Semester of Graduation

Summer 2025

Degree

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Feelings That Drive is an interdisciplinary, multimodal thesis that blends poetry, personal narrative, lyrical essays, and spiritual reflection to explore the complex intersections of Black identity, memory, trauma, resilience, and healing in the contemporary American South. Framed in five thematic sections—Worn, Anxiousness, Desperation, Hopeful, and Restored—the work traverses emotional and geographic landscapes, most notably the author’s home in New Orleans, to trace the cumulative effects of racialized trauma, familial rupture, and spiritual seeking. Through nonlinear storytelling and form-breaking verse, the thesis confronts experiences such as anti-Blackness in institutional spaces, gendered violence, economic precarity, generational silence, and the haunting echoes of slavery and segregation.

Jackson employs Black vernacular, biblical allusions, song lyrics, and colloquial expressions to craft a voice that is both intimate and prophetic. The work reclaims everyday moments—family dinners, walks on Horace Street, encounters at Walmart—as sites of cultural meaning and survival. Amid these narratives are lyrical meditations on divine grace, mental illness, and the sacredness of ordinary Black life, revealing a theology that is not inherited but wrestled into being through lived experience. The poetic form becomes a sanctuary where lament meets testimony and where mourning is an act of resistance.

Feelings That Drive is ultimately a project of restoration. It insists on hope not as naive optimism but as rigorous, embodied faith—a choice to live, speak, remember, and create despite systems designed to erase. Through its careful curation of form, voice, and content, the thesis makes a meaningful contribution to Black literary traditions, womanist theology, and the art of personal reckoning. It is both a love letter and a lamentation, offering witness to pain while radically imagining the possibility of healing.

Date

5-30-2025

Committee Chair

Ariel Francisco

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