Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana Therí Pickens’ first volume of poetry, What Had Happened Was, published by Duke University Press in March, was the subject of a two-page spread in Down East magazine’s April issue. Headlined “Well Versed,” the article included an interview with Pickens and a reprint of one of the poems in the collection, “The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death.” 

Pickens has had a busy spring. In conjunction with National Poetry Month, she appeared on Maine Public’s Maine Calling in April, as part of a panel of Maine poets and visited several universities to give talks and readings, including Rutgers (as the Clement A. Price humanities scholar in residence), the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and the University of Virginia. On April 3, she was celebrated by faculty, staff, and students at a book party in Commons. She also recently gave interviews to the online publication and .

In the Down East story, journalist Michaela Cavallaro reports that Pickens’ debut collection “showcases a distinctive knack for synthesizing diverse influences.”

She writes: “Pickens weaves together her academic training, her pop-culture interests, and her studies and experience of disability, among many other elements, in more than three dozen poems that are as readable as they are formally and linguistically inventive. Pickens traces her development as a poet all the way back to her New Jersey childhood (as a 5-year-old, she won a citywide writing contest for first to fourth graders on the subject of ‘Why I’m Proud to Be an African American’).”

The Maine Calling panel included Maya Williams, poet laureate of Portland, 2021–24, and Rose Lane, author of four poetry collections. 

Pickens told listeners what prompts her to start writing a poem: 

“There’s usually some sort of music, some sort of thought, some sort of observation that scratches my temple from the inside of my head, so to say, this urgent thing that’s begging to be let out on paper. I tend to think of myself a little bit in the vein of observational comedians. They see things and observe them and observe their absurdity and then tell you about it…. I’m always really gratified when I find an audience, in part because audiences can come from all over. Matthew Zapruder once said that he has to trust that, because he’s having a human experience, other people also having human experiences will find his work when they need it. And so I think I operate in that trust as well.”

At the end of��the Maine Calling show, a caller asked if the panelists had any advice for aspiring poets looking to publish their work. Pickens weighed in with this advice, referencing one of her faculty colleagues, Jessica Anthony ’96, a senior lecturer in English and a National Book Award–nominated novelist:��

“One of the other writers here at �ֲ���ý, Jess Anthony, talked about poetry as a kind of punishing space because when you submit something, you don’t really get feedback,” Pickens said. “You get, ‘Oh, it doesn’t work for us.’ And so you see enough of that, you wonder whether or not the poems work for anybody. So publishing poetry is quite difficult for that reason. But Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance gives us a sense of community in Maine and a space to think through things with each other.”��

At the campus gathering April 3, Pickens read a selection of poems from What Had Happened Was and was interviewed by moderator Samaa Abdurraqib, Ph.D., executive director of the Maine Humanities Council.

The book party also offered an opportunity to recognize Pickens’ recent appointment to an endowed professorship. In November 2024 the college announced she would serve as Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana from 2024 through 2034. 

Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, introduced Pickens at the packed gathering — which included an airing of pre-recorded messages of congratulations, accolades and gratitude from former colleagues across the country and many �ֲ���ý graduates. Hill reminded the audience that the Dana Professorship is the first endowed chair established at �ֲ���ý and recognizes professional excellence from professors working in any discipline.

“Dr. Pickens’ intersectional pathbreaking scholarship and pedagogy traverses the fields of race, identity and disability,” Hill said, and went on to describe her writing across mediums as “inventive, theoretically, and aesthetically attuned. She provides conceptual grammars and vocabularies that are of the present and for the future.”

“I would love it if folks could find something in the collection that resonated” — Therí Alyce Pickens

In March, Pickens described her hopes and aspirations for the collection in with poet Nefertiti Asanti in The Adroit Journal.

“I would love it if folks could find something in the collection that resonated and for folks looking to the collection, maybe for comfort?” Pickens told Asanti. “Folks looking to be read, in that, ‘Black, queer reading is fundamental’ kind of way, they could also find that. I don’t want the focus to be on how I, as a poet, put something or anything really autobiographical into the text. But rather that it’s a celebration of Black linguistic prowess and people can find something in it that speaks to them.”

For The Cafe Review piece, Pickens was interviewed by a former �ֲ���ý colleague, Jefferson Navicky, who asked about her “wide-ranging and masterful” use of poetic forms, including the villanelle, the haibun, and the sonnet. Pickens offered the insight that she uses these forms almost as guideposts, because even though she has been writing poetry since the age of 8, she still feels “like a beginning poet.”

“So when I started practicing my craft in earnest in 2017, forms seemed like the best way to get into poetry…. They offer some degree of constraint, rules to follow, so that I don’t get too lost. What began as a way to practice — and shout out to Kiese Laymon, who said, ‘We’re not good enough to not practice’ — became more attractive once I saw other folks achieving loveliness with them.”

�ֲ���ý has announced five faculty promotions, including tenure awards, effective for the 2020–21 academic year.

