UH Moment: "Soros Poetry Fellowship"
 June 10, 2009 by: Marisa Ramirez Poetry can be the voice of those who can't speak or cannot be heard. It is the instrument one University of Houston student uses to speak about undocumented immigrants. Listen to this week's UH Moment. listen now: Junkyarding through the great Moreno Valley S. was always looking for a carburetor and I'd hang around to get some sleep on the bench seat of his Ford. When I was awake and not browsing the glove compartment, I'd help comb the rust edging the lots, finding nothing shaped like a such- and-such all day. We'd split up —he called it double-timing— and I'd poke around at alternators and engines under the corrugated hoods. If I got lucky, a cat or possum would skedaddle out a trunk, or I'd find a cassette we'd jammed to at the skating rink a few years back. Once when I was leaning against the open door of a stripped jeep, he proposed with a pipe clamp too big for any of my fingers. I still wore it around, every so often forgetting what it was and calling it a gasket. We were always getting it wrong, he and I. He'd tell me to look for serpentine belts, but to stay away from the rattlesnakes, and I'd come back swinging an inner tube or two on my arms. It was good. Sure, not much happened, but those things we'd holler one after the other across the junkyards, weekend after weekend, well, they became something like a language passed between us, our own long American sentence. "My poems always seem to be about the experience of undocumented immigrants," Janine Joseph said. She was 8 years old when she arrived in the United States from the Philippines. Now a doctoral candidate of the Creative Writing Program, Joseph is one of 354 students nationwide awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship that supports graduate study of new Americans.  Soros Fellowships are awarded to support the graduate study of new Americans (immigrants and children of immigrants). Joseph is one of 31 Soros Fellows who were selected from about 750 applicants. Created in 1997, these fellowships have been awarded to 354 students. "What I aim for when writing a poem is accessibility, because if I'm going to be writing about the undocumented immigrant experience, I'm not doing myself any sort of justice if I'm writing in a language no one really understands," she said. Her current work explores themes of identity, transformation and relationships people build with each other. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals, anthologies and publications including Third Coast, Calabash, Spoon River Poetry Review and Nimrod International Journal. For more details on these fellowships, visit http://www.pdsoros.org/. Janine Joseph is part of what's happening at the University of Houston. I'm Marisa Ramirez. Telling the stories of the University of Houston, this UH Moment is brought to you by KUHF, listener supported radio from the University of Houston. > view printer-friendly version listen to audio: > in your media player download audio: > podcast > iTunes > direct subscribe to audio category: > latest podcast > iTunes > return to previous page |