{"id":468,"date":"2021-01-21T07:00:05","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T13:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/?p=468"},"modified":"2021-01-21T08:05:46","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T14:05:46","slug":"promoting-diversity-through-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/2021\/01\/21\/promoting-diversity-through-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Promoting Diversity Through Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the spring of 2020, Augsburg alumna Tracy Ross \u201919 found\nout she won the Presidential\nGraduate Diversity Scholarship<\/a> from Bowling Green State\nUniversity. This merit-based award is given to a student who plans to promote\ndiversity within the graduate student population at Bowling Green.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracy wanted to go to Bowling Green to earn her Ph.D. in\nRhetoric and Writing. She heard it\u2019s one of \u201cthe best hidden school in the\ncountry\u201d from then MFA nonfiction mentor, Karen Babine. Tracy also has family\nwho have attended Bowling Green. With the Presidential Graduate Diversity\nScholarship, Tracy plans to combine her passion for poetry and community\nservice to bring poetry to inner city youth and urban areas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracy\u2019s connection to diversity started as a young child\nand she believes her diverse background is what has helped her get to where she\nis today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Tracy\u2019s father is Black and her mother is European Caucasian. She attended school through her sophomore year of high school, then started her own path to higher education. Her father worked in the automotive industry and when economic hardship forced the automotive plants to close, Tracy\u2019s family moved to Chicago so her parents could find work. Here, Tracy homeschooled herself. On her own, she learned what it would take to pass the equivalency test and she succeeded. With her GED, Tracy got herself into Roosevelt University in Chicago at an age when her peers were still in high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEarly on I realized that through my family\u2019s economic\nhardship and inequalities, you can\u2019t see the potential in yourself unless you\nsee the potential in other people. I felt really blessed I have a diverse\nbackground, and that I was exposed not only to hardship, but I was blessed in\nhaving the fortitude and the privilege to be a thinking, aware human being,\u201d\nTracy says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After earning her bachelor\u2019s degree in English Literature, she went on to Bemidji State to earn a master\u2019s degree in education. Tracy wanted to teach creative writing, but she realized that in order to teach creative writing at a post-secondary level, she would need a subject-specific degree. Tracy researched many universities and after reading Augsburg\u2019s mission statement about its education to service, and seeing the diverse faculty in the MFA program, she decided the best fit would be Augsburg\u2019s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBetween the residency and the remote technology, that\u2019s a big part of the incentive of going to Augsburg University. Especially in an MFA program, you have to work alone as a writer and [the program] gave me so much time to go back and forth between the mentorship and working alone. Augsburg was very progressive with that style of teaching,\u201d Tracy says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracy\u2019s focus was on poetry and publishing. She considers\nherself blessed to have had the opportunity to work with four different MFA\nmentors: Cary Waterman, Heid\nE. Erdrich<\/a>, Karen\nBabine<\/a>, and James\nCihlar<\/a>. Tracy was also part of Augsburg\u2019s Howling Bird Press<\/a> the\nentire time she was in the program, until she graduated in 2019 with an MFA in\nPublishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAugsburg University was the best experience in my life,\u201d\nTracy says. \u201cI\u2019m so grateful to Heid Erdrich for editing my thesis which I was\nable to publish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracy\u2019s focus during the Spring 2021 semester will be on publishing her next book<\/a>, as well as focusing on her research and dissertation for her Ph.D. work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracy\nRoss is a poet, writer, and humanist. She holds a B.A. in English from\nRoosevelt University and a Master’s in Education. She is also a graduate of\nAugsburg University’s MFA Program. Her work is paramount in fusing poetic\npurist tradition with the modern technological progress and its influence on\nthe mind. Her first collection of poetry, <\/em>Broken Signals (Trials of\nDisconnect)<\/em> is\navailable from Shanti Arts Press. Her novella, <\/em>Certainty of One–A Tale of\nEducation Automation<\/em> was\nreleased in November of 2018 by Adelaide Press. <\/em>James Dean and the Beautiful\nMachine<\/em> was\njust released in February 2020. She currently lives and works in Minnesota.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the spring of 2020, Augsburg alumna Tracy Ross \u201919 found out she won the Presidential Graduate Diversity Scholarship from Bowling Green State University. This merit-based award is given to a student who plans to promote diversity within the graduate … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":831,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[24,36,25,34,26,35,19,21,22,20,23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/831"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/howlingbird\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}