We recently connected with Patrick Hawkins and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Patrick , thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I was a very artistic child growing up, and my parents always supported us in every endeavor we wanted. When I was around ten or eleven, I decided that I wanted to draw and become an artist. I had the most amazing art teacher in Augusta, GA. He was a black artist that worked downtown and promoted the beauty of being black. His art was part of our culture, making it even more of a safe space for me. As I got older, I joined the school choir and learned that I loved music and singing, and that sparked a different flame on my creative journey. Then when I was in high school, I joined the choir and then I auditioned for the drama department, which was my start in the world of creative arts. From then on, acting and telling stories were what made me tick. I eventually went off to college and graduated with a Bachelors’s in Drama Education and started a new journey to be creative. As an educator, I saw that reading was not an activity that was done in many homes, so I decided to promote reading in the home with my YouTube and park show The Reading Nest.

Knowing what I know now, I would just have kept with my creative life when I first started teaching because teaching takes a lot of my time. To speed up the process, I would have asked for help from my family and friends sooner to help.

The best skills that are essential are communication skills, being personable, being open-minded, and having the flexibility to know that there are going to be some highs and lows. There are many obstacles that stand in the way and the biggest one is me being my worst critic and giving up on myself. Also, have the time to promote yourself in the world to people because I feel that true promotion is talking to the people around you.

Patrick , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Patrick Hawkins Jr., I am originally from Augusta, Georgia, but lived in Atlanta after graduating from Piedmont College in 2009. Currently, I am a Special Education teacher in Rhode Island, a mentor, and life coach for teens and adults, and a storyteller. In 2017, while living in Atlanta, I started tutoring and trying to start my educational consulting business called Hawkins Learning. I was helping parents make sure that homes were structured and set up to help build confidence, success, and independence in their children. I loved working and helping these families because I felt if children had a solid foundation at home that was supportive of the individual child as well, then they would be able to have that confidence in themselves and then provide intrinsic motivation. This was sometimes challenging because you would have families not all on board with the change. I was so feeling discouraged because this was not fulfilling my creative mind. So, I decided to remove myself from the consulting world and changed directions. When the pandemic happened I was teaching and I knew that my students were not reading at home and I knew that I needed to do something new. I was teaching at home one day and I got the idea to start a YouTube channel called The Reading Nest to promote literacy in the home. I set up a stand in my office and used my phone and whatever free program I found to edit my videos and thus The Reading Nest was born. The Reading Nest was to help our black and brown youth that stories can take us to different worlds and we can learn from them. So at the end of each show, I provided a lesson that they could take away from the book. After, doing a few months of YouTube shows, I started The Reading Nest podcast when I would read chapter books. This was not as successful as I thought, but I did it anyway and I loved it. Then when were able to go back into the world, I teamed up with my friend In Atlanta to have picnics in the park and The Reading Nest would perform, tell, and read stories. We did this for a summer in Atlanta in a few parks, but the timing was not right, so we stop performing. Since moving to Rhode Island, I am working to regroup and rebrand The Reading Nest to make it more meaningful for our youth and promote new and up-and-coming children’s book authors. As a storyteller, I am the proudest when I can tell a story to my students and they can learn a lesson and then teach that lesson to someone they know. My craft is to help children and sometimes adults that a story can take us on journeys and those journeys can teach a lesson. I also promote love and support to all who know me or have worked with me.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

As a creative, the most rewarding aspect is seeing a smile on someone’s face as I tell a story and interacting with them to help bring the story to life.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Society can support artists and creatives by giving them the space to have a voice. Giving them space to show off their creativity without any judgment. Everyone has some type of creativity in them it just looks different because we are all different.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hawkinslearning
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hawkinslearning/
• Youtube: The Reading Nest

Image Credits
Zykeria Holmes