Writing and communication

This final essay was assigned by Dr. Joe Milutis BIS 206 Winter 2017 Engaging Literary Arts: Beats and Beyond. The students were designated to expand on one of the shorter responses for a 3-4 page essay.

I chose to expand on my critique of conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith's presentation at Brown University. Goldsmith's presentation was a reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy as “poetry." I concluded the essay with my point that "he has taken an already stolen life to gratify his own poetic ego."

This online engagement activity (OEA) was assigned by Dr. Kris Kellejian in the BIS 293 Autumn 2015: Introduction to Writing Studies class. OEA's are weekly assignments that require the students to apply the concepts covered to the assigned writing activities. OEA 1, featured here in the portfolio asked the students to write their literacy narrative/auto-ethnography. Professor Kellejian provided examples of non-traditional types of communication that influence literacy and can be addressed in our response.

For my literacy narrative, I chose Twitter and Tumblr as my examples of communication. Although social media can become overwhelming very quickly, I still appreciate the act of sharing knowledge on it. I still credit Twitter for being the platform where I could easily access conversations and topics from people who were similar to me. Even to this day, seeing others talk about their experiences in situations that I could have felt alone in makes me feel better. The James Baldwin quote comes to mind, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read..."

This is a poem written by Beza Ayele, outside of school terms. The theme was anxiety.

It was accepted & printed in the University of Washington Bothell's 2020 Poetry and Prose section of the Literary & Arts Journal.

This is a reading response assigned by Dr. Naomi Bragin in BIS 322 B Spring 2017 Theorizing Black Performance. This specific reading response was in the Module about Representation. The reading assigned was Stuart Hall's "The Work of Representation."

This class was in the Spring quarter that I petitioned for. I remember I was really getting along with Professor Bragin, and I participated wholly in class. Even though I appreciated I will paste a section that I wrote in my statement of purpose when I applied to the Masters of Art in Cultural Studies program to further explain my thoughts. "The problem was everything I did felt like a performance. In my short time in Professor Bragin's Theorizing Black Performance, I learned about as/is performance. Is performances are events that are put on as performances and to be seen as such, As performance can be anything that is viewed and judged as such without the intention of performance. While we are in a world made up of social constructs everything is a performance. In ADHD and other forms of disorders, there is an act called masking. Masking is made up of everything one does to seem as neurotypical as one can. It eventually causes long-term burnout when their energy is focused on just presenting. So many classes presented me with this problem. As a lover of writing, I felt I could not form words as I could before. It is dreadful when you are constantly pretending and I felt as if I was living as performance as I judged myself and felt judged. An example is Professor Bragin’s class, where I learned so much, but it is not reflected on my transcript."