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…
“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…
“The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?” George Saunders At one point in the eighteen-month period during which I revised my memoir, This Is My Body, I tried to quit. I’d tweaked, tooled, and re-imagined many, many sentences. And these were not just any sentences.…
