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Born into “the most hated family in America,” Megan Phelps-Roper grew up believing that she was working to save people from eternal damnation with her church’s extremist messages. By the age of 5, she was on the picket lines with the Westboro Baptist Church, protesting everything from plays to military funerals with profane signs and slogans.

Ms. Phelps-Roper, who left the Westboro Baptist Church—and most of her family—in 2012, told 91̽�� students that meeting people on social media who thoughtfully challenged her church’s narrow and contradictory interpretation of the Bible helped her walk away from hate. Ms. Phelps-Roper visited 91̽�� as this year’s Class of 1952 Religious Understanding Speaker.

The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population, but comprises 25 percent of the world’s prison population. And while Massachusetts is often heralded as a haven for progressivism, its ratio of black to white inmates is higher than the national average, said Rahsaan D. Hall, the Racial Justice Program Director for the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Mr. Hall visited campus as the Onyx Assembly speaker in recognition of Black History Month. A former prosecutor, Mr. Hall described policing, courts and the prisons as the “criminal legal system,” as opposed to the criminal justice system.

Malia Chung (III) was one of two winners of the 12th-annual Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize. Malia submitted two poems for consideration and a group of semi-finalists were invited to read their poems to judges as part of the selection process. The winners represented “exceptional quality of poetry, along with pitch perfect presentation and ability to command the audience.”

Malia began writing poems seriously in eighth grade. Last year, she won a Scholastic Writing Gold Key Award for poetry. She is taking Mr. Connelly’s Creative Writing class, where she worked on the two submitted poems for the Creeley Prize, “Crabbing in Bethany, Delaware” and “My Great-Grandfather’s Lithuanian Cavalry Stirrups.”

“There is something different about writing for this class; I don’t see it as homework. You can write on your own time and when you are inspired, which I really enjoy,” says Malia.

“Books were my first teachers, my best teachers,” writer Paul Yoon told 91̽�� students while on campus as this spring’s Bingham Visiting Writer.

During his reading, followed by a Q&A with students, Mr. Yoon described his evolution from a voracious reader to a writer (“It was like falling in love”) and explained that his inspiration for writing comes from the books that move him. When he reads something special, he writes to “respond” to that work.