Answering the Call of My People: Captured Fractured Buried Excavated Reassembled Set Free  is a graduate thesis written while attending Goddard College in pursuit of a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art. Since graduation, this thesis is being developed in part as a personal memoir, one-woman show, and novel. Answering the Call of my People is a collection of complete and excerpted works that map my own journey of finding, discovering, examining, reflecting, and reclaiming of ancestry, family, community, and self. Answering the Call of My People features a play and novel excerpt, essays, short stories, poetry, music, photographs, blog posts, and music referencing themes that include genealogical/familial ties, gender identity, re-membering the dead, race, and culture from an African-American lesbian’s perspective.

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Chapter I THE ARTIST includes the Artist Statement, Abstract, and Introduction

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Chapter II DIGGING IN MY SOUTHERN ROOTS includes the play, Fall of the House of Snow, novel excerpt, AUNT MAGGIE’S MOJO or The Devil in Angel Brown, research notes for An Awful Wicked Thing or Somebody has to Die, photography from Calling to the Dead, blog posts, Nobody’s Darling, From Page to Stage: Shifting from Writer to Actor, and What was Once Lost: Relighting the Lamp of the Soul

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Chapter III BLACK RAGE: FUCK POLITE POLITICS MY SOUL IS WORN includes poems, a killing on every station, song, they liked it hot, MY Home, MY Rage, Kill it, karma killed the wolf, Three Haikus: A Message to Nikki Minaj, reflection of me as my enemy, a poem for Audre Lorde, escaping the master’s house, a prayer for the living, and short story, Reciprocity

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Chapter IV I AM MY PEOPLE includes, reflection, Girl in a Tie: A Different Kind of Woman, short story, Plutonian Paradise, blog posts, Who You Calling a Butch? and What to the Queer Black Woman is the Fourth of July, short story, Why I Hate the Circus, blog post, Wake Up Black Church Before It’s Too Late, essay, Finding Sun in a Darkened Existence: Discovering My Mother’s Garden, short story, Black Cracked Baby Jesus, Reflection of My Mother, and essay, Wrong Mary: The Complexity of Being a Black Woman. 

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Chapter V COMING FULL CIRCLE: THE BEGINNING OF CLAIMING SPACE, includes, Brown Girls in the Ring- Letter to Dr. G and Forgotten Letter to My Sisters, the business of JUSTaSISTA Productions, and blog post, On Being an Artist: The Struggle is Real.​  If you are interested in reading the entire thesis, please contact prcorbett@gmail.com