Author Archives: ldiedrich

Terry Alexander Award in WGSS: Zarya Shaikh

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This award is in honor of Terry Alexander, the mother of Courtney Alexander, a Women’s Studies major who graduated from Stony Brook in 2006. Terry Alexander worked in the New York City public schools, she was an active member of the Brownsville Community Baptist Church, and she was a community activist with the Bed Stuy Park Lions Club in Brooklyn. Terry was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1982 and, from that point forward, she and her family were regular participants in the annual MS walk to raise awareness about the disease and money to further the research. Terry attended the WGSS graduation in May 2016 to watch her daughter graduate. Sadly, shortly thereafter, she became very ill from MS-related complications, and she died on December 7, 2006.

The WGSS Department is grateful for the Alexander family’s continued support, and we are honored to give the Terry Alexander Award each year to students planning to pursue a career in health care or health advocacy. Our hope is that this award will generate interest among our students in examining the complexities of caring for people with chronic illnesses while also providing us with the chance to acknowledge the importance of a parent’s love, encouragement, and commitment to education and community work. Terry Alexander is a shining example of all these things.

Photo on the left is Terry Alexander and on the right is Zarya Shaikh with Courtney Alexander at the WGSS graduation 2022.

Professor Lisa Diedrich presents the 2022 Terry Alexander Award in WGSS to Zarya Shaikh:

Zarya is graduating with a BS in Biochemistry and a BA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). Zarya is the rarest of students. She combines keen intellect, curiosity about the world near and far, and real empathy for others who suffer and struggle daily to make their lives better. I have had the pleasure of working with her this year on an initiative that is truly transformative.

In January 2021, after trying to find information for a research project about Muslim LGBTQ+ physicians, and finding nothing, Zarya had the idea of creating a podcast to fill a much-needed gap in resources and advance social justice in medicine and healthcare. This idea would become Queer Diagnosis: The LGBTQ+ Health Podcast. Zarya is the host for the podcast which interviews LGBTQ+ folx involved in the medical decision-making process including patients, medical students, healthcare providers, and everyone in between. As the QD podcast mission statement explains, the “goal is to sustain visibility and a sense of community in healthcare across the spectrum that is gender and sexuality. We’re here to learn not only how to take care of patients but also each other on our journey to provide high-quality, culturally sensitive care.” The QD podcast has been an immediate hit and in less than a year the podcast team has produced ten episodes, which are both incredibly informative on a wide range of social issues and deeply moving.

In fall 2021, WGSS teamed up with the QD podcast to create an internship for students wanting to learn about podcasting and work on producing the content for the podcasts, including transcripts of all the interviews, as well as artwork, web content, and social media to promote the project. In its first semester, the QD podcast internship was a huge success.

Zarya is right now applying to medical schools, and I know her hope is to continue the Queer Diagnosis podcast as a medical student and beyond in her work as a physician. She is already a remarkable young woman, and I have no doubt she will become a truly extraordinary doctor.

Congratulations, Zarya!

Raven Dorsey (WGSS ’16): Graduation speaker 2022!!

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Check out Raven Dorsey’s amazing speech at #WGSSGraduation2022!! See below for Professor Diedrich’s introduction of Raven.

Raven Dorsey is a doula and social worker born and raised in Wayne, PA. Raven completed her bachelor’s degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality studies with a concentration in gender, sexuality and public health from SUNY Stony Brook in 2016. That year, she received the Terry Alexander Award in WGSS. Raven, who was on the Track and Field team at SBU, also received the Seawolves Impact Award at the Stony Brook Athletics Wolfie Awards.

I’ll just mention one way that she made an impact at Stony Brook. She spearheaded a partnership between Stony Brook Athletics’ and the America East Conference on the You Can Play Project, which promotes inclusion and acceptance of LGBTQ athletes and coaches. As Raven wrote in her report on this work, You Can Play Project allowed her to apply concepts and practices she had learned in her Women’s and Gender Studies classes “to promote positive change in a place where I spend so much of my time.” Raven helped organize four YCP nights, at Women’s Volleyball, Men’s and Women’s Basketball, and Women’s lacrosse games. The event sponsored by the conference-winning Men’s basketball team was written up in a glowing feature on the initiative in USA Today.

