Morano, alongside her advisor Alessandro Salemme, research team members April Trotter and Ella Scurlock, and interviewees Sandy Longhorn, Seth Pennington, and Kai Coggin
Author: Miceala Morano | Major: Journalism | Semester: Spring 2024
During the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters, I proposed and conducted oral history research under the guidance of Alessandro Salemme at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. Over the past two years, I’ve been a researcher at the center, working with a team of 4-6 other students across majors and disciplines to make contributions to the Arkansas Story Vault.
During the fall semester, I approached my advisor with a suggestion for our next installment of the Arkansas Story Vault. I’ve discovered during my time as a student journalist, creative writer, and student researcher that there is a rich history of creative writing in Arkansas but no complete archive of Arkansas poets and writers, their histories, and their individual perspectives. Alessandro loved my idea and proposed that we use this topic as the opportunity to make a podcast using oral history interviews.
To supplement my formal research, I applied for and was accepted into Ozarks Culture, a Signature Seminar offered by the Honors College and taught by Virginia Siegel, Joshua Youngblood, and Jared Phillips. This class was focused on the history of the Ozarks, the stereotypes that have existed throughout the region’s history, and how culture is constantly created and recreated over time. Being more informed on the history of writers and poets in Arkansas paved a clearer path for my contemporary research.
Throughout this class, I learned that many well-known poets, such as C.D. Wright and Frank Stanford, spent their lives in Arkansas and the Ozarks. The school of poetry resulting from this is unique, often rooted in the natural world. What was most interesting was how diverse the landscape of Arkansas poets was. The work of BIPOC and queer writers was deeply woven into this landscape, but their existence was often invisible to the public eye. I decided that my team’s project should serve to illuminate this diverse history and highlight the writers who used writing as a tool to craft solidarity and community.
We created a list of potential interview subjects and reached out, determining that it would be best to split our interviewees into two groups, one centered in Northwest Arkansas and one centered in Central Arkansas. To interview the Central Arkansas subjects, three of the four of us and our advisor made a two-day trip to Conway and Little Rock during the spring semester. One of the funniest challenges we had faced during our research came during this trip: we learned upon our arrival in Conway that one of our interview subjects had to make a last-minute trip to Cambodia. Luckily, his husband and co-collaborator was still in the country and was able to give a fantastic interview the same day.
The Conway trip was my favorite part of the research process. I was lucky enough to be present for an interview of inaugural Hot Springs Poet Laureate Kai Coggin. Coggin embodied everything I hoped to display with this project as a deeply passionate writer, former educator, queer woman of color, and someone who constantly holds space for other writers through the Wednesday Night Poetry open mic series. Wednesday Night Poetry is the longest running open mic night in the United States, and Coggin managed to keep it running virtually throughout the pandemic, which was an incredible display of perseverance and hope. To this day, her inspiring and emotional interview, conducted by my research partner April Trotter, is my favorite contribution to the Arkansas Story Vault.
All the interviews, as well as the podcast we are recording over the summer to accompany them, will be added to the Arkansas Story Vault in perpetuity in the fall. We are hoping to travel to the 2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting to present our research on a national scale. This conference, themed “Oral History: Bridging Past, Present, and Future” is the perfect opportunity to teach others about the history of the Arkansas poetry scene and the incredible stories of those within it.
My goal throughout my time here at the University of Arkansas has been to use my talent to do good for others, whether that’s through journalism, community service, or now, research. Preserving the stories of so many people and poets through oral history has been an incredible experience, and I’m excited to expand on this research as I begin seeking a faculty advisor and conceptualizing my honors thesis.