Novelist · Short Story Writer
What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.
Novelist · Short Story Writer
What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.
T.S. Eliot Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert
The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.
Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert
The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.
Award-winning Poet, Novelist & Musician, Lead vocalist of The Spasm Band
Author of Sonnets for Albert
The life of Caribbean people is not really documented. So this idea of Caribbean life being fragmented is something that I've had in my mind for a long time. So when I came to write this collection for my father, I realized that it was the same process and what I had were fragments, especially with him, because he wasn't around in a physical sense all the time. So all I had were little photographs, scattered memories, and remembrances. They're little parts of his life and parts of my experience with him... I never disliked my father. I always loved him and always was fascinated and captivated by him.
Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles
When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.
Claudia Forestieri (Creator) & Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz (Showrunner)
Gordita Chronicles
When you immigrate, it's kind of like you're going through adolescence because you're in a new place. You feel weird in your own skin. You're learning new things. Everything is changing. You feel awkward. So that also helped us connect the adult stories to the children's stories.
Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC
In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?
Dancer, Writer, Choreographer
Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School, NYC
In both writing a first draft and in the improvisation of a dancing body, what is so key and relevant and exposed is voice. That internal voice of the artist of what they're writing on the page or what they're writing in space. If you go to fiction workshop, you talk about plot, structure, and you talk about character development, but there are very few classes within a dance curriculum where you break down an improvisation and you talk about voice, point of view, metaphor, or musical composition within a phrase. The lifespan of a phrase. And so this realisation is helping me understand that a one minute post of improvisation or even a ten-minute span of improvisation if it’s recorded is very similar to a first draft of creative writing, where then the artist is in a position to evaluate those 10 minutes and identify what is the setting? What is the voice that has come out of my experience of writing this first draft of an improvisation? And how can I give it structure? How can I give it form?
Author of Uncommon Measure A Journey Through Music, Performance, and
the Science of Time · Fmr. Classical Violinist
There's a real decrease in functional connectivity between regions of the brain that modulate the ego and a sense of self for Gabriela Montero when she's improvising. That's not a region of the brain in particular, it’s the connections between a lot of them and that together as well and also our sense of self and also our conscious memory and our ability to anticipate and plan for the future. So our knowledge of ourselves in these different spheres of time, the light of that activity is dimmed during improvisation. There really is a biological reason behind her feeling that she gets out of the way and something else comes to the fore. The study asks why are her improvisations still so coherent, why did they hold together in time. They refer to it as this form of embodied creativity or embodied cognition, where it’s a deeper kind of memory. a more physical memory in her fingers in her body that know how to play and kind of takes over and allows for ego to kind of dissolve in that moment as she performs.
Author of Uncommon Measure A Journey Through Music, Performance, and
the Science of Time · Fmr. Classical Violinist
There's a real decrease in functional connectivity between regions of the brain that modulate the ego and a sense of self for Gabriela Montero when she's improvising. That's not a region of the brain in particular, it’s the connections between a lot of them and that together as well and also our sense of self and also our conscious memory and our ability to anticipate and plan for the future. So our knowledge of ourselves in these different spheres of time, the light of that activity is dimmed during improvisation. There really is a biological reason behind her feeling that she gets out of the way and something else comes to the fore. The study asks why are her improvisations still so coherent, why did they hold together in time. They refer to it as this form of embodied creativity or embodied cognition, where it’s a deeper kind of memory. a more physical memory in her fingers in her body that know how to play and kind of takes over and allows for ego to kind of dissolve in that moment as she performs.
