Pamela Woolford Portfolio

Work samples

Generation Trailer

The trailer for Pamela Woolford's multi-award-winning experimental short Generation, which is screened in her VR experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. Woolford wrote, directed, edited, sound designed, and was the lead performer for the film, which toured internationally in 2018 and 2019 and received critical acclaim and 5 film festival awards. For more information about Generation, see the project description or visit the film's webpage.
Antoine and Me

In a 2022-2023 exhibition at Baltimore Museum of Art voted one of the 5 best in the Baltimore area by BmoreArt, Pamela Woolford premiered her multimedia experience Antoine and Me, a surreal photo album set in an ambiguous time featuring performative photographs of Woolford with sound-designed captions performed in character by her. Woolford wrote, modeled for, voice acted, and directed Antoine and Me, her first series in the artform she created, sound-designed photo narrations. This is the audio for the first photo in Antoine and Me. Click on photo or at start of listening bar to hear. For more info, see project description or visit pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me.
Trailer for Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir

The trailer for Pamela Woolford's critically-acclaimed experimental short Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, which is screened in a 3D space in her VR experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. Woolford wrote, directed, edited, and was the sole performer for the film, which had a limited online release in 2020 and a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people. For more information about Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, see the project description or visit the film's webpage.
Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows

This is a video capture of an early rough version of a portion of one of the scenes in Up/Rooted, a Maryland State Arts Council award-winning VR experience. It gives a feel for the experience but does not capture the hyper-realism of the final life-sized 3D characters and the setting and details in which users freely walk around this room using a headset. In the final, additional directional sound design adds to the realism and the elderly woman is seen as a ghost, and she is telling the narrated story heard here of her younger self, who can be seen hiding under the stairs. Three-dimensional animation is combined with real-life framed family photos on the wall. For more information about Up/Rooted visit the project description below or visit pamelawoolford.com/uprooted.

About Pamela

Pamela Woolford is an interdisciplinary artist, intertwining her work as a writer, immersive-media creator, filmmaker, and performer to create new forms of narrative work about Black Americans and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of nine Maryland State Arts Council Awards (including five Creativity Grants, an Independent Artist Award in… more

See 2022 $10,000 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize Winning Portfolio

See 2021 $2,500 Baker Artist Award Winning Portfolio

View Pamela's Resume

Generation

Generation is an art film written, directed, sound designed, edited by, and starring Pamela Woolford. Woolford is the lead onscreen performer, and the voice of the elderly woman in the film's unique overlapping dual voiceover narration. The film was an official selection for film festivals in North America, Europe, and Asia and won the 2019 Black Continental Independent Movie Award for Originality; the 2019 CR8:BLK Black Women Cinema Week Audience Choice Award; the 2018 North Beach American Film Festival Jury Award for Best Experimental Film, Animation Film, or Music Video; a 2018 Canada Shorts Award of Commendation; and a 2018 Experimental Forum Honorary Mention Award for Pamela Woolford's "vision and the film's unique contribution to cinema." For more information about Generation, visit generationthemovie.com.

Generation will screen in the virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. For more information, see the Up/Rooted project description here or visit pamelawoolford.com/uprooted.

Pamela Woolford’s love of storytelling began in childhood, listening to her mother’s stories of growing up in rural North Carolina in the '30s, '40s, and ‘50s. It is these tales, decades after Woolford first hears them, that inspire her to write her short story “Just After Supper” and create the character Mable as an homage to her mom. “Just After Supper” appeared in the literary publication Origins Journal. It was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize by novelist and Pushcart Prize editor Mark Wisniewski. Woolford adapted the story to create the script for her multi-award-winning experimental film Generation.

When Generation was released it received extensive news coverage, including the cover story for Her Mind magazine.

NOTE TO JUDGES: In reference to the private link to view Generation, some people who have hearing challenges or wear a hearing aid have found that the overlapping dual narration makes the film inaccessible to them. The narration script for Generation is an edited and more concise version of my short story "Just After Supper," which you can read here by clicking the 4th piece of media.

Generation Trailer

The trailer for Pamela Woolford's multi award-winning experimental short Generation. For more information, visit generationthemovie.com.
Pamela Woolford at Black Bottom Film Festival

Pamela Woolford was interviewed on stage to discuss her film Generation following its screening at the 2019 Black Bottom Film Festival. Generation was one of 20 official selections for the festival (alongside the film that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature later that weekend Hale County This Morning, This Evening, the film that won one of its three Academy Award nominations If Beale Street Could Talk, and Idris Elba's directorial debut Yardie.)
Pamela Woolford reads from "Just After Supper"

Here Pamela Woolford reads in character from her short story "Just After Supper" at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2023. The story was the basis for the unusual dual-narration script she created for Generation.
Just After Supper

Pamela Woolford's short story "Just After Supper" formed the basis for her unique dual-narrations script she used for her film Generation. Pushcart Prize editor Mark Wisniewski nominated "Just After Supper" for the Pushcart Prize in 2018. It was one of two nominations she received that year. To read "Just After Supper" as it appeared in the publication Origins Journal, click the tan box above.
Just After Supper reading as a Baker Artist Literary Award finalist

Pamela Woolford reads in character from "Just After Supper," which forms the basis for the Generation script, as part of the Baker Artist Awards literary finalist showcase in 2020. Here she gives a different interpretation on the character of Mable from her story than the rendition she portrayed in the third piece of media in this project, which was the reading she gave to a live audience at The Eubie Blake Cultural Center in 2023.

Pamela Woolford's first recognition by the Baker Artist Awards was as a finalist for the literary award in 2020. She went on to win in the interdisciplinary category in 2021 and in in 2022.
The Poet and The Poem video interview (separate from The Poet and The Poem audio interview)

Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri conducted two interviews of Pamela Woolford for the Library of Congress podcast The Poet and The Poem (separate video and audio sessions.) This session from 11/22/22 and includes her fiction readings of "Just After Supper," which is the story forming the basis for her Generation script, her project Antoine and Me (which has a separate project listing here), and "Pleasant People" (whose written PDF appears in the Additional Creative Writing project here). There were audio problems so closed captioning is provided for each of the readings.
DC Radio's FilmGordon Show Discusses Generation (Start playback at 29:50.)

Film critic Tim Gordon and Lakefront Film Festival programmer Charles Kirkland, Jr., interview filmmaker Pamela Woolford and discuss her film Generation in this episode of DC Radio's FilmGordon Show, which originally aired July 13, 2019. Interview begins at the 29:50 timestamp in the show's episode.
Her Mind cover story

Her Mind magazine ran a cover story on Pamela Woolford when her film Generation traveled the festival circuit, where it received awards and praise internationally. You can read the PDF by clicking it above and see the story in its original magazine layout by clicking these words.
Praise for Generation

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More Praise for Generation

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Antoine and Me

Pamela Woolford's narrative multimedia project Antoine and Me, for which she performs the voiceover in character and is the writer, director, and model, stands as a surreal love story contained in handmade photo albums and sound-designed photo narrations, or SDP narrations, an art form which Pamela Woolford has founded. The work premiered in 2022-2023 at the Baltimore Museum of Art "Baltimore, Addressed: Baker Artist Awards" exhibition, for which she created a site-specific installation centering the multimedia components of Antoine and Me in a broader story of Black love through time in Baltimore, Maryland. In her installation at the museum, she used her narratives to combine her new form of Afrofuturism with archival materials and ephemera dating back a hundred years. Antoine and Me combines age-old tactile artforms (contained in handmade photo albums and, at the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition, written narrative storytelling) and digital technology used in the SDP narrations. In its opening year, the exhibition was voted one of the top 5 in the Baltimore area by BmoreArt magazine.

In 2024 the Antoine and Me SDP narrations, along with one of the accompanying large-scale handmade photo albums, exhibited at Current Space gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Pamela Woolford's creation of Antoine and Me also marks the premiere of the world's first SDP narration NFT Collectibles. A supply of seven NFTs of the SDP narration for Photograph One of Antoine and Me was released at the WOCAX art show, Juneteenth weekend, 2022.

For more information about the Antoine and Me project, visit pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me. For information about the related NFTs, click the OpenSea NFT link at pamelawoolford.com/nft.

Antoine and Me was made possible in part with awards from Maryland State Arts Council.

Antoine and Me SDP narration for photo 1

The is the sound-designed photo narration audio for the first photo in Antoine and Me. There are seven photos in the Antoine and Me SDP narration series and more than 60 photos in the accompanying tactile album, which is made with a vintage wood photo-album cover. Pamela Woolford has also minted the first photo and its accompanying SDP narration as an NFT. In the image here, you see a portion of that first photo.
Antoine and Me photo 1

This is the full photo which accompanies the Antoine and Me SDP narration heard in the previous piece of media.
Antoine and Me at the Baltimore Museum of Art

A visitor enjoying a portion of the Antoine and Me exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2023.
Photograph from Antoine and Me handmade albums

A photograph from the large-scale handmade photo albums of 60-plus photos which are a part of the Antoine and Me project. Made using block printing, rope binding, and vintage wooden covers, the project's photo albums marry their traditional hand crafts with modern-technology based use of multimedia incorporated in the project's sound-designed photo narrations, juxtaposing and collaborating the old and the new.
Pamela Woolford introduces Antoine and Me

This is an excerpt from Pamela Woolford addressing attendees of the Baltimore Museum of Art press preview for her site-specific Antoine and Me installation.
From BmoreArt's Coverage of Antoine and Me

A photograph from BmoreArt's coverage of Antoine and Me at the BMA. In a later article the publication named the overall exhibition one of the top 5 in the Baltimore area in 2022.
From BmoreArt's coverage of Antoine and Me

Photographs from BmoreArt's coverage of Antoine and Me at the BMA showing her display cases with her narrations, curated collection of ephemera related to Black love in Baltimore through time, and her large-case photo album alongside pages from 100-year-old photo albums of Black Baltimoreans, including Woolford's own grandmother. In a later article the publication named the BMA's exhibition one of the top 5 in the Baltimore area in 2022.
Pamela Woolford discusses Antoine and Me

At the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition of her multimedia project and site-specific installation Antoine and Me, Pamela Woolford discusses her influences for the project with writer and Washington Post reporter Deneen L. Brown in this clip from their discussion.
Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me

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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me

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Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir

Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, a memoir short about anti-Blackness in America, is a Pamela Woolford film in which she is the writer, director, editor, and sole performer. The film had a limited on-demand release. In collaboration with Busboys and Poets and the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, Woolford hosted an online film-premiere event, Art as a Response to Anti-Blackness, which was attended by 1.5 thousand people. The film also screened through Marymount University later that year and was the subject of Woolford's 2020 Bisson Lecture in the Humanities there. For more information about Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, please visit the film's webpage.

Interrupted will screen again as part of the virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. For more information, see the Up/Rooted project description here or visit pamelawoolford.com/uprooted.

Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir was made possible in part thanks to the support of Maryland State Arts Council, United Way of Central Maryland, Mosaic Center for Culture and Diversity at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Leah Mazur and Drew Willard, Bob James, and Resonance Records.

Trailer for Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir

The trailer for Pamela Woolford's critically-acclaimed experimental short Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir, which also screens in the VR experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. Woolford wrote, directed, edited, and was the sole performer for the film, which had a limited online release in 2020 and a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people. For more information about Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, see the project description or visit the film's webpage.
Art as a Response to Anti-Blackness

Art as a Response to Anti-Blackness was the virtual film-launch event for Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir attended by more than 1.5 thousand people. It was a dynamic conversation inspired by the film with panelists jazz-great Bob James, two-time NAACP Image Award-nominated author Marita Golden, and Joseph Lewis, founder of Black Bottom Film Festival and executive director of Jazz Bridge. Lindsey Yancich of Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery spoke about Pamela Woolford's work, and Andy Shallal of Busboys and Poets and Dr. Charles Chavis of George Mason University cohosted.
Pamela Woolford as the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University

Pamela Woolford was the 2020 Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University. Here she speaks to Marymount University graduate students and others via Zoom about her film Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir.
Praise for Interrupted

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More Praise for Interrupted

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More Praise for Interrupted

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More Praise for Interrupted

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More Praise for Interrupted

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Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows

Combining documentary art, 3D-animated fiction, and experimental memoir, Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows is a first of its kind series of virtual-reality experiences employing the use of technologically advanced gaming application that have been refined by the application developer specifically to achieve Pamela Woolford's Up/Rooted vision. Up/Rooted allows Woolford to give the VR users a unique experience of "inhabiting" characters whose lives they've been viewing and also allowing the user to experience, in 360 degrees, sweeping pastoral settings of the Up/Rooted outdoor environment. The series of four VR experiences, each ranging in length from about 15-to-20-minutes long, is a unique retrospective presentation in which Woolford's narrative, performative, and film work are experienced life-sized, three dimensionally, and in 360-degrees through windows, mirrors, and rooms of a virtual rustic, wooden cabin.

Here users watch Pamela Woolford's films in three-dimensional settings, walk through life-like animations of her stories, see and hear hyper-realistic 3D characters tell their own stories, and hear Pamela's 360-degree directional sound design and voice acting, bringing excerpts from her stories to life as never before.

Using her signature cabin motif, Woolford gives a surreal "timeless" nod to a symbol of the Great Migration in Up/Rooted, as users experience a family's multigenerational stories. Woolford derives her cabin-windows motif from her films Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir and Generation and her story "Just After Supper."

Pamela Woolford is the writer, director, sound designer, producer, and sole performer of the Up/Rooted experience, which is co-produced by her octogenarian mother Sadie Woolford. Up/Rooted is made possible in part with support from Maryland State Arts Council and the aSHE Fund. For more information on the experience, visit pamelawoolford.com/uprooted.

Rough video capture of Up/Rooted work-in-progess.

This is an early rough video capture of a portion of one of the scenes in Up/Rooted. It gives a feel for the experience but does not capture the hyper-realism of the final life-sized 3D characters and the setting and details. In the final, users freely walk around this room in which the elderly woman, seen as a ghost, tells the story of her younger self, seen hiding under stairs, and additional directional sound design adds to the realism. Three-dimensional animation is combined with real-life framed family photos on the wall.
Rough video capture from Up/Rooted work-in-progress.

An early rough video capture from Up/Rooted. In the final, users walk freely around the room where the mother and daughter talk on the bed. The echoing narration is also heard in an earlier scene with a younger version of the mother and daughter. Three-dimensional animation is combined with real-life framed family photos. The photographs in the next piece of media give an idea of the life-like quality of the characters in the final VR experience, and the final version is also more realistically detailed, both sound-wise and visually with the characters' hands not compromising their bodies, etc.
Sadie Woolford and the character she inspired

In Up/Rooted, Pamela Woolford uses hyper-realistic 3D-animations. These are photos of an Up/Rooted character at different ages side-by side with her real-life inspiration, Pamela Woolford's mother Sadie Woolford. The first photo of Sadie Woolford as a grade schooler was the only childhood photo of her available during the character modeling, so the teenage version of the character (which looks remarkably like this teen photo of her discovered later) was created by imagining what she would have looked like at that age. Click the photo to see an enlarged version and zoom in to see detail.
Up/Rooted outdoor imaga from final VR

This image from the actual Up/Rooted experience shows the hyperrealistic nature of the foliage and natural settings of the rural views the VR users can walk through. Between the hyperrealism of the flora, the 3D-animated characters, and the setting in the final UpRooted experience along with the innovative use of new technology and applications refined specifically for Up/Rooted, Pamela Woolford is able to give her VR users a unique immersive look at her art.
Pamela Woolford discusses Up/Rooted

On November 12, 2021, Rebekah Frimpong of CR8:BLK (Create Black) interviewed Pamela Woolford about her then upcoming virtual-reality project Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. The interview occurred as part of the third annual Black Women Cinema Week, which was in Puerto Rico that year. (Rebekah is off-camera speaking via Zoom.) The event was sponsored by CR8:BLK, Fractured Atlas, ¡Cinema Paradiso, and Film Fatales. This video is excerpts from that interview.
Pamela Woolford as a James Weldon Johnson Fellow in the Arts and Bard College at Simon's Rock Artist Resident

Pamela Woolford was a 2023 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in the Arts and Artist-in-Residence at Bard College at Simon's Rock. Here she speaks about the significance of being present in the restored James Weldon Johnson historic writing cabin during her fellowship and residency and its relation to themes she explores in her Up/Rooted project and other works.
Praise for Pamela Woolford's Work

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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Work

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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Work

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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Work

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Multimedia Documentaries

Pamela Woolford is writing and directing two upcoming multimedia documentary projects. One is a multimedia project entitled Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries about early Black residents of Pamela Woolford's hometown of Columbia, Maryland, who have contributed significantly to the ideal of freedom in our nation. For this project Pamela Woolford is a recipient of the prestigious Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation. For more information, visit pamelawoolford.com/visionaries.

The other is a documentary on 102-year-old Howard Stokes, who was one of the first Black people permitted to drive a streetcar or any public transportation in our nation's capital. It is an experimental documentary being created with animated collages. This documentary is produced by Pamela Woolford's octogenarian mother Sadie Woolford with funding in part by Maryland State Arts Council.

Pamela Woolford, Changemaker Challenge Winner, on Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries

Pamela Woolford received a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation for her upcoming project Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries. She wrote, sound designed, and performed this 5-minute speech about the initial concept for the project and delivered the presentation at this Changemaker Challenge event at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Since then, Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries has grown into a larger multimedia project. The music is "Zoot Suit" by Okorie "OkCello" Johnson. (Please note Woolford did not have control over the sound levels during the presentation.)
Baltimore Sun Feature on Pamela Woolford

In February of 2020 the Baltimore Sun ran a feature story on Pamela Woolford and her Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries project (which was also simultaneously the cover story of the Howard County Times, owned by Baltimore Sun Media Group). You can read the PDF of the Sun article above or click this link to have the option of listening to the article's audio version.
102-year-old Howard Stokes

This is video footage of 102-year-old Howard Stokes taken by Pamela Woolford, who is writing and directing the experimental documentary with animated collages on Mr. Stokes.
Pamela Woolford profiled on Maryland Public Television

Pamela Woolford was profiled on Maryland Public Television's Artworks special as the 2022 winner of the Baker Artist Awards in interdisciplinary arts. Here she discusses her work.
Pamela Woolford promo on Maryland Public Televison

Pamela Woolford was featured with this promo on Maryland Public Television's Artworks special as one of the 2021 Baker Artist Award winners in interdisciplinary arts.

Strong Black Women & Sometimey Men

Strong Black Women

Pamela Woolford is directing and performs in a two-women show in which she and her mother, award-winning octogenarian interdisciplinary artist Sadie Woolford, perform four monologues from acclaimed author Marita Golden's book The Strong Black Woman: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women. In the presentation Pamela Woolford and Sadie Woolford perform the parts of Harriet Tubman, Patrisse Cullors, Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer. They have presented parts of this theater piece at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, and at The Outpost in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sometimey Men

Writer and interdisciplinary artist Pamela Woolford, who performs as Harriet Tubman in the Strong Black Woman two-women show with her octogenarian minister mother is also writing a memoir, Sometimey Men: A Memoir of Mysticism I Get Honest, Harriet Tubman's Sensual Womanhood, and These Enchanting Men, inspired, in part, by her time last year performing in the Strong Black Woman theater piece. As a middle-aged agnostic who had grown up in a religious household, Pamela makes a conscious decision in 2024 to embrace her own mysticism. As the year progresses and after she is accepted into an invitation-only monthlong residency for Black creatives, Pamela experiences a series of uncanny events preternaturally involving revelations of Harriet Tubman and also the lives of men she becomes romantically involved with. Her narrative unfolds a heartfelt empathetic view of middle-aged Black men and the boys they were and makes commentary about complex underexplored relationships between American history and how we view Black men and how Black men view and judge themselves. With a history of repurposing musical masterpieces, as she did in working with jazz great Bob James to incorporate his 1965 15-minute composition “A Personal Statement” into her film Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, Pamela organizes her Sometimey Men narrative based on 32 Roberta Flack songs, predominately from the singer’s first four solo albums released from 1969 to 1973.

Pamela Woolford as Harriet Tubman

A photo from Pamela Woolford's performance as Harriet Tubman at The Outpost in Baltimore, Maryland, July 31, 2024.
Pamela Woolford as Harriet Tubman

Pamela Woolford performs, for the first time, an excerpt from the Harriet Tubman monologue written by author Marita Golden as a tribute to Golden on the occasion of the 40th anniversary celebration of the publication of her first book, which has never gone out of print. The four-monologues two-women show includes Pamela Woolford as Harriet Tubman, as seen here.
Pamela Woolford interviews Marita Golden

On Sunday, July 16, 2023, Pamela Woolford interviewed author Marita Golden at Busboys and Poets in Columbia, Maryland, on the occasion of the launch of her book The New Black Woman: Loves Herself, Has Boundaries, and Heals Every Day as a followup to her highly successful book The Strong Black Woman: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women. The four monologues performed by Pamela Woolford and Sadie Woolford and directed by Pamela Woolford appear in Golden's book The Strong Black Woman.
Pamela Woolford, Marita Golden, and Sadie Woolford

Pamela Woolford, Marita Golden, and Sadie Woolford at the occasion of Pamela Woolford's first performance of an excerpt of Marita Golden's Harriet Tubman monologue, which is a part of the four-monologues two-women show Pamela directs and performs in with her mother Sadie Woolford.

Captioning this photo, Marita Golden has written to her followers “How wide is your friendship circle? As I grow older my friendship circle continues to expand, with women young enough to be my daughters and women in their eighties. Women who are creative and vibrant and often smarter than me. I love learning to look at the world through their eyes and hearts. I want to keep making friends until the end.”

Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half

Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half is Pamela Woolford's marriage-memoir collection, a group of essays and vignettes about her tumultuous relationship with her composer husband, who was emotionally abusive and showed signs of mental illness. Excerpts from her collection made Woolford a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and shortlisted her for the 2017 Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize. Two excerpts from Meditations on a Marriage are published in Eunoia Review: "Coffee" and "Dog."

About Meditations on a Marriage, Pamela Woolford says, "Six months into my marriage to my composer (now ex-) husband, he, out of the blue, berated me for taking a break while writing an email he asked me to write as a favor. I was astonished and confused. Six months after that I had the thought that he might kill me. His escalating verbal assaults and mental abuse left me with that much fear. Yet even after he drove me out of our home on New Year's Day 2015 with two days of back-to-back rages, what I wanted more than anything was to have the man I fell in love with back. After little more than a year with him, I had become someone I didn't recognize. I was 46 when we married, and it was my first marriage partially because I am cautious, logical, and independent. How did this happen to me? Verbal and mental abuse are insidious in the way they slowly turn a person inside out, in my case making me question my own logic and intuition and long for the man who was actually abusing me. Meditations on a Marriage is about the love I shared with a fellow artist, my surprising but not atypical reaction to his abuse and manipulation, and his psychological challenges, as he exhibited signs of having a personality disorder."

Dog

"Dog" is an excerpt from Meditations on a Marriage and appears here in Eunoia Review.
Coffee

"Coffee" is an excerpt from Meditations on a Marriage and appears here in Eunoia Review.
Photo Art for Meditations on a Marriage

Photo art from Pamela Woolford's collection Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half. The photo, shot by Carolyn Greer, shows Woolford’s torso held in her ex-husband’s arms on the day of their wedding. She wears her late father’s watch, the blue-faced timepiece her something old, borrowed, and blue. Meditations on a Marriage made Woolford a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and shortlisted her for the 2017 Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize. To read two pieces from Meditations on a Marriage, click the links in the project description.
On The Margin Radio Interview & Podcast with Pamela Woolford

Author and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller interviewed Pamela Woolford on the WPFW 89.3 FM radio show and podcast On The Margin in October 2016 and discussed Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and Half. To listen, click the red arrow and then click the listening bar at the bottom to move forward to 30:40.
Photo Art for Meditations on a Marriage

A photo, shot by Carolyn Greer, of Pamela Woolford and her now ex-husband on their wedding day. He wears blue vegan-suede shoes she gave him as a gift.
Praise for Meditations on a Marriage

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Opening Lines from Stutter

“Stutter" from Meditations on a Marriage "is written with a spare crystal clear beauty and has a definite cinematic quality," writes best-selling memoirist Marita Golden. "A moving commentary on missed connections and the deeper meaning of ‘recognitions.’”

Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir)

Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir) is an upcoming Pamela Woolford memoir in verse with drawings by nationally syndicated Black-American editorial cartoonist Walt Carr and augmented reality in which viewers will be able to focus their smartphone or iPad on a particular image in the book and see the image "come to life" as a 3D experience directed by Woolford. With the tagline "A Black woman’s memory of her childhood confidence and the racist tide she swam against in suburban 1970s America," Disrupt/ed is a race-based memoir in verse about Woolford's childhood. In the book Pamela Woolford explores her early childhood in the 1970s in the planned integrated town of Columbia, Maryland, amidst this nation's legacy of enslavement of Black people, like her. (The book's illustrator Walt Carr is also a longterm resident of Columbia, Maryland.)

With the creation of Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir), Pamela Woolford originates the term "mem-noir."

mem-noir: [mem-nwär] NOUN, A memoir, written in short paragraphs or verse, concerned with being a person of the Black race within the context of a specified subject, time period, or circumstance. Visual art or photographs, especially biographical in nature, are often incorporated.

The Disrupt/ed manuscript made Woolford a finalist for the She Writes Press and SparkPress Toward Equality in Publishing STEP Contest. Disrupt/ed is supported in part by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. For more information about Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir), visit pamelawoolford.com/disrupted.

Pamela Woolford reads from Disrupted

Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri conducted two interviews of Pamela Woolford for the Library of Congress podcast The Poet and The Poem (separate audio and video sessions.) In the above PDF is an active-link sentence in blue, enabling you to click to listen (or click here). Pamela Woolford ends this 12/2/22 session with a reading from Disrupt/ed, her memoir-in-verse with augmented reality. She also reads from her memoir creative-nonfiction piece "My Father With This Illness" and the script for her film Interrupted. This interview is heard on iHeart radio, Apple podcasts, WPFW radio in DC, and other locations.
Cover Photo for Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir)

Pamela Woolford in her backyard with her pet dog in 1970s Columbia, Maryland.
Sample Illustrations from Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir)

A sample of the illustrations by nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist Walt Carr for Pamela Woolford's Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir).
Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed from Bestselling Memoirist Marita Golden

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More Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed

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More Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed

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Additional Creative Writing

In addition to Disrupt/ed, Meditations on a Marriage, and Sometimey Men (described in their own individual project descriptions) and her short story “Just After Supper” (appearing in the Generation project description), Pamela Woolford has published much additional creative writing and was a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award winner for "notable artistic achievement" in literature. She has been a She Writes Press and SparkPress Toward Equality in Publishing STEP Contest finalist, a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist for creative nonfiction, shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, and in addition to her State Arts Council Award previously mentioned, a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award winner for screenwriting

Pamela Woolford has published extensively, including more than 100 memoir, profile, human-interest, literary journalism, poetry, and think pieces published in The Baltimore Sun, Poets & Writers Magazine, NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University’s Transition, and other publications. Her writings have been selected for anthologies, translated into German, and widely cited.