Promoted from assistant to associate professor with tenure are Brett Huggett of the Department of Biology and Geneviève Robert of the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences.

Promoted from associate to full professor are Meredith Greer of the Department of Mathematics, Therí Pickens of the Department of English, and Sonja Pieck of the Program in Environmental Studies.

The promotions were recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees.

“The words shared by each of these five superb scholars tell a collectively compelling story — of full and intense engagement with the world, with their students, and with the life of the mind, all underscored by great devotion to our college community,” says Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “The cycle of their creativity — teaching energized by scholarship, and scholarship energized by teaching — is displayed in their myriad contributions to �ֲ���ý College.”

Meet the five newly promoted faculty members, and learn a bit about what being a �ֲ���ý professor means to them.

Associate Professor of Biology Brett Huggett

Appointment year: 2014
Doctoral institution: Harvard University
Fields of research: Physiological and morphological adaptations and/or responses among tree species to stress, plant physiology, plant water relations, carbon allocation, xylem structure and function.

What it means to me to be a �ֲ���ý professor:

From my early years as a jazz musician, to a naturalist for Massachusetts Audubon Society, and now as a �ֲ���ý professor, I have always found immense joy in teaching and inspiring curiosity in others.

In the community of faculty, staff, and students at �ֲ���ý, I have found an incredible place to incorporate my passion for plant biology into teaching and research. Working closely with the talented students at �ֲ���ý — in the classroom, lab, and field — I am continually inspired to innovate my teaching and to pursue new questions in biology. The natural surroundings of �ֲ���ý have allowed me to center many of my courses in field-based learning. When not in the classroom or lab, you will find me out and about in the beautiful woods of Maine.

Associate Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Geneviève Robert

Appointment year: 2014
Doctoral institution: University of Missouri
Fields of research: Rheology, viscosity, silicate melts, experimental petrology, volcanology.

What it means to me be a �ֲ���ý professor:

It’s about empowering students to view themselves as scientists. It’s about learning from my colleagues. And it’s about working towards a common goal.

I love that students come to class with an open mind, ready for a challenge. Working with �ֲ���ý students in the classroom and the lab has made me a better teacher and mentor, and I am constantly challenged, surprised, and impressed by them. �ֲ���ý students have helped me build my experimental petrology research program every step of the way. Together, we’ve assembled and calibrated specialized instruments. We’ve synthesized lava at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve measured how fast lava can flow and have co-authored papers. I could not do what I do without �ֲ���ý students, and I feel lucky to be a part of their journey.

I’m lucky to work alongside and learn from brilliant colleagues —in my own academic unit, through research collaborations, and in every single committee I’ve been a member of. There is such a strong culture of support, of sharing resources and expertise, and of community at �ֲ���ý. And what I’ve learned from day one is that staff make this place possible for all of us. I’m grateful everyday for their expertise, help, and support.

Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer

Appointment year: 2002
Doctoral institution: Vanderbilt University
Fields of research: Applied mathematics, mathematical biology, mathematical ecology, mathematical epidemiology.

What it means to me be a �ֲ���ý professor:

It has always been about the people. I chose to work at �ֲ���ý because of the people I met when interviewing here — every single one was friendly, intellectually curious, helpful, and excited about what we could learn together. That has stayed true throughout.

Students regularly go above and beyond the call. On projects, they bring in experiences, coursework, and interests that form combinations only they could have developed. When challenged by new math topics, they inspire me by their engagement, time invested, willingness to try new study strategies, and overall devotion to learning. They build communities and support each other, in the classroom and beyond.

Faculty and staff here are also amazing. There are so many examples of dedication to excellence, solving complicated issues, and taking care of each other. Being surrounded by such enthusiasm and commitment helps my teaching every day. It really is all about the people.

Professor of English Therí Pickens

Appointment year: 2011
Doctoral institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Fields of research: 20th- and 21st-century African American / Arab American literature, African American literature and cultural studies, Arab American literature and cultural studies, Black feminism, cognitive impairment, disability, disability studies, gender studies, literary theory, mental health, physical impairment, spectacular fiction.

What it means to me to be a �ֲ���ý professor:

In the scholarly community, we often wrongly pit research and teaching against each other. I firmly believe that the two are synergistic. In my career, I find that being an engaged scholar allows me to be a better teacher.

In the years between receiving tenure, in 2016, and promotion to full professor, I wrote a book called Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press, 2019); edited a collection, Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge, 2018); edited a special issue of African American Review, “Blackness & Disability” (2017); wrote five articles; and gave dozens of presentations at academic conferences and at colleges and universities the world over. All of that work — centering the theories, ideas, and creative endeavors of Black people, Arab Americans, disabled people — pressed me and others to think more explicitly about how to make a just world.

In doing this work and listening to people in various settings, I became even more convinced that the study of literature, and the humanities writ large, is vitally necessary to our world. These are lessons that we need desperately as we seek to tell better stories about, and do better work in, our current global situation and for what lies ahead.