After graduating from Stony Brook, Raven went on to earn her Master’s of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2018. After completing her MSW, Raven joined the Women’s Law Project as a Development Associate where she coordinated events and fundraising efforts in the Philadelphia area. In late 2019, she joined the Warren for President campaign, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Raven currently serves as a Deputy Director of Engagement for the Paid Leave for All Campaign, a National Campaign fighting for a Federal Comprehensive Paid Family and Medical Leave policy. Most recently in 2021, Raven began serving as a volunteer Advance Associate for the Office of the Vice President. Although her full-time work is centered around federal policy, Raven’s passion work, and pride and joy is serving her community as a trained labor and postpartum care doula.

Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award 2022: Ashley Barry

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We are very pleased to announce the 2022 recipient of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Ashley Barry.

First, we want to introduce this award and Vivien Hartog. Then Ashley’s advisor, Lisa Diedrich, will introduce Ashley.

This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. It goes to the graduate student instructor we think most exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:

“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life through the lens of an international women’s movement.”

Professor Lisa Diedrich on Ashley Barry:

I am delighted to tell you about this year’s winner of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award, Ashley Barry. Ashley’s dissertation, “In/Sane on Screen,” is a cultural study of psychiatry and mental illness in film. She explores mad tropes and figures in film to understand how madness functions symptomatically within larger capitalist and ableist structures and intersecting with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Ashley has a wealth of experience teaching for both the Writing Program and WGSS, and she has also worked as a Writing Center Tutor, where she has a reputation as an incredibly effective and supportive tutor. Having observed Ashley teach, I can say that her pedagogical excellence is manifold: from the conceptual framework and design of her classes to the varieties of in-class and online exercises she has students do to her care for and attention to her students’ needs.

This past year, she has developed and taught a topics course for WGSS that connects to her research and introduces students to the emergent academic field of Mad Studies, as well as to mental health and Mad Pride activism, including the contemporary consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement. It is not hyperbole to say that she received rave reviews for her teaching this course. On her evaluations, students were universally effusive about the class and Ashley. She was lauded for being “extremely effective,” “knowledgeable,” and “innovative” in her teaching, as well as “extremely understanding,” “super accommodating,” “flexible,” and “very forgiving” in her engagement with her students. It is clear from the evaluations that Ashley’s course and her pedagogy has positively impacted students’ lives.

Ashley is active and well-connected on campus and in the wider Long Island community. As an undergraduate at Stony Brook, she worked with the LGBTQ* Services Center, completed the Office of Multicultural Affairs’ Social Justice League Certificate Program, interned at the Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, and was selected as a member of the Steering Committee of the Long Island Unity Collective. Since entering our graduate program, she has continued to engage in social justice work, especially in relation to improving and expanding accessibility on campus. As part of this disability justice work, she is currently a member of the GSO’s Disability Advocacy/ADA Working Group. She is a leader in WGSS and beyond. This year, Ashley was chosen as one of the inaugural cohort of Inclusion Diversity Equity and Access (IDEA) graduate fellows at Stony Brook and has been working on a project to expand wellness and inclusion within graduate education. She (along with Desi Self) was selected as the WGSS graduate student representative and served in that role as the campus went into lockdown and began teaching remotely. They were instrumental in creating programming focused on supporting best practices in online pedagogy, as well as social gatherings on zoom that helped counter isolation among graduate students. Everything she does—research, teaching, and advocacy—is concerned with making spaces more welcoming and inclusive. For all these reasons, we think Ashley represents well the spirit and commitments of Vivien Hartog.

Congratulations, Ashley!

