I was passing the time with an old friend of mine some time ago. We were drinking coffee, sitting lazily on her bed. I don’t remember what inane things led to this topic of conversation, but we started talking about physicality and our bodies, what we liked about them and what we didn’t. This was around the time I had begun questioning my gender identity, something I was open about…
When we first reached out to Paige Quiñones to interview her about love poetry, her initial reaction was to say, “I don’t write about love.” Compared to more traditional love poets, Paige’s poetry definitely breaks the mold of what we normally think love poetry is. Instead of praising warmth and desire, her poems address a different side of love, exploring its deep anxieties. She draws on influences from confessional poets,…
Peter Sellars is an American theater and opera director as well as a distinguished professor at UCLA. His tremendously popular undergraduate course, “Art as Social Action,” insists on the power of art to create structures of equality. Sellars has served as Director of the Boston Shakespeare Company and the American National Theater in Washington D.C., Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Festival, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983…
eat pizza with the english department! Being an English major at Rice means that manuscripts, screenplays, novels and other writing projects have deadlines that are coming up in the next few weeks as the semester winds down to a close. To take your mind off all of that important (but heavy) work, come out to Herring Hall (Room 225) on Monday, April 25th from 11:00AM-1:00PM for some pizza. Give yourself…
“held, still” is a multimedia project created in conversation with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It was made for ENGL 381, “A Century of Black Women Writers,” and is composed of a video, statement, and essay. “held, still” Statement In creating this piece, I felt it was crucial to complete the audio portion before anything else. I decided against using large gaps of silence; I wanted to portray quiet…
Each year, Rice University’s Chao Center for Asian Studies hosts the Transnational Asia Speaker Series, which, with the support of the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation, allows scholars of high regard to give guest lectures to the greater Houston area on topics pertinent to Asia and Asian life. Neferti X. M. Tadiar was one such speaker who gave her lecture on March 8th in Herring Hall. Professor Alden…
Before spring break, the English Department in association with the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts hosted a luncheon with distinguished poet francine j. harris on Rice’s campus. francine j. harris is a published author and has written Here Is the Sweet Hand (2020), play dead (2016), and allegiance (2012). her work has been featured in several journals, she is the recipient of numerous writing awards, and is currently an associate professor of…
Like Maya said Still I rise I rise like the sun on another beautiful day Glowing Shining Illuminating all the love there is to be given Providing warmth to those that love me I rise so that I may help others rise I rise to bring joy and grace and intelligence and I rise to show the world all the blessings I’ve been given But I also set like the…
Every semester, Rice offers a plethora of English courses spanning a diverse range of topics that attract students from every school of thought. This semester, Spring 2022, the course offerings bring forth a wide array of areas of interest, including focuses on subject matters such as translation, Milton, sports and more. The following courses have spots available and are open to all levels, majors and non-majors; this is an excellent…
Kelly McKisson is a PhD candidate in English here at Rice University. Her article, “The Subsident Gulf: Refiguring Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage,” was published in September 2021 for a special issue of the American Literature journal, which can be found here. In our interview with Kelly, read about her experiences working on and revising her essay towards publication and how it ultimately took about three years for…
