Prof. Megan Fernandes Writes About Pandemic Life

Megan Fernandes

Literary magazine Lit Hub published an essay by Megan Fernandes, assistant professor of English: “The Wild and Elemental City: Finding Life in Pandemic New York.” Fernandes shares how her observations of her surroundings shifted during summer 2020, and she examines what it means to be “in one’s element.”

She writes, “In a literal sense, I am trying to practice an elemental consciousness for my city and this requires an attention to political weather, to private property and public space, to the contradictions of living a certain lifestyle and understanding the consequences of it, to understanding how aspirational whiteness has gaslit me my whole life, to studying systems of beliefs that favor the communal, to acknowledging that the New York I want post-pandemic cannot look like the New York I occupied before.”

Fernandes, who is also the author of the poetry collection Good Boys, is known for defying the traditional boundaries of poetry.

• Read her entire essay in Lit Hub.