WGSS Academic Excellence Award 2021: McKenzi Thi Murphy

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Professor Victoria Hesford on McKenzi Thi Murphy:

It is my great pleasure to introduce the recipient of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) 2021 Academic Excellence Award, McKenzi Thi Murphy. McKenzi is graduating with a 3.96 GPA—a very impressive achievement for someone who is majoring in two subjects—WGSS and Communications and Journalism—and minoring in Theater. You might have listened to McKenzi’s contribution to the WGSS Pandemic Playlist on this blog. If not check it out below—she chose a live performance by Elaine Stritch of “I’m Still Here” by Stephen Sondheim. McKenzi’s explanation of her choice might help you get a sense of how McKenzi, like Stritch, can command a stage: “Look, I’ve got a whole playlist with musical theatre songs about women going absolutely feral, but this one seems appropriate given *everything* that’s happened. “I got through all of last year, and I’m here,” indeed.”

For the WGSS senior seminar, McKenzi combined her interest in queer studies and theater by writing a very impressive paper on queer female representation and absence on the Broadway Stage. McKenzi organized the paper around an analysis of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Fun Home, and Marsha Norman’s The Color Purple in order to contrast their complex representation of queer femaleness with the simplistic or absent queer femaleness of mainstream and queer male centered theater. McKenzi was interested in exploring how the theater can be both a “queer artform” and a creative space which routinely marginalizes queer female experience. According to Professor Diedrich, McKenzi’s presentation of her thesis for the seminar was “very smart and very funny.” As one of her classmates declared, “McKenzi is the boss!”

McKenzi took two upper-level WGSS classes with me, Sexual Citizens: Sex, Publics, and Space in the US, and Fantasy Worlds: Gender, Race, and Class in Twentieth Century American Mass Culture. I always looked forward to reading McKenzi’s comments and papers and hearing her incisive, always engaged, and often amusing responses to the course materials. For my fall 2020 Fantasy Worlds class, McKenzi created a Voicethread presentation on the 1997 film of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, starring Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother and Brandy as Cinderella. Not only was McKenzi’s presentation a super smart analysis of the race and class dynamics of the film, it also showcased McKenzi’s talents as a performer with the last slide a rendition of a song from the film sung by McKenzi. It was amazing! So, as someone who has witnessed McKenzi’s sharp intellect and droll wit in the classroom on more than one occasion, I can confirm that McKenzi is indeed “the boss”!

Congratulations, McKenzi, on being the 2021 WGSS Academic Excellence award winner!

Terry Alexander Award in WGSS: Lucy Gordon

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This award is in honor of Terry Alexander, the mother of Courtney Alexander, a Women’s Studies major who graduated from Stony Brook in 2006. Terry Alexander worked in the New York City public schools, she was an active member of the Brownsville Community Baptist Church, and she was a community activist with the Bed Stuy Park Lions Club in Brooklyn. Terry was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1982 and, from that point forward, she and her family were regular participants in the annual MS walk to raise awareness about the disease and money to further the research. Terry attended the WGSS graduation in May 2016 to watch her daughter graduate. Sadly, shortly thereafter, she became very ill from MS-related complications, and she died on December 7, 2006.

The WGSS Department is grateful for the Alexander family’s continued support, and we are honored to give the Terry Alexander Award each year to students planning to pursue a career in health care or health advocacy. Our hope is that this award will generate interest among our students in examining the complexities of caring for people with chronic illnesses while also providing us with the chance to acknowledge the importance of a parent’s love, encouragement, and commitment to education and community work. Terry Alexander is a shining example of all these things.

Photo on left is of Terry Alexander and on the right is Lucy Gordon.

Professor Liz Montegary presents the 2021 Terry Alexander Award in WGSS to Lucy Gordon:

It is my pleasure to announce the winner of this year’s Terry Alexander Award: Lucy Gordon. The department unanimously selected Lucy for this award, as her research interests, professional goals, and community activism reflect her investment in imagining new ways of organizing the world that would undo heteropatriarchal modes of oppression and improve health outcomes for racially marginalized communities. Over the past few years, Lucy has worked closely with the Center for Civic Justice at Stony Brook University. In addition to helping coordinate this past fall’s student voter registration drive, she organized community workshops on pressing matters of health and social justice, including an event on environmental racism and another on trans health care practices.

