PEER TALK at Willie Brown Middle School

Welcome to Season 2 of Peer Talk! We're so excited to be back for the 2026–2027 school year — for which we have exciting new guests, and new middle school students to interview them!

In late September, we returned to Brother Caleb Mathews' ethnic studies classroom, but this time, we had a class of newly-arrived sixth graders! For this class's interview guest, Brother Mathews chose Ms. Malea Mouton-Fuentes, principal of Willie Brown Middle School. You've heard her voice on our show before, and now, at last, she's in the spotlight!

After spending several years in New York for both college and her first jobs in education, Ms. Fuentes returned to her hometown of San Francisco to join the staff of the newly-rechristened Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School. She initially served as assistant principal before becoming interim principal just before the COVID-19 pandemic, and ascended to principal when schools returned to in-person instruction. Today, Ms. Fuentes continues to work tirelessly with other faculty and staff to ensure that Willie Brown M.S. remains a safe, enriching, and organized environment for all who enter its doors.

Brother Mathews chose Ms. Fuentes for this interview to personally introduce her to some of her new students, as well as to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. The sixth graders were ready with questions about Ms. Fuentes' background in education, her hopes for the future, and what daily life is like for the principal of a middle school. We had a blast with this sixth grade class, and we hope you'll have an equally good time listening to their conversation with their new principal!

For Peer Talk's Season 1 Finale, the 8th graders of Mr. O.’s Peer Resource class held their final interview as middle schoolers — and as a very special treat before graduation, their guest was three-time WNBA champion Kiah Stokes!

You read that right — THE Kiah Stokes, of the Golden State Valkyries!

Kiah Stokes is the daughter of former Philadelphia 76er Greg Stokes, and she gravitated towards basketball from a young age. She played for four years at the University of Connecticut, where she was part of four consecutive Final Four teams and won three straight national championships from 2013 to 2015. After going pro, Kiah won three championships with the Las Vegas Aces in 2022, 2023, and 2025, and two EuroLeague championships with Fenerbahçe Women's Basketball in 2023 and 2024.

After following her former Aces coach Natalie Nakase to join the Valkyries in 2025, Kiah has quickly become one of the Bay Area's most celebrated figures. And of course, the 8th graders were eager to ask her questions and learn more about her story. We want to thank Kiah so much for agreeing to join us on Peer Talk — her interview was a perfect ending to a spectacular season!

And, of course, we want to thank you, the listeners, for continuing to follow along with Peer Talk. We have many more incredible guests and stories to come. See you soon in Season 2!

For this episode, 8th grade math teacher Ms. Ainye Long & music teacher Dr. John King teamed up with us to teach their students about the intersection of music and mathematics. And, to really make it a party, we invited not one — not two — but FOUR musical guests for the 8th graders to interview!

Dancer and choreographer Blanche Brown (Susan's mom!), dancer and choreographer Halima Marshall, dancer Traci Schmitz, and percussionist Scooter Fine joined us at Willie Brown M.S. to offer their musical insight to their students, and performed a few Afro-Haitian dance numbers as well. The rhythms were infectious, and if you feel like tapping your toes at any point during this episode... well, our guests are clearly doing something right!

Why does music make us feel the way we do? What patterns can we find across all types of music? Stay tuned to learn the answers to these questions and more!

Software engineer Anne Halsall is the co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer of Winnie, an online directory for quality local child care services in metropolitan areas across the country. Since childhood, when her father bought an Apple II computer, Anne has been fascinated with the world of technology. After college, however, she noticed a disconcerting lack of women at the tech companies where she worked. The gender gap in tech motivated Anne to hire women employees when she co-founded Winnie. In her own words:

“  I deliberately chose to go work for organizations that had women in leadership, that had women in engineering, and that weren't just, like, teams of all men. My company is majority women and is also majority engineering. So that, to me, says when you walk in a room and it's all men, that was actually a choice.”

For this episode of Peer Talk, we brought in Mx. Oskar Soderberg’s 6th grade English class, the youngest group that we’ve worked with so far. The students had just read Hidden Figures for class, and were eager to learn more about the experiences of a woman in STEM. Anne and the students connected right away, thanks to both the students’ curiosity and Anne’s warm yet candid answers to their questions. We hope you’ll enjoy listening to their spirited conversation!

On Peer Talk, we can't think of a better way to celebrate the week of the 4th of July than with an episode on America's favorite pastime: baseball! Naturally, we're fans of the San Francisco Giants — and so, we were thrilled to score an interview with the Giants' current president and CEO, Larry Baer!

Mr. Baer's professional history with the team dates back to the 1980s. His personal history with the team goes even further back, to his childhood growing up in San Francisco. In 1992, after some time away from the Bay Area, Mr. Baer returned to San Francisco and co-founded an ownership group which kept the Giants from relocating to Miami. This group also helped move the team from Candlestick Park to Pacific Bell Park (now Oracle Park), where it still resides today. Since then, Mr. Baer has been as much of a fixture of San Francisco as the Giants have.