Professor of Environmental Studies Sonja Pieck

Appointment year: 2007
Doctoral institution: Clark University
Fields of research: Biodiversity conservation, ecological restoration, environmental history, environmental movements, environmental politics, human geography, international development, memory studies.

What it means to me to be a �ֲ���ý professor:

The interdisciplinary spaces of the liberal arts are deeply appealing to me because I love drawing connections between different perspectives, theories, scales, places, interests, groups, and species. I believe environmental problems at their core derive from uneven power relations — among humans but also between human and non-human communities — and we need multifaceted and synergistic approaches to understand them and develop effective solutions.

And my students make some of the most interesting and creative connections of all. They bring curiosity and compassion to the classroom, along with a desire to do good in the world. It is an honor to partner with them in class and on thesis projects and help them become more informed, critically engaged people.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, I’ve long been interested in international and transnational environmental politics. I’ve worked in Latin America exploring environmental activism, especially in Peru and Ecuador, where I spent formative years of my life, and am now focusing my research on Germany, my country of origin. Throughout, I’ve felt supported in my work by the college and by smart, kind, and generous colleagues.

�ֲ���ý continues to be an energizing and inspiring community of students, staff, and faculty.

A selection of recent mentions of �ֲ���ý and �ֲ���ý people in the news media.

Therí Pickens and Stephanie Kelley-Romano

That racist Kamala Harris birther conspiracy is nothing new — Wired

Wired turned to two �ֲ���ý professors to explain what’s going on with the conspiracy theories about Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

“[Harris] could show us a home video of her being born and it wouldn’t matter now. Rhetoric doesn’t have to be accurate to be effective.”

Whether such theories, such as the birther one about Harris, are true or not is not the point, says Professor of English Therí Pickens, whose areas of expertise include African American cultural studies.

“[Harris] could show us a home video of her being born and it wouldn’t matter now. Rhetoric doesn’t have to be accurate to be effective,” she told reporter Emma Grey Ellis, who noted that the rhetorical strategies being used, conspiracy theorizing and appeals to racism, “have been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years while remaining largely unchanged.”

And why are there so many conspiracy theories? Because they work, and are particularly effective in the political arena.

“Conspiracy is always a way to cause doubt,” says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano, who is teaching the course “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” this fall. When people have doubt, they’re harder to mobilize. “People stay home.”

• Read the story: “” Wired, Aug. 19, 2020

Ayesha Sharma ’18

Civil death: How millions of Americans lost the right to vote — The Guardian

In a powerful historical overview of how America has disenfranchised millions of citizens, Ayesha Sharma ’18 explores the concept of  “civil death…a form of punishment that extinguishes someone’s civil rights.”

Civil death has been “reshaped and reinterpreted over many generations, persisting in the form of felony disenfranchisement, through which a citizen loses their right to vote due to a felony conviction.”

Some six million Americans “cannot vote in the country’s elections because of some form of civil death,” Sharma writes. Restricting the number of people who can vote in elections “goes back to the colonies” in its racist underpinnings. “It’s a history that has disproportionately affected black people.”

• Read the story: “” The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2020

J.J. Cummings ’89

Memories and a mission: USS Gerald R. Ford marks 9/11 while proving it can perform at sea — Daily Press

“Capt. J.J. Cummings, out at sea on USS Gerald R. Ford for this Sept. 11, can’t help thinking of another 9/11 — that awful morning 19 years ago,” writes reporter Dave Ress of the Daily Press of Newport News, Va.

Now commander of the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, Cummings was a young naval aviator in 2001, about to deploy to the Middle East. At home, he saw the second plane hit the South Tower. “I didn’t know it then, but I watched, live, as two of my friends died,” Cummings told Ress.

One was Peter Goodrich ’89, who lived next door to Cummings in Smith Hall their first year at �ֲ���ý. The second was a former squadron-mate, Brian Sweeney.

In 2001, Cummings and his squadron were training for close-support missions. “We thought we were just checking a box,” never to need the skills in battle. But 9/11 changed that mindset. Deployed to the Middle East, Cummings flew close-support missions for months over Afghanistan.

• Read the story: “” — Daily Press, Sept. 10, 2020

�ֲ���ý College Museum of Art

�ֲ���ý compiling complete catalog of Marsden Hartley’s paintings and drawings — Portland Press Herald

Press Herald reporter Bob Keyes notes that “a comprehensive accounting of all the paintings and drawings of modernist painter and Maine native Marsden Hartley has never been completed.”

The �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art “aims to change that,” he says, “and has turned to noted Hartley expert and Portland art historian Gail R. Scott to lead the effort.” Still, he adds, “it’s a massive undertaking.”

• Read the story: “” Portland Press Herald, Aug. 16, 2020

Grace Ingabire ’19

There’s more to dance than entertainment — The New Times

The New Times of Rwanda profiled Grace Ingabire ’19, who graduated with a dance major and is now “using her art as a means for change.”

