution.
In other Township business—
Fire Chief James Cannell reported that full-time firefighter Brian Burnett has submitted his resignation after accepting a position closer to his hometown of Cincinnati, and has requested to remain with the department in a part-time role. Cannell recommended promoting part-time firefighter Dan Watt, who has been with the department for six months, to fill the now-vacant full-time position. He also recommended hiring Zion Robinson, a recent graduate of the Columbus Fire Department’s cadet program, as a part-time firefighter. Trustees heard the recommendations as part of the chief’s report.
Trustee Lori Askeland reported that the Township’s adherence to new state cybersecurity requirements will result in a transition to a new .gov domain for the Township’s website. The change is intended to improve security and standardize communications across Township functions.
Although Yellow Springs may currently be getting noticed as the small Ohio town where Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, recently interviewed Dave Chappelle for their podcast “IMO (In My Opinion),” at the new offices of WYSO in the now renovated Union Schoolhouse, I remember the schoolhouse as the place where my husband and I got married in the late 20th century — which sounds really funny now, like something that happened in another world.
At that time, because the building housed the Village municipal offices and the police department, it was a community hub, and one that was especially welcoming on cold Halloween nights. There was always a warm, crackling bonfire that was lit after dark behind the building on Union Street, replete with hotdogs, buns and oh, so many marshmallows for toasting.
But if we go even further back, to 1872, it was another kind of community hub, because it was then the village’s first integrated school, a place of coming together in defiance of segregation long before the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education that outlawed separate but equal facilities.
What made Yellow Springs such a place during the late 19th-century’s failed Reconstruction, when all across America efforts to live up to the democratic ideals manifested in the Declaration of Independence were in escalating disarray, was its legacy as an Owenite intentional community begun in 1825, a spinoff of the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana. But even before the late 19th century, Yellow Springs’ proximity to the Ohio River — a critical dividing line between slavery and freedom — linked the village to Underground Railroad routes as countless exhausted fugitives made their way to new lives. Even before that, there was the Yellow Spring itself, bringing many to what had been thought were the healing properties of its iron-rich water.
None of this is to say that Yellow Springs did not have its own troubles with racial prejudice, but over time, these circumstances brought more and more progressive-minded individuals who actively fought any such tendencies. And all of this is what lay behind the town’s signal contributions to civil rights in the 1960s, with the 1964 Gegner’s Barbershop protest, which garnered national attention; the activism of Antioch students and professors, notably William Chappelle III (the father of Dave Chappelle) who, with Jim Dunn and Glynna Garrett, co-founded the civil rights organization H.U.M.A.N. (Help Us Make A Nation); and the 1965 Antioch College commencement speech given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was brought there by his wife, Coretta, an Antioch graduate.
That the Union Schoolhouse school was integrated despite the custom of the time was largely due to the influence of the abolitionist and education reformer Horace Mann, who had been the first president of Antioch when it opened its doors in Yellow Springs in 1852. Known as the father of American public education, Mann believed that bringing the children of individuals from all walks of life together offered a common learning experience that would foster equality and justice. For Mann, this was also about building character, by instilling the moral values that are the foundation of human dignity and love.
It would not be going too far to say that these values were also reinforced by Mann’s close relationship with that cadre of 19th-century New England intellectuals and progressive reformers known as the American Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley and others strongly associated with their ideas, including American literary greats Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Though philosophically engaged with Transcendentalist views, Mann was also very much involved with them domestically, as his wife, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, was the sister of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who was a Transcendentalist educational reformer. She was also the sister of Sophia Peabody, who was heavily involved with the Transcendentalist movement and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had spent time at Brook Farm — another intentional community that had been founded in 1841 by George Ripley in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Of course, most of us already know much, if not all, of this, but it’s worth reiterating because it underscores the importance of recognizing that WYSO’s move is not just about getting a new office, but about keeping the station in Yellow Springs and maintaining and strengthening its ongoing bonds with the community.
Given this significance, then, it is more than fitting that Mrs. Obama and her brother should have been celebrating community in Ohio, when on that same day, April 12, 2026, they were simultaneously celebrating community in absentia at EXPO Chicago, where I saw a wonderful preview exhibit of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, due to open on Chicago’s South Side on June 19. As Dr. Louise Bernard, founding director of the Obama Center Museum and curator of the EXPO exhibit stated in a recent Chicago Sun-Times interview, the preview was about “humanism and … empathy and how we are all connected.” A connection that powerfully resonates between Chicago and Yellow Springs is that between the Underground Railroad and the Great Migration.