The eighth-grade students of Mr. O.'s Peer Resources class had plenty of questions about the inner workings of a Major League team, and they hit this interview out of the park! Enjoy — and GO GIANTS!

From 1986 until her retirement in 2018, Carolyn Tyler was a household name in the Bay Area, as news anchor and reporter for KGO-TV/ABC7. During her tenure, Carolyn covered numerous breaking stories and hosted two Emmy-nominated series — including a series on the Civil Rights Movement and the impact that it had on Bay Area high school students. For covering the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Carolyn and her ABC7 news team received the Peabody Award. Currently, Carolyn serves on the San Francisco Film Commission, the Board of Governors for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences representing Northern California, and the board of the Alonzo King Lines Ballet.

In both her professional and personal life, Carolyn has amassed a treasure trove of experiences, which we were so excited to share with Mr. Mathews' Ethnic Studies class. Seeing a black anchorwoman on television news inspired Carolyn to professionally pursue journalism, and we hope that the students at Willie Brown will, in turn, be inspired by her and her stories.

The school year is ending as summer begins, but not to worry — Peer Talk will continue through the next few months until school starts back up again!

Our guest for this episode is Osagie Ero, currently a software engineer at Amazon Music. Originally from Los Angeles, Osagie moved to San Francisco after graduating the University of Southern California. He began his professional career at Workday, where he helped to create a proprietary programming language for the company's Workday Student product. After a stint as a founding engineer at the blockchain startup Claim, Osagie later joined Astranis Space Technologies, where he undertook one of his most ambitious projects: developing a scheduling algorithm for Astranis's satellites to automatically communicate with Earth, which used to be a manual process. Now, at Amazon Music, Osagie combines his love of technology and engineering with his lifelong love of music.

Since Willie Brown is a STEM-focused school, we were so grateful to have Osagie, a STEM professional, speak with the students of Mr. Jacobson's Computer Science class. The kids and Osagie almost instantly connected with each other, and we hope you'll enjoy their conversation as much as we did while recording.

The 2026 Bay Area Book Festival heads to Downtown Berkeley from Friday, May 29 to Sunday, May 31, hosting over a hundred panels and special guests. It's an event where readers and writers of all sorts come together to hold meaningful conversations on both local and global interests. The Festival's rebellious, community-focused spirit is in part thanks to its current Executive Director, J. K. Fowler.

J. K. is a prolific essayist whose body of work focuses on social justice and human connection. In 2011, J. K. founded Nomadic Press, a community-oriented publishing house in Oakland; Nomadic Press will return as Nomadic Bookshop in 2026, after a three-year hiatus. J. K. is also a Policy and Outreach Analyst with BAMBD, CDC (Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation of Oakland). He pushes people to think outside their comfort zone and open dialogues with others from all walks of life.

We were lucky to have met J. K. just before the end of the school year — AND before the Book Festival — so we could have the students at Willie Brown Middle School interview him. Listen in as Mr. Mathews' Ethnic Studies class speaks to J. K. Fowler!

Since 1907, the Fairmont Hotel — located in the upscale neighborhood of Nob Hill — has been one of San Francisco's most esteemed and elegant institutions. For over 50 years, the first person to greet Fairmont guests upon their arrival has been the doorman, William May.

May began working at the Fairmont in the mid-1970s, at a time when African-Americans had far-less-prominent roles in the hospitality industry. In his illustrious career as doorman and brand ambassador for the Fairmont, May has met famous historical figures like Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis, U.S. Presidents, other world leaders, entertainers, and more. All the while, he has proudly embraced his role in the history of the hospitality industry, and unwaveringly embodied the mission of the Fairmont Hotel and its brand.

Listen in as Mr. Mathews' Ethnic Studies Class interviews the legendary William May!

In March of 2026, Peer Talk and the students of Willie Brown Middle School received a very special visitor from 400 years in the past: the Bard himself, William Shakespeare!

Thanks to Kevin Patterson of Red Barn Productions, Peer Talk got in touch with Joseph Schmitz, an actor who has performed as Shakespeare at the Northern California Renaissance Faire for the past three decades. Schmitz is also a teacher of Shakespeare's Heartbeat — a performing arts program for neurodiverse students to engage with theatre through Shakespeare's iambic pentameter — as part of Eureka Street Learning in San Francisco.

Schmitz joined our podcast in-character as William Shakespeare to answer questions from Ms. Vanessa Paiz's Eighth Grade English class, who had just studied and performed Twelfth Night. Join the students as they learn more about Shakespeare's life, the world of theatre in the 15th–16th Centuries, and how stage plays from hundreds of years ago can still resonate with audiences in the modern day.