Therí A. Pickens
Therí A. Pickens received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (P’05) and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA (2010). She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies.
In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Li’l Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Travelling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.
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What Had Happened Was
New Body Politics
Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the
Contemporary United States
In the increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic American landscape of the present, understanding and bridging dynamic cross-cultural conversations about social and political concerns becomes a complicated humanistic project. How do everyday embodied experiences transform from being anecdotal to having social and political significance?
Arab American Aesthetics
Literature, Material Culture, Film, and Theatre
Arab American Aesthetics enlists a wide range of voices to explore, if not tentatively define, what could constitute Arab American aesthetics in literature, material culture, film, and theatre. This book seeks to unsettle current conversations within Arab American Studies that neglect aesthetics as a set of choices and constraints.
Dr. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness.
Black Madness :: Mad Blackness
African American Review
Special Issue, 2017
In 2006, the late Christopher M. Bell lamented “the failure of Disability Studies to engage issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity.” In recent years, scholars like Michelle Jarman, Jennifer James, Cynthia Wu, Nirmalla Ervelles, and Terry Rowden have filled this lacuna with essays and books of their own. Though it may no longer be necessary to think in terms of failure, we still have a significant amount of work to do in exploring the scholarly terrain where disability and race intersect.
College Language Association Journal
Special Issue, 2021
The College Language Association has been a home for scholars of color since 1937 when the Modern Language Association was segregated if not by law then certainly by practice. To publish a conversation about Blackness and disability in this journal is not only a symbolic gesture about the import of the conversation, but also opens up avenues of discussion with new audiences.
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