Ingabire is a project manager at BeneDico, a Rwandan consulting firm that is supporting efforts to showcase and preserve traditional Rwandan dance.

“We believe that our traditional dances sometimes get modified because they are not being performed by the original culture,” she says. “So the objective of the project is to preserve these dances and promote local dancers in different parts of the country.”

• Read the story: The New Times, July 2, 2020

Mara Tieken

The pandemic has magnified the winners and losers in Maine’s educational system — Maine Things Considered

Speaking to Maine Public’s radio program Maine Things Considered earlier in the summer, Associate Professor of Education Mara Tieken noted how the pandemic is illuminating how powerfully class lines are shaping students’ learning experiences.

“Wealthier districts and wealthy private schools are typically able to offer more instruction with more rigorous and engaging learning experiences than poorer districts can offer right now,” she said.

“But it’s also about a student’s home situation, where wealthier families might be more likely to have a parent at home who’s not working, who can support the student’s online learning. Or maybe they’re more likely to have multiple laptops or devices so that siblings can actually work simultaneously on schoolwork, or they’re more likely to have strong and consistent internet access.”

• Listen to the story: “,” Maine Things Considered, July 14, 2020

Shirl Penney ’99

Shirl Penney: The Power of Scale — ���������Dz�’s

In a Q&A profile with ���������Dz�’s, Shirl Penney ’99 explained how his groundbreaking firm, Dynasty Financial Partners, provides the soup-to-nuts services that independent investment firms require, while still emphasizing the brokers’ independence.

“We felt that any time you take an entrepreneur and turn them into an employee, bad things happen,” he said. “The key distinction is we work for the adviser, the adviser doesn’t work for us.”

Dynasty is a service platform for independent investment advisers — ones that aren’t tethered to a firm like Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley — that’s now used by more than 200 advisers at 47 firms with $50 billion in client assets.

Among other topics, Penney predicts that the pandemic will fundamentally change the value of place in the investment experience. “If you think back 20 years ago, it was all about big mahogany offices. You had to show strength to bring clients in,” Penney says.

“That’s been turned completely upside down. We have some clients now who I think will go completely virtual once their leases are up. At a minimum, I think firms are going to decrease their footprint.”

• Read the story: “” ���������Dz�’s, Aug. 28

Sam Mironko ’21

How the camera has advanced the BLM movement — Ebony

“It’s important that we take a moment to take a look at…some of the young creatives behind the scenes” of the Black Lives Matter movement who have a “special talent with the camera,” writes Paige Rabb ’20 for Ebony.

Rabb’s select list includes Sam Mironko ’21 of Belmont, Mass., noting his stunning photography from his winter 2020 semester abroad in Ghana. 

Mironko, says Rabb, is motivated “to keep pushing for Black visibility and the legitimization of Black photographers’ work,” she says. “Mironko believes that the best way to continue to support Black creatives is to get involved with them…and allow their voices to be heard.”

• Read the story: “” Ebony, Aug. 25, 2020

Jason Castro

Cracking the neural code with phantom smells — Scientific American

Associate Professor of Neuroscience Jason Castro shows his chops for writing for a lay audience in Scientific American by explaining new research that “used precisely controlled pinpoints of light to , bypassing the nose altogether.”

The study, he writes, is “one of the most audacious and systematic efforts at ‘experience hacking’ yet.”

Why pinpoints of light? Because the researchers were using genetically modified mice with a light-sensitive protein “smuggled into their olfactory neurons,” explains Castro. “When light shines on one of these modified neurons, it evokes neural activity — the brief electrical “spikes” that are the basic language of the nervous system — with timing that can be exquisitely controlled.”

The paper, he adds, is an “unprecedentedly granular look at what, in the brain, makes a given experience that particular experience. The answer, at least in the context of olfaction, has a humanistic ring to it: an experience is a matter of timing and the sum of many small particulars.”

• Read the story: “,” Scientific American, Aug. 11, 2020

Noelle Chaddock

Beyond the protests, what meaningful actions can people take for racial justice? — Maine Calling

Vice President for Equity and Inclusion Noelle Chaddock, speaking to Maine Public’s Maine Calling program, explained the power and value of the term “anti-racist.”

“I have a strong preference for the term ‘anti-racism’ over terms like ‘racial equity,” Chaddock said. “Anti-racism centers the thing, it centers the problem, it centers the behavior, and it names the people who are responsible for fixing that behavior…. Anti-racism calls us to look at the very specific action, 400 years’ worth, that white folks need to grapple with and deconstruct.”

• Listen to the story: “” Maine Calling, Aug. 13, 2020

Richard Gelles ’68

Richard Gelles, scholar of family violence, dies at 73 — The New York Times

The New York Times published a featured obituary for Richard Gelles ’68, who taught at and was dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, noting that he “was one of the world’s leading scholars of family violence and child welfare.”

