Meet Keisha Hale, M.A.’20, applied sociology. Keisha is an educator, researcher, and author. In 2025, she published We Weather the Storm: A Poetry Memoir of Survival and Healing, inspired by her experiences surviving Hurricane Katrina and navigating foster care. Her work centers on resilience, education, and giving voice to stories that are often overlooked. Whether she’s teaching fourth grade math, analyzing data, or writing poetry, Keisha is passionate about using storytelling and research to create understanding, inspire change, and help others feel seen. Take it away, Keisha!

Q: What initially brought you to UMBC?

A: I came to UMBC because I wanted to better understand the social systems that shape people’s lives and to gain the skills to create meaningful change. After experiencing Hurricane Katrina, navigating foster care, and witnessing firsthand how policies and institutions can impact individuals and families, I knew I wanted to study society in a way that combined research with real world application. UMBC’s applied sociology program stood out because it emphasized using data, research, and critical thinking to address complex social issues. 

Q: Can you tell us what you loved most about the applied sociology program?

A: What I loved most about UMBC’s applied sociology program was its emphasis on using research to solve real world problems. The program challenged me to think critically, analyze data, and understand the social systems that shape people’s lives. It encouraged me to move beyond theory and consider how research can inform policy, improve communities, and create meaningful change. 

Q: Can you talk about your experience as a first generation student?

A: As a first generation graduate student, there were moments when I questioned whether I truly belonged. Like many students, I experienced imposter syndrome and wondered if I was capable enough to succeed. What I learned at UMBC is that belonging is not determined by where you come from, but by your willingness to learn, grow, and persevere.

I would encourage other first generation students to not let self doubt convince them they are less deserving of the opportunities they’ve earned. Ask questions, seek out mentors, build relationships, and take advantage of the support systems UMBC has to offer. There are people here who genuinely want to see you succeed.

Looking back, I realize that believing in myself was just as important as earning good grades. UMBC gave me the confidence to trust my abilities, find my voice, and pursue opportunities that have shaped my career as a researcher, educator, and author. I hope other students give themselves permission to do the same. 

Q: Were you a part of any clubs or organizations at UMBC?

A: During my time at UMBC, I was an active member of Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honor Society, and the Sociology Graduate Student Association. Both organizations gave me opportunities to connect with classmates who shared my passion for research, social justice, and community engagement.

What I appreciated most was the opportunity to learn from one another beyond the classroom. Through these organizations, I built friendships, expanded my professional network, and engaged in meaningful conversations about research, policy, and the role sociology plays in addressing real world challenges. Those experiences strengthened my sense of belonging at UMBC and reinforced my commitment to using research and education to make a positive impact in my community. 

Q: Where did you find support while at UMBC?

A: One of the things I valued most about my time at UMBC was the sense of community I found there. While there was not just one person who inspired me, the relationships I built as a graduate assistant had a lasting impact. Working alongside fellow graduate students, faculty, and staff allowed me to develop meaningful connections with people who became mentors, collaborators, and an important part of my support system.

One of those relationships was with my fellow graduate student, Samantha Fries ’18, M.A. ’25. We supported one another throughout our time at UMBC, encouraging each other academically and personally. That friendship has continued long after graduation, and I was honored to stand beside her as a member of her wedding party. 

Building a trusted, supportive community, whether through biological family or the family we create through friends, mentors, and colleagues, has always been essential to my success. UMBC reinforced that belief by surrounding me with people who invested in my growth both personally and professionally. Their encouragement gave me the confidence to pursue my goals, and those relationships continue to influence the way I approach my work as an educator, researcher, and author. 

Q: Since you’ve been a part of the UMBC community, how have you found support for your dreams? 

A: UMBC helped turn my aspirations into opportunities by surrounding me with people who believed in my potential and invested in my growth. As a graduate assistant, I gained hands-on experience while building meaningful relationships with faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students who encouraged me to challenge myself and pursue new opportunities.

The knowledge and practical experience I gained through the applied sociology program prepared me for a career in research, beginning with my role at Westat, where I supported large scale federally funded studies. Just as importantly, the confidence and encouragement I received at UMBC inspired me to continue growing beyond research. Today, I am an educator, researcher, and author, and I carry the lessons, mentorship, and sense of community I found at UMBC into everything I do.

What has made the biggest difference is knowing that UMBC did not just prepare me academically. It gave me a network of people who continue to encourage, support, and celebrate one another long after graduation. That lasting community is one of the greatest gifts UMBC has given me. 

Q: What is a piece of advice you would give a current UMBC student?

A: You never have to navigate your journey alone. UMBC is a place where people genuinely invest in one another’s success. Whether it is faculty who challenge and encourage you, classmates who become lifelong friends, or mentors who help you see your potential, there is a strong sense that everyone wants to see you succeed.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

Meet Lynn Dutrow. Lynn graduated from UMBC in 1989 with a B.A. in psychology and a certificate in early childhood education. Since then, she has worn many hats, including counselor, coach, and speaker. In 2022, she added another hat—author—when she published her first book, Aligned As F*ck: Transforming Your Inner Assholes (Like Anxiety) into Allies. Much of her work focuses on anxiety, overwhelm, and creating lives that feel more aligned and less exhausting. Lynn is deeply curious about humans and firmly believes humor belongs in serious conversations. Take it away, Lynn! 

Q: What brought you to UMBC?

A: I chose UMBC because it felt like the best of both worlds—it was close enough to home that I could get back when I wanted to, but far enough away that I could have the full experience of living on campus and becoming independent.

I actually didn’t know what I wanted to study. My parents wanted me to study business, but after my first psychology class, I was hooked!

Back then there were three dorms and two sets of apartments, only one of which even had kitchens! Living on campus was an education in itself. Some of my most memorable lessons about human behavior came not from textbooks, but from sharing living space with a variety of colorful personalities. In hindsight, my roommates may have unknowingly contributed to my professional training.

Pictured right: Dutrow on stage at her UMBC graduation.

What I remember most and appreciate, even 40 years later, are the approachable and supportive professors and the opportunities to gain hands-on experience through practicums and internships. Those experiences helped me connect what I was learning in the classroom to real people and real situations, something that has remained important throughout my career.

Looking back, I can see how those experiences laid the foundation for work that has taken many forms over the years: from education and school psychology to counseling, coaching, speaking, and writing. While the specific roles have changed, the common thread has always been a fascination with people and a desire to help them better understand themselves and navigate life’s challenges.

If you had told me in 1989 that my psychology degree would eventually lead me to become a counselor, coach, speaker, and author, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But the curiosity about people that drew me to psychology in the first place has been the common thread through every chapter of my career.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your current work?

