Our writing for this project will revolve around two main questions: (1) what kinds of commentary about contemporary culture can Cyberpunk and postmodern SF make possible? (2) What kinds of theoretical and practical possibilities can be created through imaginative integration with worlds, organisms and technology radically different from, yet reflective…

The Form at a Glance Length: Minimum 5 stanzas, Max: undetermined Stanzas: Couplets Rhyme Scheme: The opening couplet (called the Malta) sets up a rhyme scheme (quafia) and refrain (radif) that occurs in both lines. From then on, this refrain only occurs in the second line of each couplet. The…

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argues that the stigmatizing power of myths and metaphors surrounding illness have fatal consequences. So why do we as a society turn to metaphors during pandemics? What is this urge to understand illness through writing? Our guest written publication follows these and other questions through student witness journals written during their study of pandemic literature spanning the 1918 Flu, HIV/Aids, and Covid-19. Through the interpretation and appreciation of a wide range of short stories, personal narratives, and other survivor literature we will creatively and critically engage the literary complexities of pandemic life in America from the early 1900s to the lived complexities of the Covid-19 present.

The Mexican poet, Octavia Paz writes, “Poetry is made out of the very substance of history and society — language.” If this is true then when we give language form, we also formalize history and society. By writing poetry, we form reality. What this means for our publication, is that…

For me, lines of bird flight are always audible. Birds wheeling flick the quick wisps of the conductor’s baton tip into the blue, they curve shimmering notes up over the top staff line, or they bend like a light arc flickering through a lens pointed into the sun. But…

Music that resists my capacity to divide, to classify its parts. Music that grabs my ears by the shoulders and shakes them, blurring all its auditory patterns into novel seams. Music that recognizes that repetition, as Gertrude Stein believed, does not exist. …