WRITING HOME Barnard Digital Humanities Center and Barnard Center for Research on Women

“You don’t really know a boundary until you’ve pushed against it.” – Gina Athena Ulysse

Trouble-making wonder Gina Althena Ulysse gives Kaiama and Tami a glimpse into the boundless whirl of her creative (and) scholarly practices.

Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist-anthropologist and Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An interdisciplinary methodologist, her research questions engage geopolitics, historical representations, and aesthetics in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions to confront the visceral in the structural. Her work and artistic practice are rooted in what she calls Rasanblaj – a gathering of ideas, people, things, and spirits, not necessarily in that order! She is the author of several books and articles, including; Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (2015), and Because When God is too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017)- a collection of photographs, poetry, and performance texts. It was long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and awarded the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award. Gina edited "Caribbean Rasanblaj," a double issue of e-misférica, NYU's Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics journal. Her creative work and non-fiction writing have appeared in American Ethnologist, AnthroNow, Feminist Studies, Interimpoetics, Gastronomica, Journal of Haitian Studies, Liminalities, PoemMemoirStory, Meridians, Souls, Third Text, and Transition Magazine. Her latest publication WoodsWork Rasanblaj is part of her current project an exploration of land-based connections to nature, desires and vertigo. More info: ginaathenaulysse.com

“What’s left at the end of the day once we’ve divided and multiplied and subtracted pieces of ourselves to just be able to stay standing.” – Ana-Maurine Lara 
Polymath extraordinaire Ana-Maurine Lara offers Tami and Kaiama much-appreciated  lessons in arithmetic and other miraculous methodologies.
 
Ana-Maurine Lara is currently an Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Her areas of interest include Afro-Latinidad, Black: Queer aesthetics, Afro-Indigenous relationships and traditional knowledges, and the struggle against xenophobia in the Dominican Republic. Also an award-winning novelist and poet, Dr. Lara spent 10 years as a writer and performance artist before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. in African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Her short stories and poems have been published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. In addition, she has written and performed many plays and performance art pieces, most recently Sanctuary (2021), a performance collaboration with Rosamond S. King, Akiko Hatakeyama and Courtney Desiree Morris (directed by D'Lo).

“Recovery is the next thing you have to do.” – Dionne Brand
 
Illustrious poet, novelist, essayist, and thinker Dionne Brand shares her methods for speaking liberation into the world. Kaiama and Tami are grateful.
 
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of international social justice. Her work includes ten volumes of poetry, five books of fiction and three non-fiction works. She was the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto 2009-2012. From 2017-2021 Brand was Poetry Editor at McClelland & Stewart- Penguin Random House Canada.
Dionne Brand has published nineteen books, contributed to many anthologies and written dozens of essays and articles. She has also been involved in the making of several documentary films. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at St. Lawrence University in New York and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in both British Columbia and Ontario. She has also held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She holds several Honorary Doctorates, Wilfred Laurier University, University of Windsor, Simon Fraser University, The University of Toronto, York University and Thornloe/Laurentian University. She lives in Toronto and is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She is a member of the Order of Canada.

We’re back! WRITING HOME returns for Season 3, which sees Kaiama and Tami returning to the virtual studio and taking on questions of writing, teaching, and being in the world. This time around, they’re joined by Dionne Brand, Ana-Maurine Lara, and Gina Ulysse. Taken together, the insights in these conversations serve as something like a toolkit, offering strategies for boundary-creation, self-making, and the all-important art of recovery. Listen to this trailer for season 03 as we continue on our journey of writing our way home.

“No matter how long I’ve been away from home, Haiti remains inside of me.” – Katia D. Ulysse
For the final episode of WRITING HOME’s second season, Tami and Kaiama welcome the critically acclaimed Haitian-American fiction and children’s book author Katia D. Ulysse. Reflecting Katia’s stories, this conversation weaves together the vitality of music, the multifaceted bonds between mothers and daughters, and the changing, transnational narratives of Haiti. Katia drops some wonderful gems as she lifts up the names of the people she loves, such as how she learnt how to story-tell at her grandmother’s feet and why she thinks of motherhood as “babysitting her daughter for the ancestors.”


Katia D. Ulysse is a fiction writer, born in Haiti. Her short stories, essays, and Pushcart Prize–nominated poetry appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including: The Caribbean Writer, Smartish Pace, Phoebe, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; Mozayik, The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, and Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat. She has taught in Baltimore public schools for thirteen years, and served as Goucher College’s Spring 2017 Kratz Writer in Residence. Drifting, a collection of short stories, drew high praise from literary critics. She is currently at work on another short story collection. Mouths Don’t Speak is her latest novel.
Reading List:Katia’s booksMouths Don’t Speak (2018)Drifting (2014)Fabiola Ale Lekòl/Fabiola Goes to School (2016)Fabiola Konn Konte/Fabiola Can Count (2012)Authors who Katia mentioned:Yanick LahensRoxane GayEdwidge Danticat“Addicted to Love” by Robert PalmerRobert Palmer performing with James Brown

“We are a collection of all the stories that have been passed down to us.” – Tiphanie Yanique
Award-winning writer and Virgin Islander Tiphanie Yanique joins Kaiama and Tami on this week’s episode of WRITING HOME. Tiphanie beautifully answers (and evades) our hosts’ questions about the relationship between poetic form and place, balancing beauty and pragmatism, and addressing racial inequality through participation in the publishing industry. Tiphanie hints at the themes that preoccupy her in her upcoming book Monster in the Middle – American colonial identity in the Caribbean, the impact of motherhood on her writing, and the nuns and mermaids she plans to somehow include in a future novel.
Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, poet, essayist and short story writer. Her writing has won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands. She grew up in the Hospital Ground neighborhood in St. Thomas. She lives now with her family in Atlanta where she is a tenured associate professor at Emory University.

Reading List:
Tiphanie’s novels and poetry:Monster in the Middle (October 2021)Wife (2015)Land of Love and Drowning (2014)How to Escape From a Leper Colony (2010) Works Tiphanie mentioned:Alscess Lewis-Brown and the hurriku