Listen to Black-Caribbean-African American poet Arisa White from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York — now residing in Maine — share her experience working as a tenured-track professor from-home during the pandemic with her wife. Her experience as an adjunct professor teaching a hybrid-online-in-person course using Blackboard and Canvass prepared her to teach online in 2020. When Covid-19 spread and college campuses closed to prevent the spread of the virus, as a poetry professor Arisa focused on how to recognize the humanity of her students who were distance-learning on Zoom, without trying to teach them something: “How can we use this moment as an experience for learning language, about story, about the contours of our fear?”
She shares about what her online book tour on Zoom was like for her poetic memoir, Who’s Your Daddy?
Arisa's words:
On 2020
“Thinking about life as a poetic performance.”
“We’re-all-in-this-together feeling.”
On 2021
“Everyone was all Zoomed-out.”
“Everyone was falling apart.”
“After spring of 2021 I just cried... All of these existential questions… What is the world coming to? What is my purpose?”
On the Black Lives Matter movement:
Arisa speaks on George Floyd and Briana Taylor… She speaks on the expectation of people of color to perform diversity and equity.
On the mask-mandate:
She talks about taking a road trip with her wife from Maine to Florida and seeing the change in the amount of people wearing masks indoors. She saw a prevalence of people wearing masks in the tri-state area and D.C. area, which changed to people not wearing masks in Virginia and Florida, which she was fine with. When she visited museums in Florida, she wore a mask inside.
On the vaccine:
She shares how being a person who is medically exempt from getting the vaccine she experiences negative reactions to her non-vaccination status, which she fears will lead to an apartheid system wherein she is disallowed into certain spaces regardless of her negative-Covid-19 status.
On loss:
Arisa shares about her cousin who passed away in June of 2020 and Cave Canum poet Kamilah Aisha Moon who passed away in September of 2021 and bell hooks who passed away in December of 2021.
Check out Arisa’s publications and awards here: https://arisawhite.com
