Creative Writing Commons^™

The Creation Of An African American Jewish Culinary Tradition: Michael Twitty And The Passover Seder As A Vehicle For Remembering Trauma And Celebrating Survival, Samira Mehta

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The Exodus of the Israelites has long held meaning for African American Christians, as noted by scholars of African American religious history. Jewish studies scholars, meanwhile, have written about both Passover and Jewish relationships to the Exodus. Michael Twitty, public historian, James Beard award-winning author, and memoirist, has fused an identity for himself by drawing on the foodways of both traditions to remember and memorialize the trauma of both traditions While Twitty uses food to create meaning in the context of holidays, his memoirs, Kosher Soul and The Cooking Gene, explore how the food of trauma, poverty, and resilience provide …

“Caroline”: Deviance In Southern Women’S Poetry, Sage Aspyn Short

All Theses

Deviance in Southern women’s poetry can be characterized by uncertainty, religious images, and through the telling of stories often unheard of, forgotten, or erased, like racial and gendered violence. Glenis Redmond’s poetry in The Listening Skin and What My Hand Say both explore Southern womanhood alongside race, history, violence, illness, and legacy, among other themes and topics. In Caroline: Poems some deviances include religious metaphors alongside obsessive compulsive disorder, excessive cursing from a woman speaker, and historical graveyard musings. Critical texts about lyric theory and voice provide some background and historical significance to be used in this contemporary study and …

“A Book Of Many Rooms”: Joshua Bennett As Personal Tour Guide Through Decades Of Spoken Word Poetry, Michael Baumann

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Review of Joshua Bennett, Spoken Word: A Cultural History. Knopf, 2023. 304 pages.

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Appealing To Truancy: How Mary Oliver Escapes Americana, John Wise

Student Writing

How the work of Mary Oliver disagrees with the American Cultural way of thinking.

Developing And Sustaining A Graphic Scholarship Collection For Academic Libraries, Stewart Brower, Toni Hoberecht, Zane Ratcliffe, Bethie Seay

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

In early 2021, the Schusterman Library at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa satellite campus took a new step towards building a culture of interest by creating the Graphic Scholarship Collection. This new endeavor is a curated collection of graphic novels, primarily non-fiction, aligned with the academic programs on campus, as well as promoting University initiatives in diversity, equity, and inclusion. A new organizational structure for the collection materials and their circulation metrics will be examined in detail. There will also be consideration of the challenges of selection and acquisition by a mixed team of selectors, some of whom have no experience …

Reflections Of “Use Of Comics In Social Studies Education” Course: The Opinion And Experiences Of Teachers, Genç Osman İlhan, Maide Şin

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

It is well known that a quality teacher education is necessary for qualified education. Teachers must be well-trained in multiple areas and have an open-minded structure. They must develop strategies based on the lesson and students, which needs effective material development and use. The materials to be used could be prepared by others and can be incorporated into the classroom setting or teachers could design and present them to students, which is essential for the quality of instruction. When a teacher creates and effectively employs instructional materials, his/her self-confidence will increase and teaching will be enriched and made easier. Comics …

Detroit Poet Laureate: A Local And National Necessity, Rosemary O'Meara

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

From 1981–2020, Detroit officials appointed a city-recognized poet laureate. Though the position has been vacant since the 2020 death of Naomi Long Madgett, this essay advocates for reinstatement of a Detroit poet laureate to help spotlight important Detroit artists and to ensure that the words and ideas of Detroiters are sustained and celebrated. A poet laureate would continue to uniquely serve Detroit to help preserve its complex history and contribute to a literary canon specific to the city.

Double Consciousness, Mirrors, And The Children Within Them: A Conceptual Reading Of W. E. B. Du Bois's "As The Crow Flies", Adeline Navarro

Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research

This research essay argues that W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crow from his magazine column “As the Crow Flies” is a figurative device for double consciousness and examines how aspects of double consciousness are present in the frequent motifs of dialectic doubleness in the column. Drawing from scholar Rudine Sims Bishop, this essay explores how the Crow functions as a mirror that children can use to realize their own double consciousness and thus see themselves. This insight into Du Bois’s news column provides a further understanding of the significance of accessible, multicultural children’s literature.

The American West, 1899–1936: Prose, Poetry & Drama, Harriet Monroe, Michael R. Hill, Lindsay Atnip

Zea E-Books Collection

This comprehensive volume presents Harriet Monroe’s (1860–1936) previously unexplored love affair with the American West, an infatuation that blossomed in three interrelated genres: prose, poetry, and drama. Known internationally as the founder and influential editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, here Monroe is revealed as a prolific author with a passion for the people, scenery, and environments she encountered during western escapes from her constricted urban life in Chicago. Monroe’s western travels were transformative. Originally schooled in the literary and artistic traditions of Europe, Monroe became increasingly convinced of the fundamental importance of the American West as the …

Beyond Words: An Exploration Of Research And Writing For Indigenous Land Acknowledgements, Oksana Flores

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone delves into the practical application and importance of land acknowledgments within the frameworks of Critical Indigenous Theory and Narrative Theory. Through the utilization of archival research methods, the project not only offers recommendations for crafting an effective land acknowledgment but also provides the necessary historical foundation for the implementation of such a statement at Kennesaw State University. This effort serves to strengthen the university's commitment to diversity and equity on campus.

