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…
“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…
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…
Bren Ram is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Diluvial Houston Predoctoral Fellow at Rice University, where she studies the intersection of risk and ecology. Course Description: This course is organized around three central questions: what is environmental film, why study film through the lens of the environment, and how is ecological thinking impacted by the medial constraints of film? Together, we…
Sophia Martinez-Abbud is a fourth-year PhD student in the English department. Her research excavates an underlying punk poetics in Chicanx literature published in the post-1960s. Course Description: This semester (Spring 2022), her Survey of Chicanx Literature and Culture class aims to provide students with the skills to appreciate, contextualize, and enjoy learning about Chicanx literature and culture. Because the course is cross-listed with SPPO…
Nina Cook is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at Rice University. She studies innovations in representation in visual art and literature from 1760-1880 and asks how techniques of representation in painting and novel writing mirror one another. Her fields of study are Romanticism, the Victorian novel, visual culture, gender studies, and the history of optics. Course Description: Our modern era is a product of…
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…
“I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives” Ecclesiastes 2:3b This Is How I Drown When I was four, my family went to Hawaii. We did not generally take vacations; in fact, this was one of only three I can recall throughout my childhood. I have come to regard my parents as distant, fantastical planets whose orbits…
