Melissa Castillo-Garsow is a Mexican-American writer, journalist, and scholar currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Her short stories and poetry have been published in various journals including The Acentos Review, La Bloga, Hispanic Culture Review, and Hinchas de Poesia. Her first novel, Pure Bronx, co-written with Fordham Professor Mark Naison, is due for release Oct. 2013 from Augustus Publishing. Melissa completed her Master’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Fordham University in 2011. Prior to that she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts from New York University summa cum laude with a double major in Journalism and Latin American Studies. A former employee of NBC News, El Diario/ La Prensa and Launch Radio Networks, Melissa has had articles and reviews published in a wide variety of forums including CNN.com, Latin Beat Magazine, University Wire, El Diario/La Prensa, Women’s Studies, Words. Beats. L...

Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump Teaching African American Poetry in the Age of Trump Poetry can't change the world. The world where we witness horrors from the dismissal of every child's right to receive a quality education and live in a safe environment, to white racists toting semi-automatic weapons and the Nazi flag through the streets. The world where we wait to see what will become of any of us with a "pre-existing condition," and pray that a pissing match between two men does not escalate into nuclear warfare. Poetry can't change that. How can poetry even enter into the conversation? My commitment to poetry has evolved over my teaching and writing life. I first "officially" taught poetry in 1994 at San Francisco State University, where I received my MFA. Before that I taught poetry to teen moms while I was in college. I've taught "adult" (i.e. non-traditional) students at Temple University, and high school students at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and from a KIPP charter school in Texas. I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed my PhD, and for the last 11 years, I've taught at a large, chronically underfunded public university in Memphis. And despite the fact that the English Department where I work has proven in dollars and cents that it runs in the black-and not in the red (yes, English is a revenue-generating department!) I'm immersed in a culture that tells me that the humanities aren't worth funding. So why teach poetry? What does the study of poetry actually yield? In my years of teaching, I have observed that the study of poetry enables students to develop core abilities that are desperately needed in the age of Trump. These skills include: 1) Critical Literacy: the ability not only to read the wide variety of printed information we're surrounded by, but also to analyze it and form supportable arguments; 2) Knowledge of History: Students must research the historical contexts in which the poems are written and set, as well as the variety of allusions to events, people, texts, songs, etc.; 3) Patience. As my friend, clarinetist Carina Nyberg Washington, pointed out, the beauty of poetry, like the beauty of classical (and other forms of) music is only revealed to those who put in the time and practice to study it; 4) Radical Empathy: especially for those we consider different or "foreign"; and 5) Activation of Imaginative Capabilities: Only if we develop our abilities to imagine positive alternatives to our current destructive policies and behaviors can we begin to create social change. Yes, teaching poetry is crucial in 2017. My students and I laugh together when I tell them that poetry is one of the reasons I get up in the morning. However, this isn't the only reason some think me an unusual case. When people learn that one of my major research and teaching areas is African American literature, particularly poetry, some react with surprise or even suspicion: "How did YOU [a white woman] get interested in THAT [insert various judgments here]?" An administrator even asked me, "Are you actually white?" If I focused my efforts on white women's poetry, what questions would they ask? How about if it were Shakespeare? Because of the reasons underlying such questions about my vocation, my teaching of African American poetry must also involve teaching something about my own race, gender, class and sexual identities, and how my experience and actions both reflect and resist prevailing assumptions. I have rigorously examined my own privilege and disadvantages in an effort to understand stereotypes and truths about white women, so that I may more deeply engage students with the historical meanings assigned to race, class, gender, and sexuality in America. I want students to think about how we got here-the age of Trump-and how we can chart our way toward a more merciful, peaceful place where we might want to live.

Writing Death opens a meditation on the possibility of mourning; of whether there is a subject, or even object, that one mourns—of whether one is mourning, can only mourn, the very impossibility of mourning itself. The manuscript is framed by two attempts at mourning—Avital Ronell’s “The Tactlessness of an Unending Fadeout” and Jeremy Fernando’s “adieu.” In-between—for this is where both pieces posit the possibility of attending to the passing, the memory, the fading of the person—is an attempt to think this impossibility. The text is continually haunted by the question of whether one is mourning the person as such, or a particular version of the person, a reading of the person. And in reading another, in attempting to respond to the other, one can never have the metaphysical comfort that one is reading accurately, correctly; in fact, one may always already be re-writing the person. Thus, all one can do is attempt to mourn the name of that person, whilst never being certain of whether her name even refers to her any longer. All one can do is write death.