How Do You Get Into Nonfiction?
Nonfiction is hard to read. I get it — whether it be the emotional connection you form with the characters or the escape from reality afforded by a rich plot, fiction just hits different. Usually, people’s mental image of nonfiction looks like dense academic articles,...
The Last Word: We Move Together
Note to reader: This letter is a Call-In to our community, compiled with reflection and advice that graduated student leaders and past City on a Hill Press editors want to share with you. We graduated this year. Just like that — goodbye college, goodbye Santa...
The Transfer Blues: Reflecting on My First Weeks at UC Santa Cruz
“It’s high tide, you’ll learn to get by.” I moved into my apartment last September with all the grace of a bull in a porcelain shop. Sweaty, disheveled, butterfingered. Nighttime settled in before I could ferry my precious cargo from my dad’s minivan to the...
Artists Exist Somewhere: A Thank You Letter to the Staff of City On a Hill Press
Spring 2022. Fifteen of us sat around connected tables in a first-floor Kresge classroom. Some of us reporters, illustrators, some fact-checkers and copy-editors, all of us staff members of City On a Hill Press, as our media advisor Susan Watrous began our first class of...
I Won’t Be Using My Flat Iron To Press My Graduation Gown
Soft curls loop in on themselves and lay haphazardly across the top of her head and onto her forehead. Her eyes are big, round, and bright, and seem to take up most of her face. The eye doctor tells her she needs to pin her...
Was My White Boyfriend a Better Asian Than Me?
There I am in the kitchen, staunchly positioned in front of a flour-dusted cutting board and a small rolling pin. It’s as if I just stepped up to a podium and I’m soaking in the crowd — but in response, I only get awkward feedback...
Existential Crisis in the Dining Hall
“I’m just saying! ‘New Tea, New Me. Numi.’ It’s got rhymes, alliteration, and word play. I’d buy it just for that slogan.” This ingenious conversation is just one snippet of the many memories I have from my freshman year of college, seated with my friends...
If It Feels Good, Wear It
I work at a not-so-conventional boutique in downtown Santa Cruz. Walk in, and you’ll find paper-white walls, a speckled tan linoleum? floor, and black metal racks filled with clothes curated from Oakland to Uruguay. It would be boring, if not for the bright clothing and...
Love: What We’ve Got to Do With It
An orange sea washed over the steps of the California State Capitol. Students several years my junior, adorned in orange shirts, glasses, and hats, held up handmade signs as they rallied for proper relationship health education. This “Orange Day of Action,” named after the signature...
Back in Print Two Years Later: What the Return of Campus Publications Means to Me
On Wednesdays, we’d watch the sunset from the Press Center patio, scarf down takeout from Tam’s, and gather around our desktops as newspaper pages were laid out by Ella Apuntar, our then-production manager (and to me, an absolute wizard). I joined City on a Hill...