A: Much of my work focuses on helping people navigate anxiety, overwhelm, and the exhausting experience of feeling like they’re constantly fighting with themselves. What I love most is helping people realize they aren’t broken. Watching someone shift from “Why am I like this?” to “Ohhh…this part was trying to help” never gets old.

Q: Can you tell us more about your work as an author?

A: People often ask what motivated me to write my book, Aligned As F*ck: Transforming Your Inner Assholes (Like Anxiety) into Allies, and the honest answer is that I realized I was repeating the same conversations over and over again…with clients, friends, family members, and occasionally random strangers. I wanted to put the information I found myself sharing most often into one place where people could return to it when they needed it.

I also hoped, somewhat naively, that writing the book would mean I could stop repeating myself. It turns out that’s not how humans work. What I discovered instead is that people often need to hear the same ideas many times and in many different ways, and I’m grateful to keep being part of those conversations.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

In his new book, Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting, and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling, Jason Loviglio, professor of media and communications, critiques and analyzes the making of and the impact of one of his favorite shows on National Public Radio (NPR), “This American Life”—a radio show turned podcast that received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. “This American Life,” created and hosted by Baltimore-native Ira Glass, became a listener favorite for its magical way of weaving stories about everyday people into larger human issues, sounding more like a sympathetic, curious neighbor instead of a serious professor. The irony is not lost on Loviglio, who thanked his students in the book for reminding him that accessibility ensures that the public, his students, and their families, not only academic editors, understand the research. He wants this young audience to learn about radio and be inspired to research their own media and communications passions.

“The people I have had the honor of calling my students over the years have done more than anyone else to help me learn how to communicate ideas about communication and media clearly and simply,” writes Loviglio in his acknowledgements. “The MCS undergraduates are among the least pretentious and least entitled people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Too numerous to name here, I give a collective thanks to you for the lessons of clarity you’ve taught me and for the laughs.” 

Long before Loviglio became an author and the co-editor of Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media and of The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcasting Studies, he was a young kid in love with “weird radio shows,” notes Loviglio. “I remember listening at night to my red transistor radio when I was little, maybe 9 or so. I put it under my pillow so my parents wouldn’t hear it,” says Loviglio. “I mostly listened to weird nationally-syndicated late night public radio shows, like Dr. Demento and local sports talk shows.”  

While he doesn’t expect students to fall in love with radio as he did, in his History of Media class, he wants students to understand the power and importance of radio long before stories were mobilized in the palms of our hands 24/7 worldwide. Loviglio encourages students to look beyond Google and instead find people whose lives were shaped by radio. 

He wants students to explore what radio meant in everyday life and how it conveyed and reflected emotions such as fear, danger, excitement, and joy—functioning as empathy machines that inspired deeper forms of storytelling and laid the groundwork for public radio and podcasts.

Q: What are empathy machines?

A: I think it’s safe to say that public radio has been explicitly understood as an empathy machine at least since the radio show “This American Life’s” debut in 1996. If we allow for synonyms of empathy, then radio has been understood this way for a lot longer. There’s a longer history regarding various media of communication as uniquely efficient machines for producing empathy. Most famously, of course, is the novel. And before that, oral storytelling. The idea of radio as an empathy machine stems from a specific history referred to as the technological sublime.

The notion that we can invent and communicate our way into equality is central to the way we understand Western history since at least the printing press. The book, particularly the novel, has been hailed for its powers to impart democracy and empathy. This history is opposed by an equally compelling one in which the machine represents the antithesis of democratic values of participation and empathy. A dominant theme in media history is the role of technology as an extension of human values, such that we no longer hear the metaphors in our arguments.

Q: Did you always know you were going to write about “This American Life” instead of general radio?

A: It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized the best way to tell the story of public radio and podcasting was through NPR’s “This American Life.” It was first produced in 1996 by WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, and then picked up nationally by Public Radio International. It became a massive show.

“This American Life” is also one of the first shows to start offering a podcast version, in case you missed an episode. Around 2014, “This American Life” started to shift, where more people were listening to it as a podcast. I wrote to Ira Glass last year, and he still calls it a radio show. That’s still his default understanding of it, even now.

Q: Did you have fun writing this?

A: Yes and no. I had fun thinking about it and fun listening to the shows. This is such a great way to tell stories. But it was hard to write because the shows kept changing. My thoughts kept changing. I began writing the book during President Obama’s administration, when I was thinking positively about American history. Then, Trump won.

I didn’t think that because President Obama was elected, it meant that everything was great and we had cured racism. I thought a particular version of liberalism had won. Definitely very capitalistic, definitely very interested in style, maybe more than substance, but there was a story everyone was telling about the country that was designed to make people feel very comfortable. Not only liberals, but also very privileged people, and not particularly political.

Trump winning the 2016 presidential election was a reminder that there is another story. I knew the other far-right story, but I thought that more people were happy for the positive symbolic victory that President Obama represented in terms of being biracial and being born to an immigrant father. This educated, cosmopolitan elite could also speak across different cultural registers. I thought that’s what I was writing about. Then the Trump administration began, and I felt I had to write about this darker story. That meant I had to think differently about the long, slow death of liberalism. There was something rotten in the creeping neoliberalism of the era that put some of us to sleep, left others out in the cold, and mobilized a politics of racial grievance on the right.

Q: What was the critique?

A: I’m not speaking for everyone, but people like me: privileged, educated, and progressive but kind of complacent. What did we do for the eight years of the Obama administration and the previous two or three decades of creeping neoliberalism? What were we listening to? Public radio. That’s what we were listening to. That’s the soundtrack of the frog and the pot. The pot slowly heats up, the frog is comfortable, and doesn’t realize it’s slowly boiling. I love public radio. I love “This American Life.” I love podcasting, but I also wanted to look critically at the story we were telling about empathy, who is telling the story, and who is the story about? 

Important exceptions long persisted at the margins of the public radio industry. “Latino USA” is the longest-running public radio Latino news and cultural program in the United States. It is unique in that it has people of color behind the microphone. It is designed by the people that it speaks to, but most of public radio is not that way. In contrast, “This American Life,” in a way, is the epitome of white liberalism. It’s really beautiful storytelling, but in the service of this kind of sound effect of liberalism and empathy, instead of something a little bit more gritty and radically engaged that maybe we should have been trying to tune into.

Q: Did the mindset about who gets to tell the radio story shift during or after the social justice protests of the summer of 2020?

