Erin Gruwell
<p>Former inner-city high school English teacher Erin Gruwell changed the lives of her students and became a change agent for the future of education with her philosophy of tolerance, respect, and the power of writing one’s own story.</p><p>Charged with turning around a class of low performing, underserved kids who lived in a community plagued by gang violence and racial hostility, Gruwell compared the family feud in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> to a gang war and used the stories of Anne Frank and Zlata Filipović—students who wrote about their lives during wartime—t