Concentrations

I have been writing about social justice issues for many years, mostly on issues of intersectional feminism and Israeli/Palestinian conflict. My essays, "Understanding the Other Sister: The Case of Arab Feminism" (Monthly Review, 2002) and "It's Not an Oxymoron: The Search for an Arab Feminism" (Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, Seal Press, 2002), have been taught at hundreds of universities in women's studies, colonial studies, and other humanities classes. I also edited a book, Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing (Greenwood Press, 2004), which was an anthology of original creative writing by women which additionally included essays explaining the necessity of "writing back" to the existing stereotypes of Arab women.

I consider myself an intersectional feminist, and I have been deeply influenced by women of color feminists, such as Angela David, bell hooks, Cherrie Moraga, and others. I am also deeply concerned with social class issues, and much of my creative work centers on the lives of characters who are working class people. I have worked with students on projects that included focusing on the writing of people of color to examine the ways in which they depict their cultures and their traditions in their fiction.

In 2004, I founded my first literary outreach initiative in Charleston, SC, serving Burke High School, Charleston’s only non-magnet public high school, with a poets in the schools program that went on for a decade. I have since launched the Poetry in Communities program, which serves communities hit by sudden or systemic violence and is supported by Fairfield University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Center for Faith and Public Life. Poetry projects through this program have taken place in Bridgeport and Newtown, CT, as well as in Normandy, MI - Michael Brown’s home town - Charleston, NC and New Orleans, LA. This outreach work has affected my own teaching and writing, and my forthcoming collection of essays, The Nail in the Tree: On Art, Parenting, and Violence, examines my years living in Sandy Hook, CT, with my sons in the immediate aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook School, and takes up the fraught relationship between artistic production and sometimes flawed aspects meaning-making that can accompany the experience of violence.

Writers can and must take up the difficult subjects; my work attempts to discover my own difficult subjects and to address them, while my teaching assists students in the discernment of theirs. The work of Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that deep observation of the world should lead to action. The experience of writing is the experience of acting on behalf of others. His dictum, “you must change your life” rings in my ears as I teach and write from a place of social practice, justice, and action.

My nonfiction work consistently explores the relationship between the personal, the political, and social context. My first book, Opa Nobody (2008), reconstructs a life story of my grandfather and great-grandfather, who were socialists in Germany and took part in labor movement work as well as in an anti-Nazi militia before the Nazis took power. I go to their life stories in order to understand my own struggles in political activism, setting up an imagined multi-generational dialogue while exploring German social movement history. My second book, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), tells the story of an era in which I and many of my friends as young mothers did not have health insurance, and the ways that crisis shaped our choices and our views of our future. My third book of creative nonfiction, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System (2017), delves into the experience of chronic pain, political views of disability, medical treatment, feminist views of the body in pain, and healthcare access for women.

When I work with students, I aim to encourage the larger and unasked questions that spark connection between the writer’s own life and the world we share. As a journalist, I have written frequently on topics such as healthcare access, city and regional planning, and political organizing.

Ever since I returned from Iraq in 2008, my writing has been concerned with the moral, emotional, and political consequences of war, as well as our collective responsibility toward creating a more just society. My book of short stories, Redeployment, explores the experiences of soldiers both in Iraq and at home. In my nonfiction, I have explored the ways in which narratives of war experience get used interpersonally and politically, as well as the role faith and spirituality has in guiding us through how to respond to suffering and widespread injustice. I am currently finishing edits on a novel about the post-9/11 U.S. involvement in Colombia, which will hopefully allow me to explore questions about the complex moral calculus of our modern methods of warfare, as well as the intersection of individual agency and the mechanisms of state power. I also have a particular interest in the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of memory and trauma. In my teaching, I try to encourage students to explore clashing perspectives and outside voices as a means toward understanding not just individual experience, but also how that individual experience can be meaningfully connected to broader social and political movements.

I grew up with an early awareness of social justice. My mother was haunted by the loss of her own mother, who was dark skinned and died at 28 of cancer after struggling to receive medical treatment in the deep south. This life-long history in believing in social justice, beginning as a child through my parents’ engagement in the Civil Rights Movement, continued when I attended a women’s college, which was a key link in the rise of the feminist movement. All my novels express this social awareness. My first novel was praised by a feminist scholar in the New York Times for its honest portrayal of gender inequality. My fourth novel, Centerville, set in in 1968, uses that period’s social awakening as a backdrop for the upheaval of a town changed by violence. The themes, including racial discrimination, were influenced by Martin Luther King’s sermons, which led me to understand that social justice is a moral imperative, dictated by what we hold as the divine in life.

While teaching at Mt. Holyoke, an all-women’s college devoted to social justice, I developed a writing course focused on understanding the self as body and as voice, seen through the lens of gender, race, and culture. In all my classes, I taught a large percentage of international students, writing about political and social repression, including the many restrictions faced by women around the world. While teaching at Fairfield, I mentored a student whose third semester project researched the Rodney King incident, as well as two other students whose theses showed what happens when racial discrimination dominates because social justice doesn’t exist. I am deeply committed to furthering my own awareness of the impact of social justice in our world by learning from those I teach and through my spiritual practices.

I believe that, no matter how the definition of social justice changes during any particular era, it’s essential for writers to fight human ignorance and discrimination in their books. In Saving Troy: A Year with Paramedics and Firefighters in a Battered City, I chronicled the efforts of professionals to rescue a diverse cross-section of a small-city population, one by one; in The Call of Nursing, I was fortunate enough to hear and present the stories of people who are on the front lines of healing, but who are often hidden in plain sight; in my current project, Metrofix, I’m examining the ways in which a failing company town has tried to revitalize itself, and in the process, has had to struggle with which of its citizens have been left out of that process, and why. And in my poetry and fiction – in These Upraised Hands, in Roxa, and in the other books – I have always been attracted by people who were, in some way, disenfranchised or oppressed or simply isolated, and worked to give those people voices, and stories, that brought them to life.

In my teaching for Fairfield’s MFA in Writing, once again, I have been lucky to mentor students whose own writing offered us an intimate look into their own difficulties and achievements – as well as students who chose to teach in prisons or to start after-school writing classes for inner-city, at-risk children, for example – but more often than not were pursuing projects that simply set out to find compassionate ways to make a difference for other people. For me, these attempts to honor and respect everyone are the pragmatic definitions of social justice today.