In the 1990s, Gelles was initially an ardent defender of “family preservation, the practice of reuniting biological parents with their children even if they had abused them. But after studying the horrific deaths of many children at the hands of their parents…Dr. Gelles did an about-face,” says reporter Katharine Seelye.

“He took his outrage to Washington…and helped draft landmark legislation that affirmed that the safety of a child should supersede attempts to reunite a family.”

As one expert said, “Rich’s critique of the child welfare system not only indelibly shaped public policy…but his work protected and saved the lives of innumerable children.”

• Read the Story: “” The New York Times, July 25, 2020

Josh Redd ’21

Uncommon schools summer program trains future Brooklyn teachers — Kings County Politics

“We need more Black male educators,” Josh Redd ’21 told Kings County Politics.

A graduate of an Uncommon charter high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., Redd originally wanted to be a doctor, but through summer experiences, including an Uncommon-sponsored teacher program where he was “surrounded by students eager to learn, he realized he wanted to ‘be part of something’ and to serve students in the community he grew up in.”

• Read the story: “” Kings Point Politics, Aug. 13, 2020

Nick Mazuroski ’09

$26 million solar farm to benefit Milo and Maine electricity consumers — Bangor Daily News

Construction of a large solar farm in Milo will feature 67,000 solar panels and produce enough energy for 5,430 homes, according to developers who include Nick Mazuroski ’09, director of BNRG Maine, a co-development partner with Dirigo Solar of Portland.

The power produced from the solar farm will be sold to Versant, northern Maine’s electricity provider. “It’s going to directly benefit Maine homeowners, ratepayers, anyone that uses the standard-offer program in the state,” Mazuroski said.

BNRG Renewables and Dirigo Solar have 10 projects under way or scheduled for construction in eight Maine communities.

• Read the story: “,” Bangor Daily News, Aug. 30, 2020

Sam Nader ’43

“Thirst for professional baseball in Oneonta quenched in 1965” — The Daily Star

The Daily Star of Oneonta, N.Y., told the story of how then-Mayor Sam Nader ’43 brought professional baseball back to the city in 1965 after the city’s prior professional team had folded in 1951.

A 1965 Star story quoted then-editor Frank Perretta, who said of Nader, “Sam is an old-time pitcher. He pitched in high school, at �ֲ���ý College, and at Hartwick College. And since he took office four years ago he has been pitching for a minor league team in Oneonta.”

Nader landed a Class A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox for the 1966 season, which then became a Yankees affiliate in 1967 and then a Detroit Tigers affiliate. The team decamped for Norwich, Conn., in 2010.

• Read the story: “” The Daily Star, Aug. 25, 2020

Elizabeth Leavitt Nemirovsky ’88

Raising awareness and hope, Rosie the COVIDitor said, ‘We Can Do It!’ — The Bedford Citizen

Last spring, Elizabeth Leavitt Nemirovsky ’88 reimagined the iconic World War II–era Rosie the Riveter poster as a pandemic-era call to defeat the virus, showing a masked “Rosie the COVIDitor” using her well-muscled arm and fist to smash the coronavirus.

The Bedford Citizen reported how Nemirovsky created her poster as “Bedford’s COVID-19 lockdown moved from March into April and her mother entered hospice care, forcing her to quit her job.”

Initially, Nemirovsky placed the poster in a window facing the sidewalk as encouragement to the neighborhood’s growing number of walkers in the early days of the pandemic. “Rosie was an easy choice as far as an image to start with,” Nemirovsky told the Citizen. “The fun really began when I started to imagine her ka-POWing COVID.”

Later, she mounted her creation on posterboard and hauled it on her own walks of some 500 miles to raise money for a number of nonprofits, including the Greater Boston Food Bank.

• Read the story: “” — The Bedford Citizen,” Sept. 7, 2020

Sam Francis ’17

Bengals rely on one-man analytics department to make the team smarter and stronger — WCPO

“I tell people I’m the same as any analyst at any company, but my focus is football,” Francis told reporter Keenan Singleton of television station WCPO in Cincinnati.

“That can span from the roster to the draft, game management, game planning, studying opponents. We have the data available like any company does that pertain to what they do. Based on whatever question or problem we’re trying to solve, I’ll study that.”

Said Bengals head coach Zac Taylor, “He’s got a big book of information that he knows how to process a lot better than I do. I don’t hear his voice on game day. I hear it through one of the coaches, but I know there’s a lot of dialogue there.”

