From the Printed Page to the Concert Stage

by | Aug 30, 2024

Following a 2019 performance in Sweden, the singer and musician Maja Heurling was approached by an audience member and recent migrant. “This is the first time I’ve heard a Swede telling the story that I carry inside,” they told her (Heurling 2022). The Swede who...

The Dzaleka Art Project

by | Aug 30, 2024

The Dzaleka Art Project is a collaboration between youth living in the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi, undergraduate and graduate students at George Mason University (GMU), and me, a GMU Professor of Folklore and English. Six youth who live in the camp documented arts...

Manzanar, Diverted

by | Aug 30, 2024

At the foot of the majestic snow-capped Sierras, the site of Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp, is the confluence for memories of Payahuunadü, the now-parched “land of flowing water.” Intergenerational women from Native American, Japanese American, and...

Flood of Memory

by | Aug 30, 2024

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal and imprisonment of all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Maya Castronovo’s documentary short, Flood of Memory, explores the role of memory and...

Digging for Gold

by | Sep 17, 2023

Getting to the earliest sources of traditional Cajun and Creole songs is a veritable mutual obsession for Ann Savoy and me. We are friends and bandmates in the Magnolia Sisters, the premier all-women’s Cajun band from South Louisiana.  A song collector, musician,...