Candidate Interview: LaMonica McIver (Central Ward)

Newark’s municipal elections are in full swing. Walking around the city, you will see political advertisements promoting the different candidates running for office. . According to the city clerk’s office, there are 25 candidates running for 10 offices, including mayor, councilperson at large, and councilperson for the respective wards across the city. You may see debates on local television, read profiles in newspapers, engage with campaign volunteers on the street, or even attend events with the candidates. Here, on the podcast, we are striving to do our part in highlighting the importance of this election with interviews of candidates who have accepted our invitation to come on. Today, we have Councilwoman LaMonica McIver on to talk about her bid for re-election, her campaign for office, and her platform. Councilwoman McIver represents the Central Ward—which encompasses areas traditionally considered downtown, the area around University Hospital, much of Springfield Avenue, and most of Lower Broadway.

Guest:

LaMonica McIver—Councilwoman McIver currently represents the Central Ward (which happens to be my district) on the Newark City Council, a seat she has held since 2018, when she was first elected to the position. She grew up in the Central Ward and is a graduate of Central High School, Bloomfield College, and Seton Hall University. Before holding elected office, she worked in Newark Public Schools, serving as a clerk, a system analyst, and eventually as a Human Resources Regional Partners. She founded Newark GALS, Inc. in 2021, a nonprofit that provides enrichment camps for young women in Newark. Councilwoman McIver is also running on the Team Baraka ticket, which includes candidates endorsed by Mayor Baraka.

Background & Articles:

• McIver’s Candidate Website: here

• Newark Election Registration: here

Newark's Beer Revival: An Interview and Conversation with Steve Hughes

Over a century ago, walking down the streets of Newark, constant reminders of Newark’s preeminent brewing and beermaking industry would have scattered the landscape. Massive factories like Ballantine’s and Kruger’s would have churned out hundreds of barrels of lager and ale each day. Ornate mansions built by the owners and executives of these brands dotted neighborhoods. That is to say nothing about the hundreds of bars, taverns, and taprooms throughout the different ethnic communities throughout the city. While many have ascribed Newark’s success with brewing to the water flowing from the Appalachian Highlands to the city, the story is really a demographic one. Newark was host to English, Scots-Irish, German, Polish, and Irish (Catholic) immigrants, all with proven beer cultures that they brought from the Old World. It was this great demand for beer along with the requisite know-how that launched the city into the pantheon of great American beer cities. Nevertheless, a combination of Prohibition, deindustrialization, and a mass exodus of many of these same immigrant groups all but hollowed out Newark’s brewing industry. The only remnant of that industry, for decades, was the Anheuser-Busch plant that straddles the Newark-Elizabeth border. Steve Hughes, co-owner and operator of Newark Local Beer, is looking to turn this narrative around. Launched in 2021, Newark Local Beer sits at the base of Walker House on Broad Street and offers over ten different beers on site. Steve came onto the podcast to discuss his vision, why he is brewing in Newark, and what the brewery has in store for the city.

Guest:

Steve Hughes—Steve and his wife, Miller, are the owners of Newark Local Beer. He was born and raised in Hanover, New Hampshire. Miller grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The couple now reside in Montclair, New Jersey with their two children.

Background & Articles:

• Newark Local Beer website: here

• NJ.com Article about the brewery: here

• North Jersey Media Group’s 9 Fun Things to Do in North Jersey: here

• Montclair Brewery: here

• Four City Brewing Company: here

• Departed Soles Brewing Company: here

• Ghost Hawk Brewing Company: here

• Alementary Brewing Company: here

• Hackensack Brewing Company: here

• Jack’s Abby: here

• Exhibit A Brewing: here

• Trace Brewing (in Bloomfield): here

• Brief History of the Beer Revival: here

Quote:

“Beer is never a settled matter, and beer styles never live forever. As craft brewing has revived interest in taste and variety, we’re seeing preferences diverge from country to country. . . . Belgians are making hoppy beers, and Americans are making Belgian ales. The French are making cask ale, and the British are discovering craft lager. These trends get fed back into the cultural mill, shifting and mutating until they’ve created something yet again different and new. We can’t know how beer will taste in fifty years except to say this: It won't taste like it does now.”—The Beer Bible by Jeff Alworth

Newark's Election Landscape: A Conversation with Mark Bonamo on the 2022 Municipal Elections

2022 is an election year in Newark. Candidates for mayor and council have declared their intention to run, and votes will be cast on May 10. Newark has off-off cycle elections, in that our elections occur off-cycle from both the New Jersey and U.S. Presidential elections and the federally-recognized election day in November.

