How should we celebrate National Coming Out Day in 2023 in the red state of Iowa? This was a key question at the most recent meeting of Mount Mercy University’s Faculty and Staff GSA (Gender and Sexuality Alliance). Let’s start with logistics: we’re marking National Coming Out Day after fall break because the actual day, … Read more
This year marked my 29th first day of school as a professor at Mount Mercy, and my 37th as a teacher. If you count my student years, it was my 55th first day of school! That fresh fall start never gets old. Sure, there is sadness about leaving summer behind and having less time to … Read more
This Pride month, I want to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community and its many allies at Mount Mercy, a small Catholic university in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I’ve taught English there my entire career. Twenty-seven years! As a Queer elder, I’ve enjoyed witnessing and contributing to the increased visibility of the LGBTQ+ community on campus. Queer Visibility … Read more
When my friend Mary Helen Stefaniak launches her third novel, The World of Pondside, her April 19th reading will be the first in-person author event I’ve attended at Prairie Lights since COVID. This momentous occasion has led me to reflect on the many readings that have enriched and shaped my life—both professionally and personally. Professionally, … Read more
It was 1984, the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Saint Mary College, and I was twenty. Along with another Saint Marian, Diane, I was an exchange student in an international program at Sophia University in Tokyo. I took two courses, Japanese Religion and Japanese Literature. The literature professor had translated one of … Read more
Amazon has sold out of antiracist books. Topping the bestseller lists are two titles I read this past semester before the pandemic hit: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist (2019). This post is my response to the pairing. But first, what to make of the book news? … Read more
You may be thinking, Alliteration? Really??? During a pandemic laced with murderous racism and police violence against the press? Let me explain. First of all, I started this post before George Floyd was murdered. And even before the pandemic, I felt like I was playing catch up—my writing unable to keep up with my thoughts, … Read more
One practice that is helping me through the pandemic so far is the effort to embrace both/and thinking, paradox, and mixed feelings.
In this poetry collection about a prison protest, Carol Tyx shows the full range of what we humans are capable of, our worst and our best.
This past Friday, I laughed hard and thought hard at Prairie Lights. I was part of an enthralled inter-generational crowd listening to Lyz Lenz discuss her debut book, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America. The book combines the personal and the political. Lenz analyzes the cultural work performed by … Read more