Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed)
“Frank O'Hara's 'Dictionary of Art': A Collaborative Ekphrasis”
Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry (forthcoming)
A version of my first dissertation chapter, this article highlights the ekphrastic origins of a group of early poems by the midcentury American poet Frank O’Hara, written between 1952-1957. It suggests that these poems challenge the conventionally inimical ekphrastic relationship between word and image by instead positioning them in an interdependent collaboration. It further considers how obscuring or revealing these the works’ ekphrastic designations alters their reception.
This article was borne of my first-year research and writing course, "Feminist and Queer in Primetime," which positioned feminist and queer theory as a lens through which to analyze contemporary television. It outlines two pedagogical strategies that proved particularly useful in the course: the use of reality TV as a paradigm for feminist theory and the use of an alternative genre writing assignment. (See Teaching for more!)
This article attends to Rich’s often neglected early verse, focusing on “Autumn Equinox” from The Diamond Cutters (1955). Testifying to her deep historical imagination, the poem not only offers a feminist response to 1950s social and poetic mores but directly anticipates the themes of her overtly critical later volumes. Over the span of two decades, Rich’s poetry is an enduring testament to the way women and women writers learn to survive and thrive despite the restrictive circumstances they inherit.
"Frank O'Hara: Salute to the French Negro Poet Aimé Césaire”
The Comparatist 41 (2017): 257-272.
Placing the consummate New York poet within a transnational context, this paper considers the striking affinities between O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings" (1956) and Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1947). It examines how, in their respective works, both authors conceive of selfhood and its connection to language, their tentative relationships with their homelands and Surrealism, and their remarkably similar serpentine imagery.
This article examines the dialogic exchange between O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” and contemporary painter Jasper John’s eponymous piece that converges both on a fluid negotiation of artistic modes and on a discourse of “the body.” In both, the continual movement—the artists’ and our own—between surface (body/ public) and interior (feelings/ private) complicate divisions between subject and object, sexual conformity and difference, and life and death. In their work, the body becomes an index that lives on only through touch and memory.
Creative, Web-Based, & Other Writing
GradHacker for Inside Higher Ed (Contributing Writer, 2017-present)
- How to Draft a Dissertation in a Year (Nov. '17)
- Let Your Students Say 'I' (Dec. '17)
- Cultivating Authority as Female Graduate Student (Jan. '18)
- Anatomy of an Assignment Sheet (Feb. '18)
- The Name Game (Mar. '18)
- Things I've Learned Along the Way (Apr. '18)
Other Pieces:
Poetry
Waterlogged
PHILADELPHIA STORIES , FALL 2011 ISSUE
Water, Communion
PHILADELPHIA STORIES, WINTER 2009 ISSUE
REPRINTED IN 10th ANNIVERSARY ISSUE (2014):
BEST OF THE BEST POETRY OF THE LAST DECADE