But Lucy is not only a skilled community organizer; she is also a dedicated feminist researcher. This year, she worked on two major research projects. Lucy joined a team of psychologists on campus to assist in a pilot project designed to increase access to mental health care for children. On top of making time for this ongoing collaborative project, she also completed a truly excellent WGSS Honors Senior Thesis entitled “Parenting in a Pandemic: Re-Imagining Childcare after COVID-19.” Drawing on quantitative survey data from and four in-depth interviews with parents from Long Island and New York City, Lucy explores the major challenges parents have faced over the past year and illuminates how the process of navigating these challenges has changed the way her informants think about the work of parenting and caregiving more broadly. She concludes her thesis by calling for a care work economy – a new way of organizing society where care work is not devalued as unskilled, feminized labor and relegated to privatized family units. Instead, she outlines strategies for building a world where caregiving of all kinds is actually valued and materially supported in the name of public health and economic justice.

Lucy is graduating from Stony Brook this month with BAs in Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As a feminist thinker committed to racial, gender, and disability liberation, she is considering careers in psychology, counseling, or social work and plans to apply to graduate school in the very near future. I have been consistently impressed by Lucy Gordon since I met her as a first-year four years ago, and I am 100% confident that she will continue impressing us in the years to come. Congrats, Lucy!

Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award 2021

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We are very pleased to announce the 2021 recipient of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Carlos Vazquez

Congratulations Carlos!

 

First, we want to introduce this award and Vivien Hartog. Then Carlos’s advisor, Lisa Diedrich, will introduce Carlos.

This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. It goes to the graduate student instructor we think most exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:

“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life through the lens of an international women’s movement.”

Professor Lisa Diedrich on Carlos Vazquez:

I am delighted to tell you about Carlos Vazquez, a most-deserving recipient of the 2021 Vivien Hartog Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Instructor.

Carlos’s scholarship and pedagogy are deeply intertwined. The work he does in the classroom is linked to his recognition of the need for structural changes in higher education and society more broadly. In his research, he is interested in practices of what he calls “queer of color pedagogies of care,” which he describes as “an ethical mode of care that preoccupies itself centrally with a future-yet-to-come, mobilizing a praxis that enables the transmission of knowledge geared towards nurturing the future and diminishing the vulnerability of trans and queer of color communities to come.” In his classroom, he puts this ethical mode of care into action, centering both race and disability and the experiences of Black and Latinx communities. His impact on students at Stony Brook has been nothing short of profound.

Carlos has been an influential and popular instructor for our department, teaching a range of courses, including Introduction to Queer Studies and the timely and important topics class that he created, Race and Disability in Contemporary Culture. He also stepped up and volunteered to teach in the Writing Program in only his second year at Stony Brook. I mention this not only to show the breadth of Carlos’s teaching experiences at Stony Brook, but also to give a sense of his willingness to stretch and challenge himself pedagogically, as well as his recognition of the centrality of developing his students’ capacity for creative expression in multiple genres and modalities.

Carlos is a Turner Fellow and he takes seriously the Turner fellowship’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion through the teaching and mentorship that Turner Fellows provide to undergraduate students, especially underrepresented minority students. This commitment is apparent in both the form and content of his courses. He is especially good at getting students to analyze a wide range of media—music videos, TV programs, films, advertisements, memes and gifs—using a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological tools from the intersecting interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and critical disability studies. I can’t tell you the number of times he has dropped by my office to show and tell me about something that he and his students had just discussed in class. In one instance, the text he had his students discuss was one of the large Far Beyond brand murals adorning various buildings on Stony Brook’s campus. In another, he excitedly relayed to me how he and his students discussed the swimming lesson scene from Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight as an enactment of a queer of color pedagogy of care.

