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The Beauty of Grief in Performance Art
To the one who walked through light like it was ash, You came to me not with thunder, but like rain that had forgotten how to fall. On a screen already too full of noise, you entered quietly, like a question. I didn’t know your name then — and I don’t write this letter to…
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What to Do with All This Poetry?
Some days, it gathers in my throat like an unspoken prayer. Other days, it sprawls across the margins of meeting notes, bleeding into the white space between obligations. Poetry, in all its reckless abundance, arrives unannounced. It stands at the door like a lover who refuses to leave, or like a stray cat who has…
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Reclaiming the Body in Verse: Marginalized Poets, Hair, and the Politics of Presence
Poetry has long been a terrain where power structures are challenged, reimagined, and sometimes dismantled. Within this tradition, underrepresented and marginalized poets—particularly women, queer writers, and those of diasporic communities—have used the body, and often its most intimate and symbolic parts, as a site of resistance and reclamation. Among these embodied symbols, hair emerges as…
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The Architecture of Absence
It begins, as these things often do, with a choice that feels like betrayal. To spend your days unraveling the forgotten voices, the silenced poets, the marginalized verses that history either ignored or erased. To dedicate your scholarship to the overlooked. But what happens when, in searching for their space, you find there is none…
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The Classroom as a Battleground for Meaning and Difference
Education, at its best, is an act of rebellion. It dares to disrupt the comfort of certainty, to dismantle the walls we build around ourselves, and to replace them with windows. Yet, in a world that fears change, education often finds itself tamed—reduced to sterile instruction manuals, neatly packaged outcomes, and metrics that measure everything…
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The Graph of a Cry
My dissertation is available as a book for academics, libraries, and those who are interested to read more about the phenomenal journey of the American ghazal. This dissertation analyzes the journey of the ancient Arabic poetic form of the ghazal to America to provide insights into transnational poetry and cultural mobility. While the movement of…
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Intersectionality and Film at the Filmacademie
Almost every year I get to work with the vibrant students of the Filmacademie. An opportunity that I greatly look forward to as it always leads to powerful conversations in which I get to learn just as much as the students. The diversity and inclusion workshop involves the theory of Intersectionality and unpacking films and…
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Nailing my vulnerabilities, #intelligentlockdownblog
Ok so let me go right ahead and let the world know about my little vulnerabilities. Everyone I know knows (you know) that I have epic perfect nails that I am very finicky about. I have been getting them professionally done for the last ten years or so. Usually, I tell people I have bad…