A: Yes. That is when it all falls apart. The whole public radio storytelling format starts to collapse in the late 2010s because most of these shows are run by white producers and white on-air talent who are telling stories about others. All the contradictions just start to crash into each other, and a lot of the shows go off the air. There are all these awkward moments of reckoning. Shows changed. One week, the radio show “Invisibilia,” an NPR podcast about the unseen forces that shape human behavior, like ideas and beliefs, was being produced by all-white women from NPR, The New Yorker, and Slate magazine. Then, in part due to the collapse of the specific logic of empathy that animated the show, there is a switchover to new hosts—two women of color, who cheerfully embraced a more politically engaged set of feelings, like confrontation and discomfort. The show was canceled in 2023, suggesting that the format could not bear certain kinds of changes to its structure of feeling.

The same thing happened with “Reply All,” a popular podcast about the internet and digital culture, created and hosted by Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt, two white men from New York City. They had a massive implosion. Goldman and Vogt were called out for perpetuating plantation culture in the workplace, where leadership and decision-making are dominated by white executives or managers, right in the middle of doing an exposé on Bon Appétit, a high-end food culture magazine, for doing precisely the same thing. “Reply All” was calling out a white-run magazine, and the people who were doing a lot of the grunt work but not getting paid were people of color and young people, who spoke up about the hypocrisy. That show collapsed in a couple of weeks. 

It’s really a radical moment because radio shows and podcasts don’t get to tell the same stories without ever changing who gets to tell the stories. You don’t get to pretend you care, but not change. And so things really start to feel the strain by 2020.

Q: Are shows today more liberal or conservative as a result of the shift in 2020?

A: There are many shows today that center on conflict and unhappiness with the status quo—that Trumpism has gone too far. I try to write about how we are in a whiplash between this rhetoric of empathy and the rhetoric of Trumpism, this hostility to the idea of caring for others. I don’t know how many people took the political implications of empathy seriously, but rhetorically, it shaped a good deal of the public radio structure of feeling.

Q: Why did you thank your students in the book?

A: Students are reading less and less, and academics like me want to write clearly, and we usually don’t because we’re not thinking about 17-year-olds. We’re not thinking about the parents of 17-year-olds who might encounter our research in a faculty magazine or a newspaper. We’re thinking about the people who review academic journals or books.

One reason I thanked the students is that in the MCS methods class, students read articles written by MCS faculty. If they’re learning about history, they’re reading something I wrote or something Liz Patton, chair and associate professor of MCS, who writes about media history, identity, and space, wrote. If they’re reading about globalization and representation, they’ll read research byTracy Tinga, associate professor of MCS, who focuses on critical conversations about media, power, development, and digital cultures in African contexts, or research by Fan Yang, professor of MCS, who writes about the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, urban communication, and contemporary China. And now, they are reading work on social media and mental health, thanks to our newest colleague, Holly Avella. They’re also reading or viewing the work of Chung-Wei Huang, teaching assistant professor, Kristen Anchor, teaching associate professor, and Donald Snyder, teaching professor of MCS.

Students love reading faculty research, so I want to make sure what I’m writing is accessible to students. It’s a conversation starter when students connect personally with the research. 

Q: Do students in your classes listen to the radio?

A:  Some do. I think they do so a bit more after they’ve had a class with me. I want to make sure all my classes have opportunities for different kinds of creativity and engagement. In my History of Media class, I have students think about radio and pay attention to what is on the radio by having them interview a grandparent or someone older in their lives about their experiences with the radio. Students create small stories by conducting interviews and editing them into short radio diaries in a style similar to “This American Life.”

A lot of our students are immigrants or international students, and even more are children or grandchildren of immigrants. Radio remains especially important in much of the world, particularly in the Global South and in regions shaped by uneven development. This assignment helps students learn about their grandparents, and for some, it becomes the most meaningful conversation they have ever had with them. I’ve had students come back and tell me, “My grandfather died, and I have this recording of us talking for your assignment. It’s the only thing I have of him.” That’s why I really value this assignment. 

Q: Is listening to the radio really a thing of the past?

A: Video games and gaming culture are increasingly central to sound studies because so much of these experiences are built around audio design. Many major games are intentionally structured to sound like radio, as in Grand Theft Auto, which features more than a dozen in-game radio stations with full playlists. In this sense, radio continues to shape not only podcasting but also video games, providing a template for how soundscapes are constructed for audiences. Even though radio may seem obsolete or old-fashioned, it remains one of the dominant frameworks through which people understand and design contemporary sound culture.

Register to attend an interview with Loviglio on July 21, 2026, at the Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore City, hosted by Aaron Henkin, award-winning public radio producer and podcaster. Read more UMBC Humanities Books stories.

Meet Natalie Blank ’08, acting, who started writing novels as a child and continued pursuing her passion for writing while studying dance and theatre at UMBC. To date, the author has published four novels, Rock Bottom Rise (2026), The Mass (2024), The Tangibles (2022), which received the In the Margins Book Award in 2023, and Walking Off Pluto (2014). Natalie primarily writes young adult and women’s fiction, exploring mental health and family relationships. She lives in Maryland with her husband and three children. Take it away, Natalie!

Q: What brought you to UMBC?

A: I came to UMBC as a Linehan Artist Scholar. I remember auditioning for the theatre program with a fairly serious monologue. During the audition, the professors (Xerxes Mehta was my favorite professor) worked with me in a way I had never experienced before. They were able to push me to a level of vulnerability and emotional depth I didn’t know I was capable of as an actress. In that moment, I knew these were professors who understood how to challenge students and help them grow.

Q: How did you grow during your time at UMBC?

A: The Theatre Department had a huge impact on me, both creatively and personally. Through acting, I learned a lot about myself, not just as a performer, but also as a writer. I had the opportunity to portray many incredible characters, and through that process, I realized that storytelling in all its forms (acting in stories, creating stories, and writing stories) was at the core of who I am. 

During my time at UMBC, I wrote several plays that were produced and performed. One of those plays eventually became my first novel, Walking Off Pluto, which I self-published in 2014. Since then, I have worked hard to build my writing career and transition into traditional publishing. My current goal is to secure literary representation and publish with a major publishing house.

While I only pursued theatre professionally for about two years after college, the lessons I learned have stayed with me and continue to shape my work as a writer. The program encouraged me to explore who I was, challenge my assumptions, and confront some of the fears and weaknesses that were holding me back from reaching my full potential. One of the biggest lessons was learning to take creative risks. In recent years, I’ve become much more willing to take chances and tell the stories I genuinely want to tell, and my readers love it!

Q: Can you tell us about your current job and your work as an author?

A: I’ve always been driven and largely self-taught, figuring out many aspects of my career on my own. After college, I pursued acting professionally, but the pay was inconsistent and often insufficient, so I also worked a day job to support myself. Eventually, I found my way into the school system, and after starting a family, I became a certified teacher. I work part-time as a special education teacher for Montgomery County Public Schools. I miss theatre and dance, but I can’t live without writing. It’s something I’ll pursue for the rest of my life.

