Tools My Mother Gave Me: Four Poems

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Eight
  In Roundtable Session: The Poem as Tool and Home: Poetics, Identity, and Family in Educational Research (Table 13)

Abstract

To be considered autoethnographic research, autobiographical poetry must connect theory and culture with personal experience. Here, I share methods that utilize critical sociocultural theory and incorporate excerpts from interview as well as personal, public, and popular culture texts. The poems, crafted through multiple rounds of feedback and revision in a graduate level poetry workshop, explore cultural tools my mother passed down to me: cake mix, legal forms, makeup, and love. Each explicates the ways our socioeconomic status and my mother's gender affected the paths she found to social mobility. The poems about cake mix and makeup also explore whiteness, with the makeup poem noting the privileges my mother was afforded due to her race and sexuality.

Author

• Rhianna K. Thomas, New Mexico State University
  Presenting Author