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Judy Grahn's The Highest Apple
Sinister Wisdom (2023)
From Sinister Wisdom: In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book The Highest Apple. With her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling, Grahn situated poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Bromas as central to lesbian culture-and more radically as central to society as a whole.
With Alicia Mountain, I co-edited the new edition of this significant work, which was re-published as part of Sinister Wisdom's Sapphic Classics series. The new edition includes updated language and a deeper discussion of the work of Pat Parker, as well as response essays by six contemporary poets. I also wrote the foreword. Watch the launch reading, starring Judy Grahn, here.
Elizabeth Bishop's Queer Lists
Prose Studies (2021)
Mid-20th-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop used lists in her notes to collect and select language for her poems and to think associatively on the page, blurring the worlds of the everyday and the literary. Bishop’s archival drafts, published poetry, and published prose evince a poetics of list-making that provided the writer with a means of achieving highly accurate descriptions that convey a spontaneous mind in motion, turn the catalog into a surrealist camera, and queer class boundaries via a fragmentary, nonhierarchical grammar. Ultimately, this project offers a new approach to queering the archive by suggesting a politics of preservation that fore- grounds the ephemeral.
"Keeping Up a Silent Conversation": Recovering a Queer Bishop Through her Intimate Correspondence with Alice Methfessel
Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive, Press, Lever Press, ed. Bethany Hicok (2020)
The Elizabeth Bishop archive at Vassar College contains 241 letters, postcards, and greeting cards between Bishop and her partner Alice Methfessel. This chapter provides the first full overview of the letters’ content and an analysis of their material qualities, arguing that the letters, as physical artifacts, served as a technology of intimacy for the correspondents by allowing them to conjure one another in a tactile way. In illuminating these letters, this chapter works to further recover Bishop’s lesbian identity, resisting the way that, as scholar Jack Halberstam puts it, “lesbianism has conventionally come to be associated with the asexual, the hidden, the ‘apparitional’ and the invisible.” This chapter makes visible an openly erotic, queer Bishop absent from her published letters but very much present in the archive.
Fostering Jesuit Queer Inclusivity in a Charged Political Environment
Jesuit Higher Education (2021)
Co-authored with Erin Winterrowd
This paper identifies three specific strategies used to promote queer inclusivity at a small Jesuit Catholic university in a politically charged environment: educating the community via intentionally designed inclusivity trainings; cultivating deep roots through coalition-building and strategic organizing; and foregrounding Catholic social teachings in the conversation. We use a local controversy to contextualize and demonstrate the importance of these strategies when fostering queer inclusivity on Jesuit campuses. We frame our discussion within a larger conversation about LGBTQIA+ issues on college campuses (including Catholic campuses) and the role that Jesuit values in higher education have to play in building inclusive communities.
Staging Othello: Turning Students into Directors
Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments (2020)
The Othello staging project invites introductory literature students to imagine that they are directing a new production of Othello. Students create a production proposal and poster that illustrate their directorial choices, using their original interpretation of the play as a guiding philosophy. This assignment successfully addresses many of the challenges associated with teaching an introductory-level, required "core" course of non-English-majors, as well as the challenges of teaching drama in general and Shakespeare in particular. Creative response assignments like this prompt can foster student engagement, mitigate student writing anxiety, and deepen student understandings of plays as living documents open to artistic interpretation.
Infographics: A Powerful Combination of Words, Image, and Data
Multimodal Composing, ed. Lindsay A. Sabatino and Brian Fallow (2019)
Infographics are multimodal texts that combine words, visuals, and data to convey complex ideas. This chapter outlines the basic design principles of infographics and offers tips for consultants working with beginning infographic designers, as well as resources for planning, creating, and revising infographics. Key topics include rhetorical awareness, working with data, organization, typography, and color. By focusing on the rhetorical situation and the story behind the data, consultants help student designers create powerful, communicative infographics.
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