A poem of mine appears in the latest issue of Asheville Poetry Review. “Dickens in Manhattan” comes out of my experience of reading Dickens’s travelogue about the US, American Notes, while living in Tennessee. I originally conceived of this poem as a pastoral, a poetic mode I was focused on at the time.
The poem begins in New York as described by Dickens and then enters the South to find a new landscape.
…To rise means
falling with upstanding scum, superior-
seeming, well-dressed nothing. To speak
of this mirror’s wrong. I must trust
it will crack and I’ll slip through.
Thank you, Editor and Founder of the Asheville Poetry Review, Keith Flynn, for including my work in what will be the last issue of this legendary journal.
I would recommend Savushun to anyone. Daneshvar brilliantly renders Iran during World War II through the lens of her heroine’s expansive and beautiful consciousness.
I had the honor of appearing on a panel on nineteenth-century literature with Dr. Christina Jen from Southern University and A&M College last September. The panel took place at the SCMLA Conference in New Orleans, a city I had never visited. My paper was on the influence of housing segregation on the construction of the heroine’s innocence in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The presentation drew upon elements of my recent article published in Novel on the Underground Railroad and James’s masterpiece.
Not long after posting about the conference on Instagram, I deleted my (relatively new) account, wanting nothing to do with the platform’s anti-LGBTQ bent. The picture from the post, which I took while wandering in amazement in New Orleans, appears above.
The online journal, Drunken Boat, will celebrate the launch of its newest issue with a virtual party on Tuesday, March 12 at 8:00 PM eastern time. At the launch event, contributors including me will read work from this exciting issue.
I am so honored to be included in the latest Drunken Boat, now edited by students at Tufts University under the guidance of Founding Editor, Ravi Shankar, and the Director of The NEXT, Professor Dene Grigar.
This week I had the opportunity to read with my fellow contributors to the wonderful recent issue of Washington Square Review. Organized by editor Melissa Ford Lucken and Dave Wasinger, the reading was a true pleasure to experience as a reader and listener.
Please join me on Monday, October 23 at 7:00 PM EST, for a reading of work from the most recent issue of Washington Square Review. I have three poems in this issue, available for purchase here, edited by Melissa Ford Lucken. I will be reading with many of my wonderful co-contributors.
My article on the influence of the Underground Railroad on the plot of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady appears in the most recent issue of NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. The article focuses on a house in the narrative that James famously based on his grandmother’s home in Albany, New York. This grandmother, Catharine James, lived near numerous stations on the Underground Railroad.
While The Portrait of a Lady features an unusual number of grand homes, the Albany house is not one of them. One critic, Marilyn Chandler, characterizes the home as an “architectural joke” compared to the other houses in the novel. When Isabel first meets the aunt who takes her out of Albany to Europe, this aunt, Mrs. Touchett, calls the home “very bad” and “bourgeois.” (Mrs. Touchett lives in a more typical house in the world of The Portrait of a Lady, an Italian castle.)
I argue that the “very bad” house in Albany operates as a spatial representation of the novel’s plot — or to use the term preferred by James, the novel’s “ado.” In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James calls the word plot “nefarious” before reflecting on the process of creating an “ado” for Isabel in terms that evoke the “square” and “large” Albany house. He metaphorically describes constructing the novel’s narrative action as building a “square and spacious house” around his isolated heroine. Isabel when staying in Albany remains notably isolated, choosing to be alone. She consistently appears in a room whose door to the “vulgar street” is bolted shut and “condemned.”
In my analysis of the Albany house as a symbol of the novel’s plot, I consider the history of the upstate city in different decades, including the 1850s when Isabel daydreams in front of the bolted door and the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. I ultimately assert that the history of Black people in the US crossing regional and national borders in the 1850s in pursuit of freedom centrally and problematically determine James’s highly influential plot about an innocent, white American woman travelling to Europe in search of personal freedom.