Balancing work, writing, and family life is challenging, but I remain committed to my craft. I wake up before my children each morning to write and often return to my manuscript after they’ve gone to bed. I recently published my fourth novel, Rock Bottom Rise, in May 2026.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

Meet Carlos Carmona ’88, economics. After UMBC, Carlos built a long career in retail and commercial banking before retiring in 2020. Now, Carlos enjoys traveling the world with his wife, Maritza de Jesús, and exploring one of his early passions—storytelling. In 2025, Carlos realized a lifelong dream, becoming a published author with the launch of his debut novel, Unforgivable Sins: A Barrio Story. Take it away, Carlos! 

Q: What initially brought you to UMBC?

A: Growing up in Baltimore City in the early ’80s was challenging. The closure of Bethlehem Steel had devastated the city and its economy, and for many young people, the path forward was unclear. The University System of Maryland offered something aspirational at a time when everything around us seemed uncertain.

At UMBC, I was exposed to people from different backgrounds, new ways of thinking, and possibilities beyond Baltimore City’s despair and anxiety. To this very day, I maintain close friendships from those years. In fact, I recently had dinner with Jim Zerr ’89 and his wife. My time at UMBC didn’t just educate me; it gave me lifelong relationships and a broader vision of what my life could eventually become.

Q: What’s the one thing you’d want someone who hasn’t joined the UMBC community to know about the support you find here?

Every journey is different, and I would never presume to define anyone else’s path. What I can share is that UMBC and its professors fostered an environment of openness and understanding. They recognized that academic success rarely follows a single route, and in that understanding, I found the confidence to keep moving forward. They reminded me that what matters most is not how you arrive, but that you keep going.

What has stayed with me most from my time at UMBC is the generosity of my fellow students. People shared their experiences, offered advice, exchanged resources, and opened doors for one another. Friendship and support seemed to appear wherever I turned. Looking back, I realize how fortunate I was to be part of a community that valued collaboration over competition. It is an experience for which I remain deeply grateful.

When I look back on my life, I do not see absence. I see family, friendship, opportunity, and countless people who helped shape the person I became. In the end, I was never without. If anything, I was blessed with more than I recognized at the time.

Q: Who in the UMBC community has inspired you or supported you? 

A: As an undergraduate, Professor Sarah Voight was a guiding light. Though she taught in the Spanish Department and I majored in economics, our shared Puerto Rican heritage gave me something to hold on to, something familiar and relatable in a place that often wasn’t. Her advice and guidance were crucial in helping me continue my studies and ultimately graduate.

Q: Tell us about what you loved about your academic program or an organization you were involved in at UMBC.

A: I loved studying economics, finance, and accounting. I found the subjects as exciting as they were challenging. At the same time, I explored several liberal arts and language courses, which gave me a well-rounded foundation that has served me throughout my life. For many years, I was a financial advisor to Catholic parishes, a role I stepped back from due to serious health issues, though I aspire to return when I’m able.

Q: Can you tell us about your work as an author?

A: I never planned on becoming a writer. I was a banker, a man who lived by numbers, memos, and proposals, not by scenes or plotlines. Stories belonged to other people. At least that is what I believed until life forced me to reconsider what mattered. Cancer did that. Two rounds of chemo. A fight I barely survived. And somewhere in the middle of that darkness, when my world narrowed, something in me shifted. Ideas I had buried decades earlier began to surface. Words I never thought I could write spilled onto the page. It was as if the part of me I had ignored finally demanded to be heard.

That is how Unforgivable Sins was born, a book that split itself into two stories, A Barrio Story and The Rise of Charlie Green. I self‑published them because no one in the industry was waiting for stories like mine. I knew the audience would be small. I knew the road would be impossibly long. Editors have never shown interest in Latino urban crime fiction, not because the stories lack power, but because the gatekeepers have never known what to do with them. But I also knew these stories were missing from today’s literature. They were missing in 1986 when the idea first came to me at UMBC, and they are still missing in 2026. The absence never changed. I simply reached a point in my life where I refused to let that absence continue.

What I didn’t expect was what came next. The moment I finished those books; a third story consumed me. Legacy of Sins arrived like a storm, pulling both earlier stories forward. Instead of continued editing, marketing, polishing what I had just created, I found myself chasing the next chapter, the next revelation, the next plot twist. Some scenes took forever to finish in all three stories. Not because I lacked the words, but because the memories behind them were too painful. This is all fiction, yes, but parts of it were my life experience. Parts of it still are and will forever be.

Pictured right: The potential book cover for “Legacy of Sins: A Barrio Story” by author Carlos Carmona.

Now the story is almost complete. I’m editing, refining, shaping it the best someone with only their passion can. For no publishing company would. With the lessons learned from the first one, the never‑ending process of self‑publishing. I expect Legacy of Sins to be ready this summer or early fall.

I write because these stories once brought to life refused to let me go. I write because they were missing. I write because survival gave me a second chance, and I refuse to waste it. 

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

Meet Michael Cook ’20. While at UMBC, Michael majored in information systems with a minor in statistics. Outside of the classroom, he was a member of UMBC’s improv troupe, Dog-Collar Comedy, eventually serving as the group’s president. Today, Michael is a senior business intelligence analyst for Johns Hopkins University. But recently, Michael put his improv skills to good use once again when he turned a Dungeons & Dragons mistake into the idea behind his first book, He Who Speaks Out Of Turn, which the author published in May 2026. Take it away, Michael! 

Q: What initially brought you to UMBC?

A: The big drivers for me were cost, convenience, and reputation. Of all the schools I applied to, UMBC gave me the best scholarship (in the sense that I had the least amount of tuition left over to pay myself), so it was the most affordable. In terms of convenience, UMBC was actually a shorter drive from my house than my high school was. This meant I could keep my part-time job and visit home whenever I wanted, which was most weekends, if nothing else than for the free laundry. Finally, I knew UMBC had a great reputation. I knew people, such as my own older brother, who had graduated from the school and gone on to successful jobs right out of college.

Q: Who in the UMBC community has inspired you or supported you?

A: While at UMBC, I worked in the Admissions Office as a tour guide (now called Grit Guides). One of the most valuable lessons I learned there was to communicate through stories rather than facts. Prospective students typically don’t care about statistics; they’re more interested in hearing things like, “In my second semester, I met my best friend at Salsarita’s.”

So, without realizing it, the Admissions Office trained me to think narratively and to look for the story in everyday events and present it in a way that would engage an audience. While I was never inspired to author a fantasy story specifically, my time in that position helped storytelling become second nature. That mindset probably helped me turn my D&D accident into a story in the first place. Which reminds me, I should shout out the Dungeon Master (DM) for that session: Thanks, Skip!

