Terry M. Dugan: Dancing With (And Through) Adversity & Injustice

Medical researcher and writer of poetry/prose that places human-scale attention to the daunting social costs of war, violence and AIDS, Terry M. Dugan will be speaking tomorrow at PoemAlley to share her experiences as a journalist, a researcher in the 1980s at Bellevue Hosptial's Pediatric AIDS Clinic and as a lifelong social justice activist. Terry will also read material from her latest chapbook, I'm the Reason All the Kids Are Dead (Moonstone Arts Center).

As she explains below on the June 5 segment of "One On One With Vin Dacquino", Reason's title is inspired by the role of current political polarization in the failure of adults to address school gun violence throughout the United States:

Tapping the interplay between creativity and passionate advocacy (causing her dismissal from the University of Texas' graduate program, where she nonetheless earned three MAs), Terry tells past PA guest John F. McMullen on the Johnmac Radio Show of how, as a child, she began practically "(writing) before she could read" and went on to contribute to a wide range of publications, including Inkwell, New Verse News, Women's Study Quarterly, the Bellevue Literary Review and the 2007 anthology Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose On HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora, edited by Randall Horton, M.L. Hunter, Becky Thompson and Haki Madhubuti (Third World Press, 2007).

Her academic appearances at the Ford Foundation, Oxford University addressing human rights and AIDS in Africa, and at the Social Science Research Council on research methodology, have been complemented by invitations to read fiction and poetry at the United Nations, Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Bowery Poetry Club and Fordham University.

The piece below, which ran in A&U magazine on March 28, 2018, relates Terry's faith in the sustaining power of artistic expression against the darkness of suffering and uncertainty:

Why We Dance

Because we do the electric slide into the clinic to the tune of crying babies.

Because every day we fox trot in and out of intensive care.

Because we breakdance after rounds while waiting for lab reports.

Because we waltz into patients' rooms waving their sheet music.

Because we're sick of doing the hokey pokey with hospital administrators.

Because we tell strangers what we do and they shimmy away from us.

Because we square dance while death calls out partner changes.