And if we can understand that, it’s also possible to see Mrs. Obama’s visit to Yellow Springs in exactly that light — working to build new bonds that strengthen communities. Why? Because the podcast “IMO” is about reaching out, getting others’ views on life and its issues, connecting on a human level and engaging in a completely different kind of sharing than what we do when we share on our phones.
The fact that Mrs. Obama and her brother are purposefully focusing on personal interaction as opposed to any audience expectation of politics is subtly and exactly right for where we are in America today. But more productively, we can also think about it in terms of what Harvard scholar Danielle Allen has called “democracy renovation,” or the urgent need to repair our civic infrastructure and political institutions, an essential part of which is simply going back to the fundamental skill of re-learning how to talk to each other — in search of a new beloved community, transformed.
*Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is Associate Professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame, and a former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.
For the last three years, the Yellow Springs Community Foundation has been giving away free money — in a sense — and there’s more available now.
Since the foundation established YSEQUITY, one of Ohio’s only guaranteed income programs, it has paid $402,000 of unrestricted cash to 70 Miami Township and Yellow Springs residents struggling to make ends meet.
Since its creation in 2023, that total has been divided up between 15 individuals semiannually — $300 in cash payments over a period of 24 months, or $7,200 per individual. This is no-strings-attached money, or dollars that can be used for rent, food, childcare or anything else that makes life a little bit easier.
The latest window to apply for this guaranteed income opened May 1 and will close Friday, May 15. Those interested can check their eligibility for the program at http://www.ysequity.com
Eligibility is determined by a threshold of household income. For example, a household of one is eligible for the $300 per month if they make $40,770 or less per year. A household of five qualifies if they make less than $97,410.
Applicants must be residents of Yellow Springs or Miami Township, and must be 18 or older.
According to local resident and the foundation’s program manager, Chloe Manor, the guaranteed-income program has been a success.
“Cash is helping people pay bills, support their families and put food on the table in Yellow Springs,” Manor wrote to the News via email earlier this week.
To substantiate those findings, the YS Community Foundation will hear back from its research partners at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research this summer, when the university will publish its findings from YSEQUITY’s initial 30 participants.
Manor said that CGIR’s findings will likely be consistent with what studies from across the country have already shown:
“That unconditional cash programs are helping people in the short term,” Manor said.
She also acknowledged there being room for growth — particularly in the areas of helping program participants beyond the momentary influx of spendable dollars.
“Many programs, ours included, are looking for ways to make guaranteed income effective long term by partnering cash with savings and investments, financial education and wrap-around services like counseling and community-based programs,” Manor said.
Looking to broader economic forces — statewide gas prices hovering around $5 per gallon, as well as inflation on nearly all consumer goods and services nationwide — Manor stressed that providing for the most economically vulnerable is now more imperative than ever.
“Supporting guaranteed income [programs] is so important right now — both in the context of poverty mitigation work on a national level and especially on a local level,” Manor said. “Redistributing wealth by taking cash out of our own pockets and putting it directly into the pockets of our neighbors is one of the most direct ways we can make an impact on economic equity in our village.”
As she noted, YSEQUITY’s guaranteed-income program is entirely funded by its donors, while the initial start-up costs were supported by Greene County funds via the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA.
Those interested in furthering YSEQUITY’s program are encouraged to donate via http://www.ysequity.org
By Alissa Paolella
When Jean Barlow Hudson served as the first woman mayor of Yellow Springs, residents knew her as a thoughtful civic leader, a frequent letter writer and a steady advocate for women’s equality and reproductive rights. What many may not have known was that, tucked among her papers, was a literary murder mystery she believed in — but never saw published.
Now, more than 40 years after she first drafted it, that novel has come to light.
Edited and published posthumously by her son, Rex Hudson, “Stephanie’s Secret” is more than a mystery. It is, in some ways, a reflection of Hudson’s own life: a story of caregiving and career ambition, and a woman navigating male-dominated institutions while guarding a private truth.
For Rex Hudson, bringing the manuscript into the world was both an intellectual and emotional undertaking — and a promise kept. At his mother’s deathbed in August 1992, he vowed to get her novels, short stories and poetry published. He made good on part of that pledge in 1993, compiling and editing her poetry collection, “Foreverness.” But her novels waited. It was not until 2023, when Hudson retired, that he returned to the unfinished work.
“Since then, along with a revised edition of ‘Foreverness’ and a collection of her short stories, ‘Castle in the Clouds,’ I have edited, revised and published her four novels,” he said.