Q: Tell us about what you love about your academic program or an organization you were involved in at UMBC.

A: Other than the Admissions Office, I was also involved in UMBC’s improv team, Dog-Collar Comedy. We practiced once or twice a week and put on a show each semester, but it never felt like work. It felt like I was just hanging out with friends, which is really what it became over the years. One of the things I love most about the group is how we’ve maintained a strong community, even after graduation. We still keep in touch and get together as we can. In fact, many improv alumni were among the first people to order copies of my book!

Pictured above: Cook during an improv show when he was a student (left). Cook at a recent Dog-Collar Comedy alumni Christmas party (right).

Q: How did UMBC help prepare you for your next steps after graduation?

A: My coursework directly prepared me for the kind of technical work I do for Johns Hopkins now. The information systems program places a strong emphasis on SQL, which I use daily in my work. Even subjects that don’t directly apply to my current role, such as networking, gave me a broader understanding of how technology systems fit together. Just as important were the professional skills or “soft skills.” UMBC taught me how to manage my time, communicate effectively, and take ownership of my work. In my current position, I’m expected to work independently, balance multiple projects, and speak directly with customers. Because of the habits and skills I honed at UMBC, the transition from student to professional felt natural from the start.

Q: Can you tell us about your journey as an author?

A: He Who Speaks Out Of Turn began with a mistake. During Covid, I had participated in a D&D campaign virtually, where I accidentally created a typical medieval-era wizard character for a futuristic campaign. That sparked the idea of a time-traveling wizard who accidentally strands himself far in the future. Of course, the story morphed to be much more than that, but that is where it began.

In the intervening five years, I worked on the story with no intention to publish; I wrote 500 words here and there as I got spare time. I’ve always enjoyed stories, and when I was younger, I wanted to be an author, so it was a natural hobby for me. I moved multiple times and got married, and the story followed me through these different phases of life and grew as I did. One day last summer (2025), I typed the final word and finished the story. It was one of those moments where I paused and felt like, “Well, now what?” I had an entire story written, so I decided to look into publishing it. I worked with an editor to clean up the story and some friends to design the cover and map. By this spring, five years of writing, revising, and collaboration had transformed that hobby into a published novel.

People have asked me if the characters are based on people I know. The truth is, the core characters are just different aspects of my own personality; some of them are the best of me, some the worst, some who I aspire to be, and some who I never want to be. While I’ve never traveled through time or slain a dragon, I’ve felt the same loss they have, given into the same impulses, and made the same mistakes. I learned a lot about myself while I wrote this story, and I had a lot of fun with it. I hope people enjoy reading it as well.

Pictured right: Author Michael Cook holding a copy of his debut novel, He Who Speaks Out of Turn.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

Manil Suri moved to the United States after spending the first 20 years of his life living in a 400-square-foot room in Bombay, India, with his father, Ram, and mother, Prem, to whom he dedicated his latest book, A Room in Bombay. The rest of the apartment was shared between three other families. “In the apartment lived my family, which was Hindu, and three Muslim families. We had a lot of fights, but those fights were really not about religion. They were about the shared bathroom, or the shared kitchen, or resources, or money, or space,” explains Suri, a professor of mathematics at UMBC.

Suri is also an award-winning author of three novels named after Hindu gods: The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi. His fourth book, The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, is a humanities-based approach to mathematical concepts. They all paved the way for Suri’s most personal and most recent book. In three parts, Suri shares his life growing up in this room in Bombay and his life in the United States, drawing on more than 2,700 letters he wrote to his mother, which she saved in bundles organized by year, beginning with his time as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. The letters chronicle his life in the U.S., including his relationship with his partner Larry, whom he took twice to meet his parents in the room in Bombay.

Q: Who is your book for?

A: I think it’s a book that, first of all, I want to work as a story. People who like a good narrative will enjoy it. It also ties into a different idea of immigration. You hear drastic tales of how immigrants are being shunned and put into prisons. But there’s another side of immigration, too, a little more subtle, perhaps. People immigrate for all sorts of reasons—including “finding themselves,” as I did. 

Also, I’ve already received a few pieces of feedback from people who are taking care of their aging parents. There are a huge number of people in various generations who are doing that. So I think it’ll appeal to them and help them negotiate the very difficult road ahead that many will face.

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Q: How did the timing for publishing this memoir come about?

A: I have published three novels and a book on math. I felt I had to write the math book as a public service, since I had one foot in the humanities and one in the sciences—and needed to make something out of it. Once this math book was done, there was this other lingering project [the memoir] that I actually started around 2010.

My mother passed away in 2013, and there was a big gap before I really got into writing the memoir. I needed that distance, since it would have been too much to have written it too close to her passing.

Q: Your mom had this intense love for you, which you wrote was sometimes overwhelming. How did that carry on through the room and through the rest of your life?

A:  I think what happened with my mother was that my identity almost melded with hers when I was growing up. It’s only once I came to the U.S. that I was able to separate the two a little and move on. She would always say, “The U.S. has made you unemotional.” It was something I learned after coming here, to keep some distance, and move away from that merging of personalities.

Keeping boundaries is always hard, but it also tunes you to being more conscious of them. I don’t have any kids, so I don’t have to worry about that boundary. 

Q: How did you feel coming to the United States?

A: When I first came to the U.S., I spent one week with a typical American family, and suddenly I had my own bedroom. That was exhilarating, but also a little weird. After that, I was in a dorm room with a roommate, so that was again a shared room for one year.

But after that year, I moved into an apartment where I had my own room. Since then, I’ve always had my own bedroom. Even though I’m married now, I need my own bedroom.

Q: A Room in Bombay centers around four families with very different backgrounds that often argue and have major disagreements. How does that tie into today’s world?

A: I think the book actually offers a lesson pertinent to our times. Although it was my Hindu family and three Muslim families sharing this apartment, the fights we had—and there were a lot of them—were really not about religion. They were about the shared bathroom, or the shared kitchen, or resources, or money, or space.

The same applies to most of the clashes going on in the world. Even though people try to put a religious spin on them, there are so many other reasons underlying all this strife. It’s property and boundaries, space, and resources.

Very rarely is it really religion. It’s not the cultural differences that are the cause of friction, it’s other things. Look deeper, and you’ll probably find an economic reason.

Q: Why did you choose to write the book as a memoir as opposed to an epistolary novel?