• Read the story: “” WCPO, Aug. 17, 2020

What can we learn by interpreting new and classic works of literature through a “mad Black” lens? In literature, how are Black characters with mental illness and cognitive disabilities portrayed, particularly in Black contexts? Do these characters exist for their own ends, or to help other characters grow?��

Associate Professor of English Therí Pickens

Associate Professor of English Therí Pickens, who studies Arab American and African American literature and disability issues, explores these questions in a new book, (Duke University Press, 2019).����

Pickens describes the book as an “intervention,” meant to “bring the two fields of critical race studies and disability studies into conversation.”��

“When I’m in disability studies audiences, I make sense to them, and when I’m in critical race studies audiences, I make sense to those folks as well,” she says. “The question for me became, ‘What is it that’s keeping these two from being in conversation?’”��

In the book — and in this Q&A — Pickens explores how Black writers of speculative fiction (an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, and other genres) think about the intersection of Blackness and disability, and how their theories can inform us about a wide variety of literature and film.��

Why did you decide to use Black speculative fiction to discuss madness and Blackness?

If you were to think about Black speculative fiction as a space of theory rather than just a space of enjoyment or escape, then what you have is a rich ground of theory to work with. Black speculative fiction unmoors you from time and space, allows the imagination to go places that realist fiction doesn’t.��

You write that many scholars see Blackness and disability as “mutually constituted,” or dependent on one another. What do you mean by this?

Ellen Samuels is the person who gives us these ideas. Her book talks about how race, gender, and ability are created as narratives in the 19th century. At the very beginning of the 19th century, we didn’t have the railroad. We were still in an antebellum, agrarian economy for the most part. By the end, we’re pressing against the Industrial Revolution.��

People’s relationships to each other and to the world were also changing. In the U.S., with an agrarian, slave economy, you had to know who’s Black and you had to know who’s white because it’s a matter of property, a matter of freedom, a matter literally of life and death.��

When six million African Americans migrated from the southern United States to the North in the 20th century, racial categories that existed in the antebellum South broke down. (Jacob Lawrence, Harmon Foundation Collection, Wikimedia Commons)

When you have cities and the Great Migration of African Americans that happens at the beginning of the 20th century, those categories break down. If you don’t know where someone comes from and who their family is, you don’t know for sure whether they are white, whether they are Black.

Likewise, Kim Nielsen has a book called . She talks about how almshouses and asylums arise in the 19th century, because prior to that people were taken in by their families. There was no need for public assistance of that sort. Historically speaking, race and disability are mutually constituted, created at the same time, and reliant upon one another.��

What is an example of mutual constitution?

There’s a book called , by James Weldon Johnson. It was published as an autobiography in 1912, but it was a hoax, so it was republished as fiction in 1927.��

James Weldon Johnson explored the intersections of race and ability in��The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.��(Carl Van Vechten, Wikimedia Commons)

When the main character passes from Black to white as a result of having witnessed a lynching, he is refashioning himself in terms of race but also in terms of gender, because to refashion oneself from a Black man to a white man is to grab hold of certain ideas about masculinity which, by definition, include mental and physical capability.��

In order to adequately take on the persona of a white man in late 19th-, early 20th-century America, what one also takes on is mental acuity. As a Black man, the main character was a very successful ragtime musician.��

As a white man, he blends into a crowd. He also, in so doing, moves himself away from music, which people did not consider intellectual at the time, to banking. That narrative of passing is about gender self-fashioning, racial self-fashioning, and holding onto narratives about mental ability and mental acuity that are intertwined with them.��

In the book you also push back against the idea of mutual constitution.

As we progress into the 20th and the 21st centuries, it doesn’t make sense to think about madness and Blackness in that way anymore. It is not necessarily the case that both are being created or understood with the same kind of equality or parity. There are times when madness overrides Blackness, and there are some times when Blackness overrides madness.

When you think about race and disability, you have to think about the way that white disability is constituted against Black ability, or Blackness in total. So Black disability can’t be recuperative in that context. Black disability gets mobilized as resistance but the two together don’t necessarily amount to resistance.

In Octavia Butler’s , Shori, the protagonist, knows she’s Black and that she has amnesia, that she’s considered disabled and a “mongrel,” according to her vampire people. But knowledge about that doesn’t provide the foundation for her resistance. It is her knowledge about how the community works and her desire to finagle around that that creates the moment of resistance.��

In that moment, she’s constituting herself not just as Black, and not just as disabled, and certainly not necessarily those at the same time. She’s also constituting herself from a position of antiracism and anti-ableism.��

You argue for the need to look at madness in specifically Black contexts. Why is this important?

