Celestine Woo
Celest Woo is an English professor who has taught college in NY, NJ, and CO. She is now a teacher at Trevor Day School in New York City. She has published poetry, memoir, fiction, and scholarly work, and is also a modern dancer and choreographer.
My parents lied once to me and my sister as teenagers, bringing us to church on a Saturday morning under false pretenses expressly for the purpose of having our Sunday School teacher meet us in the parking lot and listen to our parents harangue him about how disobedient we were.
...within the unlikely First World environment of graduate-educated, progressive, cosmopolitan, psychologically sophisticated circles, I encountered two targets of exorcism and an accusation of witchcraft. For one demon-ridden friend, it was traumatizing; for the other, transformative.
I can muse on inequity and stereotypes
safe in the comfort of my paycheck
and business attire.
I can waltz by the cops in and around
the train station, wary but unafraid for my life.
The crashing of the English canon in Spanish Harlem
Resounds like cymbals in dissonant reverb:
The path out of poverty is strewn with dead white poets,
Whose diction students strive to emulate,
