Jefferson Market Library Programs

By Corinne Neary

We are looking ahead to a new Jefferson Market University course with Kimberly B. George, a creative and academic writer. Kimberly holds an M.A. in Religion from Yale and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UCSD. Contemplative Reading and Spiritual Autobiography will be a four-week, writing-based course that will explore the histories of progressive religious feminist and queer activism in the U.S. It will take place on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. from February 27-March 19. Registration begins on Monday, Feb. 12.

We sat down with Kimberly to learn more about her and the course.

This course is unlike anything we have offered at JMU before! Can you tell us about how you got interested in feminist and queer histories? 

One beginning is that I took a course in feminist theory in graduate school 15 years ago with Dr. Laura Wexler, and I learned that humans have incredible creativity and resilience for re-imagining the world. We have power to shape and change, and when we learn the astounding histories of feminist and queer social transformation, we access even more of our collective power to birth the world we want today. 

The class focuses on a couple of figures that many may be unfamiliar with: Rev. Pauli Murray and Leila Ahmed. What makes these two so important?

Murray was a poet, writer, lawyer, feminist/lesbian foremother, dear friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Episcopal priest, and the intellectual force behind the research that allowed Thurgood Marshall to overturn segregation in 1954. She fought and overcame constant sources of discrimination and derision in what she called “Jane Crow”— at the intersection of anti-Black racism and patriarchy. 

Ahmed was the first professor of women’s studies in religion appointed at Harvard, and her groundbreaking work has been a critical feminist voice on Muslim women’s experiences and intersections of gender, race, class, and colonialism. In our class, we will read excerpts from her gorgeous memoir, “A Border Passage,” and we will think about how her feminist methods of research give us different creative tools for how we write and make new knowledge. 

Your course has a creative writing component as well. How does that help your students’ experiences in the classroom?

Many of us had an education that dimmed our sense of nourishing our creative voice. I use creative writing in my classes so that participants can fall back in love with trusting that their innate creative joy holds value. I also use creative writing because it helps us activate the subconscious parts of our learning, allowing us to integrate the different parts of who we are. 

And finally, what’s your favorite book? Or something great that you’ve recently read? 

I am a contemplative, so I am drawn to authors that guide me—through the beauty of language—to practice presence with myself, with others, and with the land. Kathleen Norris’ “Dakota: A Spiritual Autobiography” first taught me this presence as a teenager. Later in grad school, I fell in love with the book “Islands of Decolonial Love” by Leanne Simpson, which offers that contemplative lens through feminist Indigenous knowledge.