Barbie: For Better Or Worse, Renee Ho

Pop Culture Intersections

This article covers a history of Barbie, as well as an analysis of the live action Barbie movie. Barbie lovers and haters alike often debate whether the iconized doll is a feminist figure. Those who critique her argue that the messages she sends are superficial, or that Barbie perpetuates an unrealistic beauty standard and causes harm to the mental well being of her audience, especially because most of her target audience is made up of younger, impressionable girls. However, there is no doubt that Barbie can also be a role model for her audience. She was the first doll to …

Nostalgia's Complicated Role In Contemporary Pop Culture, Ethan Clawsie

Pop Culture Intersections

Over the past several decades, there has been a growing trend of nostalgia in popular culture, with the number of remakes, reboots, and revivals of classic films, television shows, and music at an all-time high. Dozens of old TV shows have also been rebooted in the past few years, old movies are being remade, much of the music that’s been released lately has been engineered to sound like it came from the past, and a subset of recent video games either build upon old games (like Pokémon GO), or are made to look and feel like old games (like Flappy …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Ploy : An Immigrant Daughter's Archival Survival Strategy, Porntip Israsena Twishime

Doctoral Dissertations

Transnational human migration is commonly conceptualized as the moment a person crosses national borders. In “PLOY : An Immigrant Daughter’s Archival Survival Strategy,” I advance a framework of migration in which migration is an ongoing embodied and relational process, one that continues after a person crosses national borders. This framework maintains that migration exists as a meaningful concept because of the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that gives this type of mobility meaning. I use a performative novel methodology to construct and represent this argument; a performative novel methodology uses fiction and the novel as a performative text …

Nella Larsen’S Passing: Ambiguous Symbology & Weather, Sara Casten

Anthós

Nella Larsen wrote Passing in 1929, a novella that explored the relationship between two women of mixed race: Irene and Clare. This article highlights the complimentary weather elements with the emotional turbulence experienced by Irene as she tells the story; Clare’s warmth and beauty to Irene’s cold and lack thereof. This article also explores the skills of Larsen to write these ambiguous complimentary weather elements in Passing by highlighting her other novella Quicksand, published the year before.

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates “affiliation” as a socio-spatial poetics and spatial ontology, a departure from the past and future to the material, landed present. The author’s experience growing up proximate to federally ordered uranium mining and nuclear weapons research on Indigenous land and at Los Alamos National Labs drives this work’s aim to render visible the economic, social, and ideological structures governing social-spatial dynamics in the North American context. This dissertation argues for a poetics of affiliation as a methodology, to move beyond theoretical and discursive questions in scholarship to negotiations of the social at scales that affect systems beyond the …

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Me, Myself, And My Muppets, Sara Jones

Emerging Writers

In this personal narrative, the author explores her relationship and upbringing in relation to Jim Henson’s Muppets. She illustrates her experience at puppet camps, on long Muppet-filled road trips, and the special connection her mother and her share with the Muppets. Find out how the Muppets have shaped the author’s life, morals, and aspirations, as well as how Jim Henson’s creations have influenced and brought joy to past generations and future generations to come.

Amjambo Africa! (January 2023), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In this Issue

War in eastern DRC ............2-3

Updates from Africa ................4

Depression/refugee camps...... 5

Editorial .....................................6

Amjambo Arts: Phuc Tran ......7

Advice: Someone to trust .....8-9

In 7 languages

Notable inaugurations .....10-11

Coastal resilience ...................11

All about the Workforce ........12

Financial literacy/New Year ..12

Legislative Update ..................13

MCA Giraffe awards ..............14

Tips & Info ..............................15

Year in Review .................. 16-17

Health & Wellness.......18-23, 25

Protecting vision

Health in winter

In 7 languages

Portland Adult Ed. .................27

Abolitionist movement ..........27

Languages are similar ............27

Ukrainian perspective ...........28

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …

Constance After Dark, Connor Vanmaele

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Constance After Dark is an episodic screenplay, outlining the beginning, middle and end of a television comedy pilot. Set in Ohio, the story follows Brooks Riegler in his first semester at the fictional “Constance College” as he navigates the ups and downs of university life at the lowest ranked school in the state. Due to a class taught by the eccentric and nefarious Dr. Mars, Brooks learns to open up to hyperactive athletes, obsessive overachievers, and even strange, mysterious men urinating on the side of the road. Brooks, Cassidy, Jenny and Guy form a tight-knit and unlikely bond in a …

Naruto And Naruto: Shippuden Through The Lens Of Campbell’S Monomyth, Victor Ayon

Literary and Intercultural Studies | Senior Theses

“Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden through the lens of Campbell’s Monomyth” is a comparative analysis of the anime television series Naruto (2002-2007 Japan, 2005-2009 USA) and its sequel Naruto: Shippuden (2007-2017 Japan, 2009-2019 USA) with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as delineated in his The Hero with the Thousand Faces. These Japanese anime television series that are considered one of the most popular worldwide, and yet the hero’s quest in each series is often overlooked. This study both compares and contrasts how the Campbellian stages of monomyth intersect with Naruto and Naruto: Shippuden animation narratives.

Football Can Save America, Francisco Attie

Capstones

Looking to cure the malaise of our day, I went to the football game, and, in the dying breaths of the match, found something much greater. https://medium.com/@Fran_Attie/football-can-save-america-2bb918f19a97