If you’d like to know a little about me, a great way to meet me and get to know me is through this dialogue/interview with my brother and our family friend, my former theatre director, Keith Wharton, who asked us to speak at a Pride Month education event for employees at M & T Bank as part of its Pride Month Educational Programming. This podcast-style interview took place in late June, 2022.
Jessica Lowell Mason, Ph.D, is part of the adjunct faculty of the Bard Prison Initiative, Niagara University, and SUNY Niagara. She teaches courses in the disciplines of gender and sexuality studies, writing studies, interdisciplinary literary studies, feminist pedagogical studies, and communication studies, and has taught at the college level for thirteen years, primarily at the University at Buffalo, but also at Carl Sandburg College, Spoon River College, Western Illinois University, and Buffalo State College. She was a research assistant with the Mellon Foundation-funded Communities of Care project with the Center for Disability Studies and Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo between 2024 and 2026. Prior to this, in 2021, she was a graduate fellow with the College Consortium and the Coalition for Community Writing’s Herstory Training Institute and Fellowship Program, Teaching Memoir for Justice and Peace, a year-long program in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University. Between 2021 and 2024, she served as graduate coordinator and hospitality fellow for the Northeast Modern Language Association. In 2022, Jessica was a recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award at the University at Buffalo. Jessica has also worked for Shakespeare in Delaware Park, Ujima Theatre Co., Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Jewish Repertory Theatre, and Prometheus Books. In 2014, Jessica was awarded the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Some of her poems, articles, and reviews have been published by Sinister Wisdom, Lambda Literary, Gender Focus, The Comstock Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Lavender Review, Wilde Magazine, Passengers Journal, IthacaLit, The Feminist Wire, Mad in America, SUNY Buffalo’s Romance Studies Journal, and Praeger. She is the author of Woman in Disguise (Saltfire Press, 2013), Straight Jacket (Finishing Line Press, 2019), A New Flora: Poems from the Garden of Lesbos (FLP, 2025), and as well as the co-editor of Madwomen in Social Justice Literatures, Movements, and Art (Vernon Press, 2023). Her article, “Making Bedlam: Toward a Trauma-Informed Mad Feminist Literary Theory and Praxis,” was published in the journal Humanities in 2023. She is the co-founder of Madwomen in the Attic, a feminist mental health literacy organization in Buffalo, NY, is the facilitator of an ongoing weekly writing workshop in partnership between MITA and the Herstory Writing Network, titled “Memoirs in the Attic,” for writers affected by the mental health system and psychiatric diagnosis, and is a member of the Mad Writing Collective, where she currently leads workshops in a series called “Hearing Feminist Voices: Writing with Feminist Theorists.”
Check out my dissertation, here: https://www.proquest.com/docview/3385423374?fbclid=IwY2xjawUagUBwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMXY4ZVNUaUVPNmFaNENlaGpzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeSymmCw1qBKC6_SMZ_nJvRwfvwF__EHVs05FjKd1tc_RnPIDFJrG8cszHQ_A_aem_bbLWZ1W1S7cHZ28LCTYeSw&sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses
Image: Portrait of JLM taken by Vincent Lopez.
