Essays will be evaluated on clarity, focus, originality, and engagement with the text.
Use any standard citation format.
Find a relevant primary source, like a poem, film, or historical document, or a secondary source, like a critical analysis, article, or interview, and discuss how it can inform or enrich our analysis of one of the works we have read or of an author’s body of work. What can we learn from this additional text that could change or deepen our understanding of a work?
Write a critical essay that explores a specific aspect of how gender and sexuality shape identity in one of our texts. Your analysis can explore characters’ lives as well as the lives and milieu of their creators. What does the text say about what makes us who we are?
Discuss how one or two of our texts engages with ideas about home and belonging. Consider home in both the sense of a physical place and as a feeling of affiliation and acceptance. How and where are ideas about acceptance and belonging complicated? Discuss one or two instances where being “at home,” physically or psychologically, matters in these texts.
Some poems we have discussed, I’ll put below:
Terrance Hayes:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/george-floyd
from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins:
https://poets.org/poem/american-sonnet-my-past-and-future-assassin-seven-ten-things
https://poets.org/poem/american-sonnet-my-past-and-future-assassin-when-james-baldwin-audre-lorde-each-lend
https://poets.org/poem/american-sonnet-my-past-and-future-assassin-even-most-kindhearted-white-woman
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143916/american-sonnet-for-my-past-and-future-assassin-598dc8f97f34b
Danez Smith:
https://poets.org/poem/juxtaposing-black-boy-bullet
https://poets.org/poem/even-black-guys-profile-reads-sorry-no-black-guys
https://poets.org/poem/cream
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/145994/dogs
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92050/the-17-year-old-the-gay-bar
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/150542/dear-white-america
Jericho Brown:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57694/psalm-150-56d23b6f36d1b
https://poets.org/poem/virus
https://poets.org/poem/langston-blue
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57692/hustle
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57693/another-elegy-this-is-what-our-dying-looks-like
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152728/bullet-points
Reginald Dwayne Betts:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/88739/when-i-think-of-tamir-rice-while-driving
Tracy K. Smith:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147468/declaration-5b5a286052461
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147467/wade-in-the-water
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-history-of-anti-hispanic-bigotry-in-the-united-states/2019/08/09/5ceaacba-b9f2-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html
https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet02-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com/5c0ffebc3f6c6/3144450?X-Blackboard-Expiration=1628802000000&X-Blackboard-Signature=PsUO1JWLc6CeJhcZ4DbAKA6Nz7TFEnCLShNqr9Q2nc0%3D&X-Blackboard-Client-Id=100781&response-cache-control=private%2C%20max-age%3D21600&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27EMBROIDERIES_Satrapi.pdf&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210812T150000Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21600&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PL5SJBSTP6%2F20210812%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=624d4f9c53b807b7c022c493fd1ce7c8a9db1a8144e9429d7374c7874ec72cb3
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm
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