Mark Bonamo has joined the podcast to discuss the lay of the election landscape and what to expect from this cycle.

Pod & Market will invite all candidates for city-wide office onto the podcast for a short interview segment to provide the residents of Newark (and those interested) with information about these candidates. (The host of the podcast is actively supporting one of the candidates for the East Ward seat and will therefore be looking for guest hosts to conduct those interviews.)

Note: This conversation was recorded a few days before the window for submitting candidate petitions closed. Much of what was discussed in the episode remains relevant and on-point. If you would like to keep up with the election, please check out local news outlets like TAPInto Newark for up-to-date information.

Guest:

Mark Bonamo—Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of TAPInto Newark and a Newark resident. He has long reported on local news and politics in Newark. For the last three years, TAPInto Newark has been recognized as the state’s best local news website by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Background & Articles:

• Register to Vote: here

• TAPInto Newark: here

• Newark City Clerk’s Google Drive: here

• U.S. Census Page for Newark: here

• Sharpe James Threatens Suit for Certification Denial: here

• Wikipedia on 2014 Newark Mayor Election: here

• Justice Department’s Announcement of Charges Against Joseph McCallum: here

• Amador Announces Stepping Down from Council: here

Quote:

“Democracy in an era of enormously complex global constellations and powers requires a people who are educated, thoughtful, and democratic in sensibility. This means a people modestly knowing about these constellations and powers; a people with capacities of discernment and judgment in relation to what it reads, watches, or hears about a range of developments in its world; and a people oriented toward common concerns and governing itself.”—Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Beyond Story: An Interview and Conversation with Maisy Card

“Harlem. 2005. Let’s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death.” Thus begins These Ghosts Are Family, the debut novel of Maisy Card. Published in 2020, These Ghosts Are Family is the intergenerational story of the Paisley Family, one that harbors many secrets, including the faked death of Abel Paisely, which starts the book, and how the family grapples with history, trauma, slavery, White guilt, abandonment, poverty, and the Jamaican diaspora, among many other issues. Mia Alvar of the New York Times Book Review described the book as “a rich, ambitious debut novel, [where the] the ghosts bracingly remind [the reader] that no family history is comprehensive, that some riddles of ancestry and heritage persist beyond this lifetime.” Hannah Giorgis of the Atlantic wrote that the novel “moves across time and space as it deftly weaves the families’ paths . . . a tale of the most monstrous acts: intimate betrayals with unthinkable consequences.” Bookpage, in my favorite single line of any review of this book, said “There is magic in these pages.”

Maisy joins to podcast to discuss releasing her debut novel, the inspirations for her book, the themes present in her book, and her future plans as a writer.

Guest:

Maisy Card—Maisy is an author, librarian, and Newark resident. She was born in Portmore, Jamaica and was raised in Queens. She is also a graduate of Wesleyan University and of Brooklyn College’s MFA in Fiction program. Aside from being an adjunct in writing at Columbia, she was also a librarian at Newark Public Library and is a librarian with Donald Payne Tech. 

Background & Articles:

• Maisy Card’s author page: here

• These Ghosts Are Family Book Page: here

• Bookmarks Collection of Reviews of the Book: here

• We Keep the Dead Close Book Page: here

• Lolita Audiobook: here

• The Lolita Podcast: here

• The Prophets Book Page: here

• Luster Book Page: here

• All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running Book Page: here

• “The Singularity Is Here” by Ayad Akhtar: here

Quote:

“Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heat of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all–if the bird is already dead.” Toni Morrison, Lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature [source: The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations]