About the Contributors
- About the Contributors
Deyonne Bryant teaches creative writing at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts. She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. “Black Wings against the Blue Sky” is from an unpublished manuscript of short stories. The story is a meditation on memory, history, and American black culture.
Aimee Carrillo Rowe is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge. She teaches and writes in the areas of Rhetoric, Feminist Theory, and Cultural Studies. Her book, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Duke 2008) theorizes relational possibilities for antiracist feminist futures.
Jade Foster received her B.A from Sarah Lawrence College. She’s been published in Words, Beats and Life, make/shift magazine, and Torch.
Damaris B. Hill earned a PhD in English-Creative Writing and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. The majority of her poetry is spiritually based and addresses issues of gender, race and identity. Eager to express the accomplishments of underrepresented women, she is writing a novel about juvenile delinquents.
Her selection of poems in this issue is based on the book Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 by Kali Nicole Gross, PhD., Associate Professor at University of Texas Austin. She was so genuinely moved by the triumphs and tragedies these women endured within the justice system that she has memorialized some of their experiences in her latest series of poems. Most of the poems attempt to create a first person testimony and are in formal verse. The use of formal poetic structure is symbolic of the women’s physical confinement within the Philadelphia penal system. It also acts as a critique of the economic and democratic limitations many African American women experienced in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is depicted as the beacon of liberty for Americans, but ironically it became the exact opposite for many of the African American women that migrated there. A majority of these poems blend the blues tradition with the conventional poetic forms. [End Page 243]
Dr. Leigh Johnson is an Assistant Professor of English at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. She teaches American Literature, Women and Gender Studies, and American Ethnic Literature. She was an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow in 2010-11, when the research for this article began. She has been thinking a lot about motherwork and activism since the birth of her two children. Thanks to Jesse Alemán for reading and commenting on early drafts of the article.
Bettina Judd is a visual and performance artist, poet, and scholar. She is currently a Five College Dissertation Fellow in Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, a doctoral candidate in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, and an alumna of Spelman College. For more information on Bettina, go to www.bettinajudd.com.
Sheila Lloyd is Associate Professor of English at the University of Red-lands. Her scholarship and teaching have focused on African-American writing and film and psychoanalytic and materialist feminist theories. She is at work on a project, of which this essay is a part, on African-American women and neoliberalism.
Sudarat Musikawong is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Siena College. Her publications include “Art for October,” in positions, v 18, n1: 2010 and “Mourning State Celebrations,” Identities, v17, n5: 2010. Her book manuscript, Violent Forgetting, investigates how Thai society revises and unsettles past state violence through cultural productions that forget, rather than remember.
Jennifer C. Nash is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women’s Studies at George Washington University. Her work has been published in Social Text, Feminist Review, Scholar and Feminist, and Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Her book, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Vanessa Pérez Rosario is Assistant Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York—Brooklyn College. She is the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010). She recently completed the manuscript Becoming Julia de Burgos: Feminism, Transnationalim, Diaspora. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality and migration.
Hermine Pinson has published three poetry collections, most recently...