A: First of all, in terms of the letters, what I wrote are not letters to be treasured like Letters Between a Father and Son, a collection of intimate letters between Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul and his son. Most of my letters are very ordinary and come with no claim of literary value. I was desperately trying to find things to say, and wrote three or four times a week just to keep my parents happy and engaged. 

There’s also so much more that happened that is not covered by the letters. I did keep some journals, especially once my mother came to the U.S. In fact, I had too much material. The first draft of this novel was about 50 percent longer, excess that I had to edit out.

Q: How do you choose what parts of the book to keep and what to cut?

A: That can be a painful decision, but fortunately, my editor helped by telling me what could be trimmed or shortened. Eventually, I had to get ruthless enough and ask myself: Is the story coming across? How much do I really need to put in for that? What examples have already been included to illustrate something—if there are two of them, let’s get rid of one.

A lot of nice, entertaining experiences had to be jettisoned in the interest of a story that keeps moving. You know, that’s what they say to writers: Kill your darlings. It’s a hard, murderous task to be a writer.

Q: There is a lot of stigma still in South Asian cultures around coming out. Did you intentionally want to address that?

A: Yes, the South Asian LGBTQ+ community is definitely one of the audiences I aimed for in this book, and in particular, their parents. Because even with my mother, who was so enlightened in many ways, there was this up and down that she went through after I came out to her. I think it really eats away at you if you cannot come out to your parents. 

At the end of part two in the book, I talk about coming out to my dad. It happened after he took me to his friend’s house to introduce me to his 19-year-old daughter. Afterwards, my father said, “Well, what did you think of the daughter?” And I said, “You can’t be serious. First of all, she’s like half my age.” I ended up telling him about my relationship with my partner, to which he said, “I didn’t know, I didn’t know.” But then I noticed he was still looking expectantly at me. I realized then that he was still waiting for an answer to his question about whether I wanted to marry his friend’s daughter! 

I always wanted to have a long conversation with him, which I thought I would have the next time I went back. But he passed away two months later, so that opportunity never came. I found out from my uncle that he had told all his brothers I was gay, even in that short period. So even though my mother always said, “He won’t be able to handle it. Don’t tell him,” as it turned out, he was fine with it.

As far as creating a supportive atmosphere for coming out in the South Asian LGBTQ+ community goes, I’d love to help in any way I could. It would be a good thing for members to give the book to their parents, “Here is someone else’s experience. It may help you.”

Q: Out of the twelve letters that you kept from the hundreds your mom wrote to you, is there one that really stands out to you?

A: The one that’s at the end of the book. It’s a full letter that really crystallizes a lot of things about how she viewed my coming out and how she was aware of losing some of her faculties in terms of memory and concentration. All those things are in that letter, which is why it’s probably the most poignant.

Read more about books from the humanities at UMBC.

It was around five o’clock on a Wednesday in May, and Michelle Jabès Corpora ’03, English and theatre, was on her sofa watching her favorite British murder mystery on TV. It had been a long shot to think her newest book, His Face Is the Sun, would hit the New York Times (NYT) bestsellers list, and since she hadn’t heard anything and it was getting late, she figured it wasn’t meant to be. 

Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! Suddenly, she looked down at her phone to see a FaceTime call from five different numbers—most of which she didn’t recognize. She quickly answered and saw her agent, editor, assistant editor, and publicists in the group of smiling faces before hearing the four words every author dreams of hearing: “You’re on the list!”

“I just started crying,” recalls Corpora. “I couldn’t believe it.” 

His Face Is the Sun stayed on the NYT Bestsellers Young Adult Hardcover list for five weeks, which the author says was “absolutely unbelievable.”

Where it all began

Corpora’s journey to becoming a NYTbestselling author was not a straight line—far from it. Corpora initially came to UMBC as a Linehan Artist Scholar to study theatre. Because she’d always been passionate about writing and literature, however, she added English as a second major to supplement her studies.

“Learning about drama helped significantly with my approach to character, plot, and pacing,” says Corpora. After UMBC, Corpora earned a master’s degree in Children’s Literature from Hollins University. Then, a few more twists and turns. Among other jobs, Corpora worked as a wedding singer, as a technician in a veterinarian’s office, and volunteered at a wildlife rehabilitation center before taking a big career leap and moving to New York City to try and get a job in children’s publishing.

Pictured left: Corpora as ‘Cleo’ AKA Fraulein Kost in a 2001 UMBC Theatre production of Cabaret.

New York state of mind

One catch: Corpora didn’t have a full-time job lined up. All she had were two unpaid summer internships at children’s publishing houses. 

“It was a real gamble,” says Corpora, “but I feel like my entire career has been a series of gambles, and they always seem to work out well.”

Corpora landed an editorial assistant position at Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books, where she had the opportunity to work on books by legendary authors like Kevin Henkes and Sid Fleischman, among many others. Then came her own children and another career pivot. With the birth of her daughter, Corpora moved into book packaging services.

“Book packaging is an interesting, mostly unknown side of the publishing industry where groups of writers work as a team to create concepts for series fiction,” says Corpora. “The transition was challenging because you really have to let go of ownership over your ideas, and you have to be creative in a collaborative way, which doesn’t come naturally to most people at first.”

Despite the learning curve, Corpora admits that her work as a concept creator really helped her grow as a writer, as she was coming up with ideas, developing them, and also editing manuscripts. “It made me into a jack of all trades,” she says.  

From ghostwriting to ghosts

In 2015, Corpora got her first publishing opportunity after winning an audition to be a ghostwriter for a long-running middle-grade mystery series, eventually writing five books in the series. It wasn’t until 2021, however, that Corpora would see her name on one of her creations. Her next four books, all bearing the name Michelle Jabes Corpora on the cover, were what are known as work-for-hire projects.

“These are usually projects that you audition for,” explains Corpora. “It’s not ghostwriting because your name goes on the books, but usually the publisher has a concept for a book or series they want on their list, and they hire a writer to develop and write that project for them.”

This was the process for her two middle-grade historical fiction novels, The Fog of Warand The Dust Bowl, as well as her young adult horror duology, Holly Horror, which was created in partnership with the owners of the classic character, Holly Hobbie.

Each step in Corpora’s journey built her foundation as a writer. But at that point, her agent knew she was ready for more.

“She’d seen me grow through all of this, was basically like, ‘It’s time for you to stop auditioning and ghostwriting and start writing your story—something that’s meaningful to you and that’s yours,’” recalls Corpora.

Finding her story 

In 2023, Corpora took her next big gamble: creating not only her own original series, but writing something she’d never tried her hand at before. Epic fantasy. 

“It felt like a big leap of faith at the time. I still had two young daughters, a part-time job, and a very busy life,” says Corpora, “and I was planning to put a lot of hours into a project that might never sell. But once the idea was born, I knew there was no going back.”