In different cultural contexts, disability acquires different meanings and makes meaning differently. There are various kinds of Black communities, but in the fictional Black community of Nalo Hopkinson’s , madness and mental illness are constituted by communal assent.��

People get together through their daily actions, through their gossip, through their play, through their work, and decide that the main character, Tan-Tan, is mad, disturbed in some way, an outlier.��

Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Midnight Robber begins with a scene of the Caribbean New Year’s Day parade Junkanoo, shown here in Jamaica in 1975. The subsequent Carnival celebration is a motif throughout the novel. (Photo by WikiPedant at Wikimedia Commons)

There’s also a character, Quamina, who has what might be termed a cognitive disability. There’s not as much pressure on her to perform her disability in this particular Black community, the way that cognitive disability performs in other communities.��

When we think about characters that are configured as autistic, in white texts they are usually exceptional, or they are annoyances, or they’re people you live with because they’re useful. We need look no further than Sherlock Holmes or Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory. In those texts, those characters are exceptional, or they are a burden.��

In Midnight Robber, Quamina is part of the landscape. There are some folks who have ableist understandings of her, some who want her to perform a kind of “good cripple” narrative, some who want her fixed — but the text doesn’t endorse any of those.��

She’s part of the community. She contributes, she lives, she laughs. There’s a scene where she and her mother are laughing and enjoying a story with the same facial expressions. Part of what is depicted there, which isn’t often depicted for characters with cognitive disabilities, is kinship.��

In discussing narratives about Black people with or without disabilities, you argue that these characters are often written “for” other characters. How does this work?

When you have Black disabled characters in texts that are beholden to an ideology of white supremacy — which includes ableism — you have characters that don’t exist by themselves. They do exist in service of others.��

Downton Abbey falls into this trap. The only major character in six seasons that we see that’s Black is Rose’s love interest, Jack, who does not quite exist for his own ends. We get very little backstory about him.

All you can see is the bratty Rose instrumentalizing this young man to get back at her mother. Lady Mary, one of the main characters, says as much. Now Jack, the Black character, attempts to allay these fears for Lady Mary — “Rose is more than you think she is,” blah blah blah. We don’t believe him, because after that scene he ceases to exist.��

This also happens in the first four episodes of the first season, in terms of disability. There’s all this brouhaha about how Mr. �ֲ���ý, the valet to Lord Grantham, uses a cane and has a limp, and the servants have to pick up the slack.

The entire storyline is about Mr. �ֲ���ý having a stiff upper lip and how he’s going to leave because he knows what’s best for the estate. Disability is a moment for Lord Grantham to insert himself as liberal and ultimately insist that he stay.��

For the Jack narrative and the Mr. �ֲ���ý narrative, what you get is never a dismantling of ableism or racism. What you get is, “This is the way the world is, and there are some good white people who are able-bodied.”

The characters’ difference is only instrumentalized for the announcement of the good of the other characters, without ever attempting to dismantle the narrative itself or even expose it as wrong. The stories never say, “This is insidious.”

You make the case that incorporating race and disability into literary criticism requires a new conception of the novel itself. What is a “mad Black text,” and what does it mean to interpret a novel, film, or other text through a mad Black lens?

Mad Black texts, as an aesthetic, privilege time as nonlinear and the sonics of the texts. Midnight Robber is really a character telling you a story — that’s the way it’s set up. Fledgling has quite a bit of aural storytelling in it.��

Many of Toni Morrison’s texts do not adhere to linear time and often have something in them that forces you to think about the sonics of language. The end of Beloved, “This is not a story to pass on,” has multiple meanings because of the sonics of the past and the inflections of it.��

Toni Morrison, pictured here with President Barack Obama when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, made use of the sonic in her novels. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

When you choose to interpret something as mad and as valid as such, and as Black and as valid as such, you change the interpretation of the novel. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for instance, if you look at the woman in the attic, you get an entirely different interpretation.��

When Chinua Achebe looks at Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he gets a very different picture. If you’re watching Downton Abbey, and you look at the camera angles and the storylines of characters with disabilities, it changes the narrative locus of the series.��

As an English professor and literary critic, what is it like to read books that you enjoy, but with a critical eye?

As a scholar of English you don’t necessarily come to books for pleasure. They’re usually recommended to you by someone in the field, by a relative who knows you work on this, by some well-meaning stranger. You end up with certain books. When you like them, it’s better.��

I think every reader is a critical reader; some have more tools in their toolbox than others. One of the things that I like about the classroom is that when you’re reading something that’s been assigned, or you’re reading something someone gifted you, you not only have the tools in your toolbox to read it, but you have a community of readers.

There’s something about discussing a book in that community that is part of the joy of the book.��

Assistant Professor of English Therí Pickens. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Do the people you touch make you the person you are? If you are breathing, can your oppressors claim that you do not exist? Is a seemingly robust Magic Johnson really the best person to promote AIDS and HIV awareness?

Questions like these drive a new book by a �ֲ���ý professor examining the literary uses of bodily awareness in writings by Arab American and African American authors.

The first book-length cross-racial study of narratives reflecting those groups, New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States is the creation of Therí Pickens, assistant professor of English. The book was published in February by Routledge.

Putting these two cultural traditions “into conversation with one another,” says Michelle Wright, who teaches African American studies at Northwestern University, “takes the reader through a dazzling array of topics, from the construction of minority subjecthood and family politics to illness and medical practices.”

Pickens’ focus is the narrative use of so-called embodied experience — “what it is to live inside a body,” she explains. “It isn’t just that we see, but that we interpret what we see. It isn’t just that we touch or breathe, but that our touching or breathing has meaning.”