He began typing up the final draft manuscript of “Stephanie’s Secret” on March 1, 2025, and worked on it over eight months — in time for a November appointment with Qamber Designs in Bahrain for cover design and interior formatting.
Jean Barlow Hudson was born in 1915 in Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania. She earned a degree in English literature from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1939 and wrote throughout her life, composing more than 200 poems, dozens of short stories and four novels.
Her marriage to hydrogeologist Benjamin Hudson carried the family across continents — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Latin America and Africa — before they returned between assignments to Yellow Springs, the village they called home beginning in the early 1940s.
Hudson published one novel during her lifetime: “Rivers of Time” (Avon, 1979), which sold 50,000 copies. She attempted an encore in the first half of the 1980s, producing three neatly typed drafts of “Stephanie’s Secret,” a mystery set in academia. Although she considered it her best novel, she was unable to get it published, Rex Hudson said, primarily because of her habit of submitting unedited drafts to publishers.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Hudson became a regular voice in regional newspapers, writing op-eds that championed women’s autonomy and reproductive rights. In 1987, she was elected the village’s first woman mayor, serving two terms. She died of pancreatic cancer in 1992.
The novel opens with a murder on a college golf course. The victim, an older man with a complicated past, is later revealed to have had a hidden relationship with the mother of the book’s protagonist, anthropology professor Charlotte Anderson. As the public mystery unfolds — who killed the man and why — a private mystery surfaces: Charlotte’s realization that the victim may have been her biological father.
Rex Hudson described the novel as a hybrid: part whodunit, part psychological reckoning. The most autobiographical character, he said, is not Charlotte but Stephanie herself — Charlotte’s mute and paraplegic mother, whose silent soliloquies appear throughout the book.
“Like Stephanie, my mother grew up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm,” he said. “Stephanie’s dying thoughts were of dangling her feet in the nearby creek as a child.” His cousin Annie, who lives in the old stone farmhouse where Jean grew up, offered her own reaction: “Stephanie’s last musings hit home. … How wonderful she wrote it all down.”
The parallels are difficult to ignore. Like Charlotte, Jean Hudson was a college-educated woman who devoted significant years to supporting her husband’s career and raising children while nurturing her own intellectual ambitions. Like Stephanie — described in the novel as “the little wife at home with a (Bachelor of Arts) I never used” — Jean Hudson regretted not having a professional career, Rex Hudson said. Living overseas in a dozen countries made it difficult for her to build one. Rex Hudson noted that his parents remained married for 50 years, despite their personality differences.
Originally drafted in the mid-1980s, the manuscript underwent significant revision before publication. In its earliest form, the novel was structured as a “howcatchem,” revealing the perpetrator at the outset in the style popularized by the 1970s television series “Columbo.” Rex Hudson reshaped it into a more traditional whodunit, withholding the killer’s identity until later in the narrative.
He also moved the novel’s setting from mountainous western Maryland to the Chesapeake Bay area, condensed the timeline from six months to six weeks and refined character arcs.
“I believe these changes among others helped the novel’s structure while preserving her story,” he said. “I am sure that my mother would have appreciated and agreed with my various revisions.”
For Yellow Springs readers, the book carries a particular local resonance. The cover features a photo of Antioch College’s iconic main building, contributed by Rex Hudson’s brother, Jon Barlow Hudson, of Yellow Springs. The fictional murder unfolds on a college golf course, and Rex Hudson suspects he knows exactly where his mother got the idea: Antioch’s 36-acre grassy expanse at the south end of the college, west of Corry Street and bounded on the south by Allen Street, had been a nine-hole golf course since 1930.
“Undoubtedly, the author got the idea for her murder mystery while playing golf there one afternoon,” Rex Hudson said.
That open space has since become a solar array and the fenced-off Antioch Farm.
As mayor, Hudson was known for her convictions and her willingness to speak plainly; as Rex Hudson said: “There was no daylight between her own deeply held values and representing village values.”
Even as her health declined and she wore a wig, her empathy as a leader remained evident. In a 1992 tribute in the Yellow Springs News, writer Diane Chiddister described her as “passionate, opinionated, complex, committed” — and above all, gracious.
The publication of “Stephanie’s Secret” adds another dimension to Hudson’s legacy in the village. She is remembered as a mayor, a feminist voice, a traveler and a mother. Now, she may also be remembered as a novelist whose final work waited decades for its audience.
*Alissa Paolella is a local resident and freelance writer for the News.
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