Eliza Kretzmann is the executive director of the Railyard Park Stewards, a new organization dedicated to the caretaking of the Railyard Park and encouraging broad community use and stewardship of the park.

Inmate No. 44521 doesn’t want to be Mark Reyes anymore. The 35-year-old prisoner at Penitentiary of New Mexico has filed a petition to change his name to Monica Meshica Wolf Tenocha, which he says better represents his identity as an Aztec high Satanic priest and an individual coping with gender dysphoria.

An accolade darling on the underground circuit—he received Best Feature at the Underground Film Festival in both New York and Chicago—Jon Moritsugu creates films that in mainstream circles are called “offensive,” “perverse,” “low-budget” and just plain “weird.” Moritsugu and his wife/collaborator, Amy Davis, traded in the cloud cover of the Pacific Northwest for Santa Fe’s adobe and arroyos to film Moritsugu’s newest work.

Larry Hinz is the senior vice president of business development for Laureate Education, Inc. He has been one of the principal architects of a proposal for Laureate to lease College of Santa Fe facilities in order to continue arts-based higher education in Santa Fe. The Santa Fe City Council is scheduled to vote on Wednesday, July 29 on whether or not to purchase the college land and lease to Laureate.

Randy Grissom is the interim director of the Santa Fe Community College’s Sustainable Technologies Center. Last week, SFCC announced it had received a $100,000 grant from Los Alamos National Securities that will be used to support the center.
 

State Sen. Phil Griego, D-Los Alamos, has a big résumé. It includes stints in former US Sen. Pete Domenici’s, R-NM, office, as Santa Fe’s mayor pro tem and, less illustriously, as a habitual drunk driver. After getting caught, he helped pass New Mexico’s ignition interlock law. Now the 60-year-old real estate agent is among the more credible voices on how to deal with DWI—a vital concern, after the June 28 crash on Old Las Vegas Highway that killed four teenagers. Griego says he no longer drinks.

Ted Wiard knows grief. He’s suffered through the worst and emerged with a commitment to help others survive loss through grief counseling and through the Golden Willow Retreat he founded in Taos. The Monday morning after the June 28 crash that left four teens dead, Wiard helped Santa Fe Preparatory and Monte del Sol schools with one of the most emotionally challenging weeks in the community’s history.

Judy Goldberg is the executive director of the Youth Media Project, a program in Santa Fe high schools that teaches students about radio production. It airs at 7 pm every other Wednesday on KSFR 101.1 FM. Goldberg’s own radio show, Back Roads Radio, airs on KSFR at 1 pm every Sunday.

Joni Arends is the executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety—which watchdogs the environmental and health effects of the work done at LANL. SFR spoke with her about the CDC's 558-page report that found dangerous “airborne releases” from Los Alamos National Laboratory “were significantly greater than has been officially reported,” and that “exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion”—the 1945 Trinity test—“were measured at levels 10,000 times higher than currently allowed.”

Richard McCord co-founded the Santa Fe Reporter in June, 1974 with Laurel Knowles and acted as its editor and publisher for 15 years. McCord also is the author of The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Versus The Gannett Empire, a must-read for anyone interested in journalism, the Reporter or a gripping David versus Goliath tale.