"Noise as Meaning: An Exploration of Voice."
How does one “craft” voice? Drawing upon the Barbadian scholar and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s assertion that the “noise” is part of the meaning, Claire Jiménez, author of What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, explores the pedagogical implications of teaching “voice” in the creative writing workshop. Jiménez reflects on her work on the Puerto Rican Literature Project and the creation of her own novel, as she discusses how the writer can incorporate considerations of history, especially those histories of colonialism and displacement, to imagine the voices of their characters.
Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.