Shackled: To A Front-Row Seat of My Own Horror Film

This document serves as internal view point, stemming from my experiences as a black muslim, first generation Ethiopian American, overall identity, and it’s disorienting implication on my interpretation of my view-self and the world. This is also informed by my struggling with the realities of type-1 diabetes and the sporadic and often inadequate support of the American health system. All of these intersecting experiences have led to me making work as an agent for advocacy, empathy and social justice. This work is also informed and dressed with the elements of horror, sci-fi, & fantasy. See and hear the voice in this desolate yet continuously changing environment that is nestled within

Snow Angel

Abstract Snow Angel is a song cycle for two singers and instrumental sextet that presents the rediscovery and reclamation of personal identity and agency following trauma through the words of Kansas poet Wyatt Townley. Snow Angel represents my current compositional style, synthesizing classical and vernacular idioms to portray a first-person, female perspective of assault and recovery. The work makes use of the dialog and interactions between the soprano and mezzo-soprano to voice the victim’s thoughts and feelings as she processes the experience. The musical material of Snow Angel supports the concept of the cycle through motivic and harmonic means. Throughout the course of the work, recurring musical gestures reappear in different contexts. The first nine songs, though linked, are independent enough to be excerpted for performance independent of the cycle, while the final song is essentially a remix of motives from the other songs and functions as an open-ended postlude that closes the cycle while looking forward to a new beginning

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 46 (09) 1993

published or submitted for publicatio

Forms of release : the escape poetry of Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost

textThe four poets in this dissertation--Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Frost--write poems that resist domestic confinement. In these poems, houses become prisons from which the poet must enact an escape. Pulter, Bradstreet, Hardy and Frost--writers drawn from two sides of the Atlantic and two different centuries--are nevertheless linked by the urge to create poems that will provide doorways to less confined states of existence. They are also linked by the formal strategies they use for the attainment of such poetic release, and by the scale of their rebellion against enclosing structures. All four poets make claustrophobic domestic spaces the topic of their poetry, but rather than writing their objections into the unbounded space of free verse, they mimic the confinement of small rooms in the restrained dimensions of their poems. Rather than discard the enclosure of poetry, they accept its confinement. Their forms of release, then, are more pointed; they emerge at brief instances, as opposed to making wholesale departures. Instead of using their poems to create boundless spaces, unrestricted by walls and ceilings and floors, they use their poems to create rooms similar to those occupied by their personae. In poems such as these, poetic freedom is less absolute than relative to the extent of confinement, and it is made sweeter by the awareness of inescapable limits.Englis

Voices in Psychosis

Voices in Psychosis: Interdisciplinary Perspectives deepens and extends the understanding of hearing voices in psychosis in a striking way. For the first time, this collection brings multiple disciplinary, clinical and experiential perspectives to bear on an original and extraordinarily rich body of testimony: transcripts of forty in-depth phenomenological interviews conducted with people who hear voices and who have accessed Early Intervention in Psychosis services. Voice-hearing experiences associated with psychosis are highly varied, frequently distressing, poorly understood, and deeply stigmatized, even within mental health services. Voices in Psychosis responds to the urgent need for new ways of listening to and making sense of these experiences. The book addresses the social, clinical and research contexts in which the interviews took place, thoroughly investigating the embodied, multisensory, affective, linguistic, spatial, and relational qualities of voice-hearing experiences. The nature, politics, and consequences of these analytic endeavours is a focus of critical reflection throughout. This volume presents a collection of essays by members and associates of the Hearing the Voice project that were written in response to the transcripts. Each chapter gives a multifaceted insight into the experiences of voice-hearers in the North East of England and to their wider resonance in contexts ranging from medieval mysticism to Amazonian shamanism, from the nineteenth-century novel to the twenty-first-century survivor movement

Ghosts of the African Diaspora

The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers—Fred D’Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers’ engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies