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

Pamela Woolford performs live readings in character and voiceover work. Examples of each can be viewed by clicking the boxes shown, including a reading in character from her story "Just After Supper" and her voiceover work in an indie short.

Her project Antoine and Me, for which she performs voiceover in addition to being the writer, director, and model for the photographs, is the opening to a surreal love story contained in handmade photo albums and sound-designed photo narrations, or SDP narrations. The work premieres at the Baltimore Museum of Art "Baltimore, Addressed: Baker Artist Awards" exhibition, running November 13, 2022-March 12 2023. Antoine and Me also marks the premiere of the world's first SDP narration Collectibles. A supply of 7 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 https://pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me. For info about the related nfts, where you can actually hear an nft example of one of her SDP narrations, click the OpenSea NFT link  at https://pamelawoolford.com/nft

In addition, Woolford is the primary onscreen talent, performing both acting and movement-based art, in her multi-award-winning film Generation (see separate Generation project description), the sole voice actor in Generation, the sole performer in her critically acclaimed film Interrupted (see separate Interrupted project description), and the sole voice actor in her virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted (see separate Up/Rooted project description.)

Trained in dance, theater, and voice performance, Pamela Woolford's performance career began in the early 1990s as a dancer and choreographer. In the early 2000s, she began performing voiceovers, including PSAs and for professional theater.
 

In addition to the book  Antoine and Me, described in the Up/Rooted project description above, and “Just After Supper,”  published in Origins Journal and described in the Generation project description above, Pamela Woolford has written much more fiction and has been a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award winner for fiction, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts.  You can read her piece "Pleasant People" which has been republished with an introduction on Grace and Gravity. It was anthologized in Amazing Graces and was once published on Alfie Dog Fiction. To find out more about Woolford's fiction writing, click the various links on the right.

Pamela Woolford is a speaker and keynote storyteller amplifing the histories, memories, joys, and inner lives of Black women and girls and others whose voices are under-explored in American media, popular art, and experimental spaces. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, she has been the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University; delivered a keynote address for a TogetHER Women's Forum session sponsored by United Way of Central Maryand; curated and headlined the program Art as a Response to Anti-Blackness, which was attended virtually by 1.5 thousand people; presented memoir-in-verse for Artists U SHIFT; and performed a dramatic reading for the Baker Artist Awards showcase. For more information about Woolford's work as a speaker and presenter/performer, including clips from her presentations, visit: pamelawoolford.com/speaker.

Pamela Woolford has conducted interviews and profiles with noted figures in arts, culture, scholarship, and science since the early 1990s for Poets & Writers Magazine, the NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University's Transition,  and other publications, including her widely cited interview with filmmaker Haile Gerima "Filming Slavery," which appeared in Issue #64 of Transition.

Woolford's interview work has been cited in, for example, books such as:

• Commander, Michelle D. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Falola,Toyin ‎and Augustine Agwuele, eds. Africans and the Politics of Popular Culture Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009
• Field, Allyson Nadia and Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, eds. L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 
• Henry, DeWitt, ed. Breaking into Print: Early Stories and Insights into Getting Published, A Ploughshares Anthology Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
• Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Keeling, Kara. The Witches Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
• Lupton, Mary Jane and Lucille Clifton. Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters Westport: Praeger, 2006. 
• Ndounou, Monica White Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014.
• Peterson, James Braxton, ed. In Media Res: Race, Identity, and Pop Culture in the Twenty-first Century Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014.
• Young, Cynthia A. Soul Power: Culture Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

“Threshold” is the first story in Pamela Woolford’s novel-in-stories Taking One’s Life, which she began writing while married to her emotionally abusive husband, who was suicidal. The title Taking One’s Life is a reference to both suicide and considering one’s life. “Threshold” made Woolford a Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest semifinalist at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. “Threshold” also won Woolford admittance to the weeklong writing workshop Life Stories, Real and Imagined, sponosored by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and led by author and PEN/Faulkner Foundation president Richard McCann. Woolford’s current book project, Meditations on A Marriage: A Memoir of Our Year and a Half, grew out of the McCann workshop. “Threshold” is currently available for publication.

Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, a memoir short about anti-Blackness in America, is Pamela Woolford's latest film release in which she is the writer, director, editor, and sole performer. Originally scheduled to premiere at a 2020 solo show of her work at Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, the film has had a limited on-demand run (after the postponing of her gallery show to 2022 due to to the pandemic). 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 mem-noir.com.

Interrupted will screen as part of the virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows. For more information , 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.

Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir) is an upcoming Pamela Woolford memoir with drawings by nationally syndicated Black-American editorial cartoonist Walt Carr. 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 childhood memoir in vignettes. 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. 
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. 

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.

This is a video artist statement for Pamela Woolford's work-in-progress Meditations on a Marriage, a multidiscipline memoir. Meditations on a Marriage will be a book (represented by the Carol Mann Agency) with an accompanying short film, a film about a dance about a book about emotional abuse. The book will be a collection of first-person vignettes on Woolford's verbally and mentally abusive interracial relationship with her composer husband, who showed signs of mental illness. Woolford was a 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards finalist and longlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize for excerpts from the project.