Comments on Carlos’s evaluations frequently mention his kindness and compassion. One student noted that, “such compassion from the professor motivates me to do better and…try instead of giving up. I want to thank him for being an inspiration on how to be a good professor.” In relation to the difficulty of going online in spring 2020, another student said Carlos “was incredibly understanding of the situation and tried to alleviate our stress as much as possible.” I know as well that he is particularly good at reaching out to students who are struggling, giving them specific ways to get back on course, showing care and concern for their well-being and lives beyond the classroom.

In his letter of application for the Vivien Hartog Award, Carlos wrote that he hopes “these cares, and commitments, and concerns…align [him] with the aims, objectives, and aspirations of the late Vivien Hartog, and the Award bestowed in her name.” I think Vivien and Carlos are indeed kindred spirits.

WGSS @ URECA 2021

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We are pleased to showcase work by WGSS majors at URECA’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, this year in a virtual format. This year two WGSS majors submitted posters for the event: Lucy Gordon (supervised by Prof. Liz Montegary) on “Parenting During a Pandemic: Re-Imagining Childcare after COVID-19” and Nicole Vion (supervised by Prof. Lisa Diedrich) on “The Politics of Female Rage in Queer Music.” Check out their amazing research projects below.

Pandemic Playlist: WGSS@SBU Mixtape #1

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We are now one year into the coronavirus pandemic. In March 2020, we closed the WGSS office at Stony Brook University and went into lockdown. All classes went online. We started this WGSS blog in order to create a virtual space of celebration for the graduating class of 2020. We will use this space again to celebrate #WGSSGraduation2021.

We decided it would be fun to create a #WGSSPandemicPlaylist that brings together music that has helped WGSS faculty, students, and alums during this difficult time. This will be on ongoing project, so please be in touch should you want to contribute to the playlist (Lisa[dot]Diedrich[at]stonybrook[dot]edu).

Happy listening!

McKenzi Thi Murphy (Journalism/Theater Arts/WGSS (Class of ’21))

I’m Still Here: Elaine Stritch

I’m Still Here by Stephen Sondheim, sung here by Elaine Stritch for Sondheim’s 80th Birthday Concert (the best version). Look, I’ve got a whole playlist with musical theatre songs about women going absolutely feral, but this one seems appropriate given *everything* that’s happened. “I got through all of last year, and I’m here,” indeed. Elaine Stritch is no longer with us, but there’s something inspiring about watching a then-85 year old woman belting out a song and jumping up and down just relishing in the fact that yes, she’s still here.

 

Mary Jo Bona (Professor of WGSS) and Stephanie Bonvissuto (PhD candidate)

The President Sang Amazing Grace: Kronos Quartet and Meklit

Mary Jo: We talked about Leonard Cohen’s passing and we both later played “Hallelujah” all that month. I was at JFK the day after the 2016 election, off to Montreal for NWSA. We connected by phone. I told you I could hear a pin drop at the gate; it reminded me of being at the airport after 9/11. And then the years after that day in between: poetry, lyrics, and song. And then: listening more, weeping, and healing.

Stephanie: I would not hear Cohen’s haunting anthem again until Saturday Night Live’s cold open a few days later. Kate McKinnon sits at the piano as a white pantsuit-clad Hillary Clinton to play to a hushed audience, giving us permission to weep in and for the moment. As the last note fades, Kate/Hillary faces the camera to say, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.” Mekit and The Kronos Quartet elicits the same for me, wrapping the ethos of a powerful moment as an ephemeral gift for us to similarly hold and to hold us and our tears.

