Professor Andrea Scarpino has been among the teaching faculty at UI&U since 2008. She is a prolific writer, poet, and presenter, and continues to be a vital leader of the Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program. She teaches courses in creative writing in addition to serving on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Studies Committee and on the Admissions Committee. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and Creative Inquiry, and serves as a coordinator for the Residency Planning Committee.
Although Scarpino has published for years and has
received many honors and awards for her poetry, this year marks the release of her first,
full-length poetry collection, Once, Then.
Red Hen Press is scheduled to release the volume in March of this
year. For this book-length publication, Scarpino covers themes of personal and
political loss and the tensions between science, myth, and spirituality.
“My new poetry book, Once, Then, being released
March 1 is a collection of elegies built around the deaths of my father
and of a young friend named Gracie, as well as poems of witness for larger
global atrocities like the American bombing of Hiroshima.”
By blending and contrasting scientific models with
references to classical mythology, Scarpino presents her readers with
meditations of how loss shapes us and our understanding of the world.
She is currently working on two other poetry projects—a
book-length poem having to do with water and her father's work in water
disinfection and a book-length poem having to do with the body in pain.
She said of her work, “All of my poetry, really,
connects elegy and poetry of witness, and my current scholarship seeks to
identify the ways in which elegy and witness connect in writing about the body,
particularly in the poetry and prose of Paul Monette and Audre Lorde.”
See more of what Professor Scarpino is doing at her website!
Scarpino believes in the value of the scholar-practitioner model and desires to integrate the principle of social responsibility inside and outside of the academy. “At its most basic, I see social responsibility as paying attention to the world around me and trying my best to act in a way that demonstrates my commitment to just and equitable treatment for all,” Scarpino said. “One of my heroes, Carolyn Forche, writes, ‘The time, however, to determine what those politics will be is not the moment of taking pen to paper, but during the whole of one's life. We are responsible for the quality of our vision, we have a say in the shaping of our sensibility. In the many thousand daily choices we make, we create ourselves and the voice with which we speak and work.’ Dr. Nancy Boxill instructs, ‘We are the culture keepers.’ And Terry Tempest Williams writes, ‘We cannot do it alone. We do it alone.’”
Scarpino acknowledged that social responsibility is not only about theory or artistic production. She tries to integrate the principle into her daily decisions: “When I choose a plant-based diet and refuse bottled water, I act out social responsibility. When I spend money on brands that support living wages for their workers and use sustainable materials, I act out social responsibility. When I carbon offset my travel, when I refuse to participate in the inequality of marriage as it is currently constructed, when I pay attention to the many privileges my white skin allows me, I act out social responsibility. Which is not to say I am perfect! But it is to recognize that social responsibility cannot just appear when I sit down to write a poem about war, or when I construct a syllabus. It must be present ‘in the many thousand daily choices’ I make. It must be part of how I live my life each moment of each day.”
No comments:
Post a Comment