A few years later, the rare opportunity to leave my tenure-track position for more teaching autonomy in a better location.
Then, competing offers for tenure-track jobs. Then a one-year visiting job at a prestigious liberal arts college. But I hadn’t gone to Cal to genuflect to the patriarchy.Ĭut to graduation. I worked in corporate America for non-profits for myself. I had taken several years off between undergrad and grad and completed almost four years of graduate-level coursework with distinction in another field before realizing it wasn’t my calling. Suggestions of incompetence, labeling as arrogant or presumptuous-all the while being awash in a sea of arrogant and presumptuous white male peers who are exalted and shown favoritism. Now that more brave women academics, WOC in particular, are disclosing their experiences of structural white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia in grad school-and on the job-I realize mine was common enough. Still, I was in good standing for the first couple of years. If there were queer male faculty, and there were, I received no support from them. At progressive, “free speech,” Berkeley, I was the only queer woman of color in my Art History PhD cohort, as far as I know one of the very few women of color or queer women in the department-counting the faculty, among whom there were, also as far as I know, no tenured women, or men, of color. And it’s of color, bitches.Īround 2.5% of PhDs in the humanities are Black women. My debut romance, Meet Me in Madrid, was me responding to Morrison’s familiar exhortation to write the book you want to see if it doesn’t exist. I guess the latter is good in a way expectations are changing. Toni Morrison’s virtuosic and soul-crushing first novel, The Bluest Eye, is being banned (again) in Virginia while a romance between two Black lesbian academics feels boring and unrelatable to some of the younger, ostensibly queer, crowdsource. Full of quips and sociality and unexpected delight in another smart (and sexy) person’s company.
I wanted to write something that felt like our best lives-thoughtful, observant, self-reflective. I am a lesbian of color who teaches and writes in Art History, one of the most conservative humanities fields-what do I know about happily-ever-afters? Not enough, I thought, when I sat down in COVID times to write a queer of color romance about Black and brown female academics falling in love across continents, a sabbatical leave, and career status. Her debut novel Meet Me in Madrid is available now, more at.
She likes imagining and describing a world where art, ambition, and history provide the background for diverse and steamy love stories, mostly about women falling hard for women. Verity Lowell is a professor and occasional curator.
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