Mara Lee Grayson
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Dr. Mara Lee Grayson is a poet, researcher, and educator. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Tampa Review, Nimrod, and other literary journals, and has been nominated for the Best of the Net and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Grayson holds a PhD in English Education from Columbia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. She was previously a tenured faculty member in the California State University system. As a scholar, her work focuses on the rhetoric of racism and antisemitism in higher education. She is the author or editor of five books as well as more than 100 articles, essays, and poems. Grayson has facilitated workshops on racism and antisemitism at academic institutions across the United States and Canada and has designed and led initiatives within multiple professional organizations to improve the experiences of marginalized students and educators. Grayson is originally from Brooklyn, New York, and has lived in Southern California and New Jersey.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I am a Jewish woman poet and a scholar of antisemitism; questions of identity, culture, and bias frequently make their way, if obliquely, into my work.
Published Works
Nonfiction Books
The gendered transaction of whiteness: White women in educational spaces. (Palgrave. Tevis, T., Nishi, N., & Grayson, M. L., 2023)
Challenging antisemitism: Lessons from literacy classrooms. (Rowman & Littlefield.Grayson, 2023)
Antisemitism and the white supremacist imaginary: Conflations and contradictions in composition and rhetoric (Peter Lang, Grayson, M. L., 2023)
Race talk in the age of the trigger warning: Recognizing and challenging classroom cultures of silence (Rowman & Littlefield. Grayson, M. L., 2020)
Teaching racial literacy: Reflective practices for critical writing (Rowman &Littlefield. Grayson, M. L., 2018)
Poems:
‘For now you’ll need to cope and compartmentalize,’ said the therapist. (Pinesong Anthology. Grayson, M. L, forthcoming 2025)
Jacob Elordi debuts a bold (and bearded) new look (Funicular.Grayson, M. L., forthcoming 2025)
footnote 1. the verb (New Feathers, Grayson, M. L., 2025)
How to be the mother of a missing daughter (Variant Literature.Grayson, M. L., 2025)
Cross-country hydatidiform. (Grayson, M. L., 2024)
‘Traveler’ is a kinder word for shaking time inside an hourglass (Grayson, M. L., 2024)
The invisible girlfriend reads the Bible with a classmate on the night in question. (Grayson, M. L., 2024).
On epigenetics (Grayson, M. L., 2024)
Intergeneration (Grayson, M. L., 2024)
Postmortem. Consequence (Grayson, M. L., 2024)
No matter how languid, or how familiar sweet the palms of your hands. (Grayson, M.L., 2024)
The invisible girlfriend grows restless. (Posit: A Journal of Literature and Art, 36, 2024)
Polaroid (Posit: A Journal of Literature and Art, 36, 2024)
The mother and the lover left behind (Posit: A Journal of Literature and Art, 36, 2024)
The palm tree is not indigenous to Southern California: A poem for our colleagues who are too busy reading White Fragility to actually do anything about racism (Community Literacy Journal, 18, 2024)
Weather report (Community Literacy Journal, 18, 2024)
The director’s daughter (Community Literacy Journal, 18, 2024)
For the red-brown cow whose eyes I caught from the backseat of my mother’s Chevy Nova (Radar Poetry, 2023)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Hunter, City College, Columbia