My headshot as “Dr. J” after finishing my PhD, 1997. I’m wearing the Julius Erving Sixers jersey and applying the stethscope to Rich’s book. I had an alternate shot in which I wore the mortarboard.
My first career was as an academic writer on modern literature, and also as a teacher of expository writing and literature classes at Rutgers University.
Here is my 2015 piece in Critical Flame titled “Witness: #BlackLivesMatter, Claudia Rankine and Adrienne Rich”
Here is my 2012 appreciation of Adrienne Rich I wrote after her passing (a humble blog)
Some of the academic pieces that still seem relevant to me now:
“An Atlas of the Difficult World”: Adrienne Rich’s Countermonument (Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 727-749)
This was my first and only article published in a significant lit journal. Even in 2020 people were responding to this work in articles or theses on Rich, which helps me look back at my academic life and feel it made a contribution.
Mapping after the Holocaust: The “Atlases” of Adrienne Rich and Gerhard Richter (Mosaic (Winnipeg) , Vol. 32, No. 4 , December 1999)
I was inspired to write this piece after visiting the installation of Gerhard Richter’s massive multimedia piece “Atlas” at the Dia Art Foundation in NYC
Queer Inheritances: Tracing Lesbian, Jewish, and Poetic Lineages in Adrienne Rich (Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review, Vol. 67 (1997), pp. 23-32)
This piece builds upon Rich’s famous work in both prose and poetry on the intersections of her identity as a Jew and a lesbian, most prominently in her poem “Yom Kippur 1984”