She says, “The book aims to answer the question of how blacks and Arabs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries make meaning out of bodily sense — how they mobilize their embodied experience, with all of its various and itinerant parts, to create social and political critique.”

Pickens argues that African Americans and Arab Americans narratives tend to rely on the body’s fragility, rather than its exceptional strength or emotion, to create critiques.

Authors discussed in New Body Politics include:

• Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, who draws on black feminist poetics and hip-hop aesthetics to explore the metaphorical power of breathing and the circumstances surrounding occupied Palestine;
• novelists Alicia Erian (Towelhead) and Danzy Senna (Symptomatic) who, writing from Arab American and African American perspectives, explore the relationship between touch and the sense of self; and
• Lebanese American writer Rabih Alameddine, whose fiction offers a contemporary parallel to a question posed to blacks decades ago by African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois: How does it feel to be a problem?

A native of New Jersey, Pickens grew up “in a multiracial, multilingual, multi-ethnic space. And that setting really prompted me to think about what it means to constantly be aware of one’s difference and to engage the difference of others.”

She is acutely cognizant of literature’s power not just to enrich inner life but also to point the way to material change. “I think if we can put literature back into the conversation, then we can truly imagine a better world,” she says.

“The human capacity for storytelling is absolutely amazing and is one of the things that crosses cultures and crosses time.”

Pickens, who came to �ֲ���ý in 2011, bases her research on the study of the nature of awareness itself — a branch of philosophy called phenomenology. In addition to Arab American and African American literatures, her interests include disability studies — a field that bears on “New Body Politics.”

“Disability takes seriously this issue of your body mattering. The field of disability studies asks us to consider disability as a social category” — a category to which, but for the grace of good fortune, “everyone can belong.”

Pickens received an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Princeton in 2005 and a doctorate in comparative literature from UCLA in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Save the Date and Disability Studies Quarterly.

Her blog and a schedule of appearances are featured at .

Assistant Professor of English Therí Pickens.

As an assistant professor of English, Therí Pickens will teach and mentor countless students as they pass through �ֲ���ý en route to a career.

“I want to make sure that when they go out into the world, they understand how to interact with people in ways that deploy the knowledge they gained in my classroom,” she says — particularly what they learned about differences among people.

That’s why Pickens has organized a �ֲ���ý symposium in March that will show students how knowledge about identity and difference can be put into practice in the workaday world.

Beyond Intellectual Profit: Using Classroom Knowledge in the Workplace takes place from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 2, in Rooms 221-222 of New Commons, 136 Central Ave. The public is invited to attend at no cost.

Kirk Nugent, a poet and prominent motivational speaker, facilitates the event. Other symposium presenters include �ֲ���ý alumni; �ֲ���ý staff; and representatives from local businesses and nonprofits. Read more about Kirk Nugent.

The symposium comprises four discussions: a panel about how employers deal with difference in the workplace; a lunchtime session about connections between coursework and the workplace; a look at how theoretical concepts inform professional work; and a panel with �ֲ���ý staff describing how they integrate discussions of difference into their jobs.

To register for any or all of the sessions, please visit: . For more information, please call Pickens at 207-753-6963.

Pickens was moved to produce the symposium by the realization that students, while often receptive and responsive in the classroom to discussions around such distinctions as race/ethnicity, gender and ability, don’t always translate what they learn to behavior outside of class. And after college, behavior can make or break a career.

For example, “What do you do to make sure people are appreciated?” she says. “How do you ensure that there is pay commensurate with responsibilities? What do you do when there is a class divide?”

She explains, “There’s a calling that we have as an intellectual community to really think about how we practice diversity and how we live it. It has to be more than just, ‘Oh that’s just someone’s thing, that’s so-and-so’s culture.’

“You have to engage with it. It has to mean getting to know somebody. Sometimes it means asking questions, and sometimes being rebuffed when the questions are uncomfortable.”

The symposium supports a �ֲ���ý ethos that college President Clayton Spencer calls “purposeful work” — helping students make sense of themselves and the world, discovering their passions and how they can integrate those into a meaningful career.

“My intent really was to make sure students have an idea of what it means to use a �ֲ���ý education,” says Pickens. “I think we can make sure that students have a sense of how their knowledge in a women’s studies class or African American studies or English class is useful.”

Motivational speaker Kirk Nugent.

As a student, Pickens set out to be a biochemical engineer. But she turned to comparative literature because, she says, “I found some value in studying something with a bit more of a liberal arts bent.

“The passion that I have for the liberal arts drives me to see the way it works in the world. To have purposeful work, meaningful work, is to marry passion with skill, to marry opportunity with knowledge,” she says.

“Our graduates go on to do amazing things. I want them to not just open doors for themselves but for other people.”

Sponsoring the symposium are the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the �ֲ���ý Career Development Center and Office of Intercultural Education, the offices of the dean of the faculty and the special assistant to the president for diversity, and the English department.