To find out more about Woolford's writing, click the various links on the right or visit her writing portfolio at pamelawoolford.com/writing-portfolio.

Here are some links and descriptions of some of her older pieces still available to read online:

"Pleasant People" is a short story in which Pamela Woolford explores facades of American society, walls between races, and a connection between two women stretching even beyond the grave. The story has been republished with an introduction on Grace and Gravity. It has been anthologized in Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody and was once published on Alfie Dog Fiction.
“Here I Am Looking” is an example of Pamela Woolford’s creative-nonfiction work in which she muses off of works of fellow artists, in this case two photographs of herself, one displayed with the "Here I Am Looking" essay and one, by noted art photographer Fabrice Monteiro, yet to be shown. It is memoir which can be described as a flash essay. “Here I Am Looking” currently appears in the literary journal Eunoia Review and was published and shared on social media just before the first Women's March on Washington. It was then translated into German and published in Briefe aus Amerika. From having written "Here I Am Looking," Pamela Woolford was interviewed on the podcast Fury: Women's Lived Experiences in the Trump Era.
“This Is What Happened,” the first memoir Pamela Woolford ever wrote, she wrote unconventionally in the third person. Since witnessing an incident causing her father severe brain damage leading to his death in 2012, Woolford has suffered PTSD symptoms. She couldn't write for about a year until she began writing “This Is What Happened.” It is her tender, sometimes funny story of finding her way back from tragedy and deals with mourning the loss of her father, online dating at 45, and an unexpected letter from U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski. This piece appears in the literary journal Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art.
(TRIGGER WARNING) "Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?" is a literary journalism piece by Pamela Woolford. It appears on Medium where it runs with an audio recording of the article in which Woolford performs the voiceover.
Pamela Woolford was one of the first writers published on the Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote website. Chosen by site creator and bestselling author Julianna Baggott, her piece was published alongside that of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult and award-winning poet Erin Belieu on September 27, 2016.
The Baltimore Sun ran a feature on Pamela Woolford and her upcoming project Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries, for which she has received a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation. For more information on Columbia's Black Freedom Visionaries, visit pamelawoolford.com/visionaries.

Threshold

Woolford's short story “Threshold” was chosen by acclaimed author Bernice L. McFadden to be anthologized in The Fire Inside, Vol III, which was released in 2024. “Threshold" was also the story that had made Woolford a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. Additionally the story once won Woolford admittance into a weeklong workshop sponsored by Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and led by then PEN/Faulkner Foundation president Richard McCann. It was her time in the McCann workshop which led Woolford to write her collection Meditations on a Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half.
Pamela Woolford reads from "Threshold"

Pamela Woolford reads an excerpt from her short story "Threshold," which appears in the Zora's Den anthology The Fire Inside, Vol. III edited by Bernice McFadden and Victoria Adams Kennedy at the Baltimore book launch at the Charm City Cultural Cultivation headquarters on September 30, 2024,
Pleasant People

“Pleasant People” is a short story by Pamela Woolford which explores facades of American society, walls between races, and a connection between two women stretching even beyond the grave. In 2022 the story was republished on Grace and Gravity as it appear here with a new introduction. It was originally anthologized in Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody and has also been published in Alfie Dog Fiction. It was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize.
Here I Am Looking

A photo in which Pamela Woolford looks straight into the camera accompanies this essay "Here I Am Looking" in which she writes about her work as a model for art photographer Fabrice Monteiro and alludes to her body as tool, witness, and memory. The essay can be read here in English or its German translation in Briefe aus Amerika.

In August 20018 Pamela Woolford was featured on the podcast Fury: Women's Lived Experiences in the Trump Era in which she discusses traumatizing effects of American politics, the healing power of art, and her essay "Here I Am Looking."
This Is What Happened

After a harrowing period, Pamela Woolford began writing again, starting with her memoir written in the third person "This Is What Happened," which Arik Gabbai, senior editor for Smithsonian Magazine and then editorial staff member at The New Yorker called "moving and very carefully calibrated." To read the essay, click the tan box above.
[TRIGGER WARNING] Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?