The Throne of Khetara series, born from that fateful conversation with her editor, is an Ancient Egyptian-inspired trilogy about a kingdom in turmoil, a forgotten oracle, and four unlikely heroes: a princess, a priestess, a rebel, and a thief.

“My parents and three of my grandparents were immigrants born in Egypt,” says Corpora. “So I grew up hearing stories about Egypt, and became fascinated by Ancient Egyptian history from a very young age.” 

Corpora describes the series as “Ancient Egyptian Game of Thrones for young adults,” and is told from the perspectives of the four main characters.

“That seemed to really resonate strongly with people,” says Corpora, who wanted to showcase the different perspectives in ancient Egypt, including the non-royal population who were most affected by war and conquest.

The trilogy was picked up by Sourcebooks Fire and is currently being published in nine territories so far, including the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Hungary, and Greece. It has also won numerous distinctions, including being on the list of YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults in 2026. 

“It’s been a long and winding road to get here,” says Corpora. “But I’ll always remember UMBC as a place that allows people to find their way in the world, even if your journey might take you off the beaten path.”

Pictured right: Corpora, a New York Times bestseller, at a book signing event at The Strand Book Store in New York City.

Kristina Gaddy ’09, saves and gathers manuscripts, sheet music, pictures, maps, drawings, and anecdotes, sharing them on her blog to make public what she finds hidden in archives, private collections, and museums. For her fourth book, Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), Gaddy teamed up with Rhiannon Giddens, a Grammy Award-winning musician who is equally passionate about digitizing and broadening access to the historical material culture of the banjo. 

Gaddy came to UMBC as a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar. Her passion for history and languages—Swedish, German, and Spanish—led her to graduate with a dual degree in history and modern languages and linguistics. Looking back on her time at UMBC, Gaddy is grateful for the opportunities the program provided, especially the chance to study abroad in Germany. There, she combined her proficiency in German with her historical training to research the foundations of her first book.

“The Sondheim Public Affairs Scholars Program was wonderful because of the funding I received to support my research and the cohort of students,” says Gaddy. “We were all really interested and excited about social issues, public policy, and how these ideas could be used to improve the world.”

These interests inspired a career in historical nonfiction writing and led to her to write meticulously researched books: Flowers in the Gutter: True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis (Dutton Books, 2020), Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), and A Most Perilous World: The True Story of the Young Abolitionists and their Crusade Against Slavery (Dutton Books, 2025).

Digitizing public history

Her collaboration with Giddens isn’t the first time Gaddy has written a book about banjos. “My start in music research and writing started 15 years ago when I was an AmeriCorps working with multi-instrumentalist Gerry Milnes at Augusta [Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia], and the friends I made while living in Elkins helped put me on the path to writing Well of Souls and Go Back and Fetch It.” 

It’s not just documents that Gaddy used in her first banjo book—which are accessible on her blog—but also sound clips, performances, and interviews. While many historical records can be found online, many more have yet to be digitized. Gaddy, who also digitized and archived the West Virginia Upshur County Historical Society‘s local history collection, has made digitization an integral part of her process. 

“Having come from the public history side of UMBC’s history department, I strongly believe in people having access to information as it pertains to their own history. It was one of the reasons I wanted to write Well of Souls,” says Gaddy, about her second book. “I had gathered all this information, and I could have shared it with just a few people, but I wanted anybody who wants access to banjo history not to have to go to some expensive conference to hear about it.”  

A revolutionary collaboration

Giddens, a MacArthur recipient and Pulitzer Prize winner, is grateful for Gaddy’s dedication to digitizing and broadening access to historical material culture. While working on pieces of music highlighting 18th-century North American, Scottish, and Irish traditions for Ken Burns’s 2025 PBS documentary The American Revolution, Giddens was looking for samples of Black music from the Revolutionary War. She wasn’t having much luck until she explored Gaddy’s website, where she not only found what she was looking for but also the inspiration for their co-authored book, Go Back and Fetch It.

“I just kept going back to Kristina’s website, where she had put up these JPEGs. I would download them, lose the JPEG, and I’d go back and, like, download it again. And then I was just like, ‘Kristina, why don’t we put all of these in a book?’” explained Giddens at the 2025 Michigan University Arts Initiative interview on Go Back and Fetch It with Gaddy.

The book is their third collaboration. In 2018, Giddens invited Gaddy and her husband, Pete Ross—banjo maker, researcher, and musician—to present at a banjo symposium during the inaugural North Carolina Folk Festival, which Giddens curated. Gaddy presented her research on the African American roots of the banjo, an experience she credits as the inspiration for Wells of Souls, for which Giddens wrote the foreword. They also collaborated in 2022 on one episode of the 10-part series The Banjo: Music, History, and Heritage for The Great Courses. 

“The idea behind the book was that there were all these little pieces of music in archives, in published books, in manuscripts that were sprinkled throughout the historic record of Black music in the Americas,” explains Gaddy in the same interview. “They weren’t compiled in one place. Rhiannon, as an artist, was frustrated that she couldn’t access them.”

For their book collaboration, they selected 19 pieces of music from 1687 through the 1860s. Gaddy wrote a historical research essay for each song explaining the types of banjos used, how and when they were played, and their socio-cultural significance across communities in the Americas and the Caribbean. Giddens transcribed the songs into modern treble clef and banjo tablature, which shows finger placement, rather than the Western classical notation tradition, making early Black Atlantic banjo music accessible to banjo players today, in the future, globally, and across all genres. 

Following the banjo around the world

Gaddy’s last five years have been busy. But dig a little deeper, ask more questions, and do a lot of listening—just as she does for all of her interviews—it turns out that Gaddy really started her musical performance research in high school while playing traditional Swedish music with her mom and traditional American music with her uncle and aunt. After college, she fell in love with the banjo while living with other artists in West Virginia, developing a connection with a vast, diverse community passionate about banjo culture and history—including in Baltimore City, where Gaddy and her husband performed some of the songs from Go Back and Fetch It at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in September, right before she moved to Nottingham, England.

Gaddy has also expanded her digital research presence to Substack, where she posted the news of her fully funded doctoral program at the University of Nottingham, where she will research Black fiddling in the 19th-century British Caribbean.

And even though she is a whole ocean away, Gaddy still feels the support of her UMBC history department.

“One of the most exciting things for me is to see other students and scholars diving deeper into these subjects,” says Gaddy. “My former history professor, Dr. Michelle Scott, recently put me in touch with Amina Thiam, a UMBC graduate student who is writing her thesis on Black banjoists and string instrumentalists in Maryland during the colonial period. I can’t wait to see what she uncovers.”