 

Nur-E Ferdous (Health Sciences Major, WGSS Minor (Class of ’22))

Fine Line and Treat People With Kindness: Harry Styles

In my opinion, the two songs are like two sides of the same coin. Fine Line is much slower and somber, and to me it kind of recalls the numbness of life in the pandemic but also towards the end the way he almost is begging and reassuring at the same time that “we’ll be alright” helps me think that we will be alright after this and that it’s okay to be scared and sad because of this. Treat People With Kindness is much more upbeat, and it is literally about being kind and generous to others and celebrating each other for being who we are. I linked the music video of TPWK because there’s a lot of analysis of the video and Harry’s gender identity in it. That also kept me patient during the pandemic and also positive because it was difficult many times to handle our own emotions as well as the emotions of others’.

 

Callias Zeng (WGSS Major, Environmental Studies Minor (Class of ’21))

The Beauty of Being Deaf: Chella Man

I’ve followed deaf, trans, queer activist Chella Man for a few years now. He’s very vocal about addressing ableism and celebrating the Deaf/Hard of Hearing community. He posted a video today called, “The Beauty of Being Deaf.” It is a wonderful video, so I wanted to share it!

 

Teri Tiso (Associate Professor Emerita of WGSS)

Let’s Talk about Sex: Salt-N-Pepa

We cannot talk about our bodies and health without talking about sex. Our basic understanding of physical characteristics is always skewed by our social and cultural beliefs. When we talk to each other (all of us) about blood, breasts, penis, vagina, sperm, eggs we are able to learn about menstruation, puberty changes, pregnancy, and how we are taught to interact as females, males, intersex, and queer humans.

 

Julie McGovern Carballo (Biology Major, WGSS Minor (Class of ’21))

Keep It Gold: Surfaces

This song is a reminder to always look at the brighter side of things!

 

Lisa Diedrich (Professor of WGSS)

Budapest Concert Part VIII: Keith Jarrett

Music has been so important to me during the pandemic. I have really loved that many musicians performed live on social media from their homes to entertain us—a gift that emerged out of isolation and fear. The person I have listened to the most is Keith Jarrett. I love the melancholic virtuosity of his live performances. We also learned this year that because of health issues caused by a stroke in 2018, he may not be able to perform live again. So, this recording of a concert in Budapest released in October 2020 is bittersweet.

 

Joy-Louise Gape (History/WGSS (Class of ’21))

I Won’t Give Up: Jason Mraz

This song has been in my playlist for years because of how powerful it is. This song is a very strong reminder about how important it is to never give up and always look up as well as look to those around you. It also reminds you how necessary it is to adapt to the surrounding circumstances and how much stronger that can make you. Most importantly, this song reminds the listener that you are worth it. Given the times that we all have been through recently, I think that this a powerful reminder about our inherent worth and strength as well as the power we can draw from those around us.

 

Victoria Hesford (Associate Professor of WGSS)

Honey: Robyn (on Later…with Jools Holland)

I chose this song because, first of all, it’s just a great pop song. But I also chose it because Robyn explained in an interview that she wanted to create a song that didn’t end. So, it seemed a fitting song for the pandemic. You really don’t want this song to end, unlike the pandemic, which has already gone on too long.

 

Nicole Vion (English/Studio Art/WGSS (Class of ’22))

Salt in the Wound: boygenius

Boygenius is a collaboration of the artists Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus (I love this album so much). This live performance is one of my personal favorite versions of the song:

 

It’s Okay to Cry: SOPHIE

The artist SOPHIE was a trans woman who recently tragically died and the loss of SOPHIE has impacted a lot of people, especially in the LGBTQ+ community. This is SOPHIE’s song titled “It’s Okay To Cry” and the visual that went along with the track:

 

A Pearl: Mitski

Mitski’s lyricism really solidifies her as one of my favorite artists, and this song definitely falls under that category.

 

Jackie Donnelly (WGSS ATC & GPC)

Coldplay: Everyday Life (Live in Jordan)

Jackie added to the playlist on Twitter with this comment: I’m late to this party, but I’m posting a live album here by Coldplay performed at a citadel in Jordan at sunrise & sunset that I stumbled upon. I gravitate back to it over and over to listen & watch. Beautiful guest vocals, instrumentals, & views. [Editors note: No one is late to this party!]