This is the print version of Pamela Woolford's literary-joiurnalism article "Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?" To read it, click the tan box above. In the next piece of media, one can listened to the article as it is read by Woolford doing the voiceover.
[TRIGGER WARNING] Audio Story for Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?

This is the audio version of Pamela Woolford's literary-joiurnalism article "Are IFC and Netflix Promoting the Rape of Brown and Asian Boys?" (See previous media to read the article.) Here Woolford performs the voiceover.
#DedicateYourNoTrumpVote

In Sept 2016 bestselling author Julianna Baggott makes a post on social media using the hashtag "DedicateYourNoTrumpVote," which quickly trends and is used by literary powerhouses and noted voices "as an act of hope, to reach beyond ourselves and honor someone else" while encouraging voting, as Baggott put it in the website she soon establishes to publish many of the #DedicateYourNoTrumpVote essays, which were read by millions, including Pamela Woolfords's dedication published alongside that of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult and award-winning poet Erin Belieu on Sept. 27, 2016.
Words of praise for Pamela Woolford's fiction

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Words of Praise for Pamela Woolford's fiction

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Truth & Story

Truth & Story is a scripted vlog written and directed by Pamela Woolford. With the first four episodes, Truth & Story began as Pamela Woolford's personal scripted vlog of positivity, which she called "mini-memoir and good vibes" and soon the series expanded to become a humorous co-hosted scripted vlog featuring Pamela's mother, writer Sadie Woolford, as well. Pamela and Sadie recorded four episodes together, completing the eight-episode summer 2017 season of Truth & Story. To discover more and for the most fun, start watching with episode 8, which is the first episode in the media to the right and watch the rest in the order that the episodes appear to the right.

Truth & Story, Vlog #8: I Don't Like Deepak Chopra

Truth & Story was a scripted vlog written and directed by Pamela Woolford and performed by her and her mother Sadie Woolford. In this this last episode of Truth & Story, Vlog #8: "I Don't Like Deepak Chopra," Pamela's cousin Joella has a Deepak Chopra-like suitor for her octogenarian cousin Sadie, and Pamela has to get comfortable with the idea of her widowed mom dating again. To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box to the right of the project description.
Truth & Story, Vlog #5: 10 Ways to Beat Writer's Block

Truth & Story, Episode #5: "10 Ways to Beat Writer's Block" (and have you laughing and smiling in the process!) In this the first of the Truth & Story episodes co-hosted by Pamela Woolford's writer mom Sadie Woolford, discover Sadie's fresh ways to beat writer's block, or overcome most any artistic mental block. To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Truth & Story, Vlog #6: I Can't Stop It (Part I)

In Truth & Story, Vlog #6: "I Can't Stop It (Part I)," Pamela Woolford's mom Sadie Woolford co-hosts once again, and Pamela realizes she can't stop her from becoming a permanent part of the series! A writer herself and somewhat of a southern storyteller, Sadie reminisces about growing up in the rural south in her home state of North Carolina during the Great Depression and the Great Migration. They also talk about Britcoms, the war effort in World War II, and making moonshine. To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Truth & Story, Vlog #7: I Can't Stop It (Part II)

In Truth & Story, Vlog #7: "I Can't Stop It (Part II)," Pamela and Sadie discuss play readings, a love of the arts, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry. To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Truth & Story, Vlog #1: I'm a Hiker

Truth & Story, Vlog #1: "I'm a Hiker" is the very first episode of Pamela Woolford's scripted vlog of "mini-memoir and good vibes." To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Truth & Story, Vlog #2: I Love the Beauty of the Quotidian

Truth & Story, Vlog #2: "I Love the Beauty of the Quotidian" is one of Pamela's personal favorites of the vlog series. To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Truth & Story, Vlog #3: I Have These Eyes

To watch Truth & Story, Vlog #3: "I Have These Eyes," another inspiring episode, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Truth & Story, Vlog #4: I'm an Introvert

Truth & Story, Vlog #4: "I'm an Introvert" is the last episode Pamela hosts alone before she's joined by her writer mom Sadie. To watch, click the arrow. To see additional episodes, click another blue box.
Pamela Woolford and Sadie Woolford interviewed on Unerased: Black Women Speak

In February 2024, Pamela Woolford and her mother and artistic partner Sadie Woolford were interviewed by author Tracy Chiles McGhee for the showcast Unerased: Black Women Speak as part of their "Have A Heart: Health, Love and Self-Care" episode. Their interview appears at the 12-minute mark in the episode.

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