Learn more about Kristina Gaddy’s work and UMBC’s History department.

Keegan Cook Finberg, an assistant professor of English, started graduate school at UC Santa Cruz during the financial crisis of 2008, in a moment of extreme recession. “Privatization and austerity politics were everywhere. It was becoming increasingly clear that this wealth was stratifying upward, and notions of what constituted the public good were diminishing,” says Finberg. Finberg’s response to the times was to study avant-garde experimental poetry.

She notes that some might not see the connection between austerity politics and poetry. But she was excited about how poetry was engaging the public sphere. “Avant-garde poetry was obsessed with this notion of what made the public. And the category itself was becoming more interdisciplinary and more capacious,” said Finberg. “I started noticing and studying different forms of poems that didn’t look like what you might consider poetry. Poets were taking various aspects of state-controlled capitalist regimes and bureaucracy and using those forms as fodder for their poems.”

She remembers, around this time, books of poetry that were winning the major prizes were “avant-garde” in the sense that they chose words from material that wasn’t considered poetic. One poet chose words from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms to make poems about love. Others used these untraditional literary materials to document their experience of going through TSA at the airport, or repeating stories about racism on the street where people live. Finberg became interested in how all of these forms that we might think of as public forms were suddenly poetic forms.

In her debut book, Poetry in General (Columbia University Press, 2025), Finberg explores the privatization of the welfare state and the way that poetry changed in relation to that notion of the public. “I located the beginning of this history around 1960, which many people consider the ballooning of the welfare state, the opposite of privatization,” says Finberg. “I started thinking about what poetic form looked like in that moment and how we might trace it to today.”

Q: What drew you to poetry?

A: I have loved poetry since I was an early reader. I was first drawn to it because it is a way of experiencing the world and understanding it. As I got deeper into my studies, I became really interested in the way that poetic form changes with history.

I’ve always been curious about how the category of poetry makes us think differently. What does it mean for us to read poetry versus the way we read other forms? Can anything be read as poetry? How do we think differently if we try to read things as poetry that aren’t poetry? 

These questions excite me. It’s a way to slow down and model reading practices, a way of interacting with language that’s very intentional and precise. I think if you’re interested in play, the unknowable, or unmasterable, it can really change the way you see your everyday life. That’s how I got interested in poetry and what still excites me about poetry.

Q: Is there a piece of poetry that challenged you to accept being uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what it meant?

A: I remember when I was assigned Gertrude Stein‘s poetry as an undergraduate, it did not make any sense to me. Why would anyone assign this to me? I was irate about it at first, but once I started working with the text and playing with it, Stein’s poetry became richer and more interesting to me.

I began practicing different modes of orienting myself towards the text. Eventually, it helped govern the way that I think about the domestic sphere, feminism, and regular objects around the house. In her book Tender Buttons (1914), Stein makes objects and foods in her house come alive. Part of my attention to language and my love of language and detail comes from the practice of trying to do this type of work. 

Q: Is there a particular poetic technique that you like best?

A: I love constraint-based processes where poets make a strict rule to limit the words they choose. Often, I find our brain is attuned to think in a certain way. These constraints help us outside of what we usually think of as creativity or imagination into this other world that we didn’t even know was possible.

The book Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, a Canadian Caribbean poet, is a great example of a constraint-based process. The language for the book-length poem comes from the only historical record of an atrocious case that became important in the British abolitionist movement. Using only the text in the court case, Philip’s poem recounts the massacre of more than 130 enslaved Africans on the slave ship, Zong, headed to Jamaica from West Africa, who were thrown overboard to drown in 1781. The enslaved were dying of starvation and disease. Insurance would not cover this kind of loss. The captain decided that death by drowning could be claimed as a loss of property insurance claim. The insurance company approved the claim, but it was later overturned. No one was charged with murder.

Philip was trying to tell the story of the people on the ship and kept coming up against all of these gaps. The court case didn’t even contain the names of the people who were murdered. She decided to take the words of the court decision as a word bank for her book, to contort the case file to fill in these silences. The result is a testament to, and critique of, the horrors of the bureaucracy of slavery and its afterlife.

Most of the poems that I look at late in my book also use the language of archival documents about a major issue related to racial capitalism and the bureaucracy of the public sphere.

Q: What are other examples of constricted processes that you cover in the book?

A: I start the book with Yoko Ono. In the 1960s, she was doing wonderful experiments that were at the edge of what was performance and what was poetry. Ono was interested in speaking back to the category of racial capitalism through humor and expressions of everyday life as art. The poems in her book Grapefruit take this premise that instructions for everyday life can be fun, easy, or even impossible.

In my book, I also talk about three feminist artists from the 1970s, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and Bernadette Mayer. Their constraints are durational experiments where they go on some sort of diet, all of them for different reasons, for about the course of a month—the duration of a menstrual cycle—and document their journey. They’re writing about welfare and food assistance and their own reproductive rights on the precipice of Roe v. Wade. They’re interested in their own reproductive possibilities, and what it means to experiment with that as duration.

Q: This is your eighth year at UMBC. How do UMBC students respond to poetry in your classes?

A: For an upper-division class on feminist poetry, I recently taught Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, a famously complex avant-garde poem about Korean independence and about the experience of immigration and colonial violence. Cha writes in multiple languages to capture the disorientation of the acquisition of a new language, of a new culture, and the difficulty and violence of assimilation. It’s complex, and it can be off-putting to students.

In situations like these, I want students to be okay with not understanding everything that they’re reading while exploring the aspects that they do understand—to explore why this author might want it to be difficult in the beginning, why there might be something important in that feeling of discomfort that they’re experiencing with the text. Can they notice moments of beauty in the text, even if they don’t yet understand what they mean? A lot of our conversations start with that sort of work. 

And once students realize that that is the goal—that they don’t need to be able to decode, they don’t have to be the person who knows it all in the room, there isn’t one right answer—it really unlocks a very different sort of space. I often watch that sort of journey with students. They realize that there’s something inherently important about this difficulty, important even to their understanding of themselves, their heritage, the way that language works in their households, even in their larger worlds. 

And for my students who may take poetry to fulfill a lower division requirement, what I want more than anything is for them to see the ways that literature and poetry are alive in the world. Poetry is interesting, it’s happening, and they can read it. They don’t have to be afraid of it. Introductory level students are asked to attend literary events to see writers come and read and talk about their work. This is happening now. This is part of your world. If you’re a nurse, a scientist, or in whatever career path you follow, poetry and literature are alive and are going to continue to be part of the world that you live in. If you pay attention, this revelation may help you understand your experiences differently, connect to others in new ways, or even create new knowledge. 

Learn more about Finberg’s work andUMBC’s English department.