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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 literature, and an Individual Artist Award in screenwriting); five film-festival awards internationally; a… more
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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’”
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me
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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me
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Additional Fiction
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Opening Lines of Night from SleepPamela's Woolford's conceived novel-in-stories Sleep is highly praised by Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward P. Jones. These are the opening words from the story "Night" from Sleep.
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Photo Art for 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. “Pleasant People” appeared in the anthology Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody and was published in Alfie Dog Fiction. It was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. The story has been republished on Grace and Gravity and can be read by clicking the link in the project description.
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Opening lines from Pleasant PeopleThese are the opening lines to Pamela Woolford's Pushcart Prize-nominated story "Pleasant People," which is anthologized in Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody.
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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.
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Praise for Pamela Woolford's Fiction
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More Praise for Pamela Woolford's Fiction
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.
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Pamela Woolford, Changemaker Challenge Winner, on Columbia's Black Freedom VisionariesPamela 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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Threshold
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Opening Lines of Threshold“Threshold” is the first story in Woolford’s conceived novel-in-stories Taking One’s Life. The novel's title 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 and also won her admittance to 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Cover Photo for Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir)
Pamela Woolford in her backyard with her pet dog in 1970s Columbia, Maryland.
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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).
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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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Artist Statement for Meditations on a Marriage
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Artist Statement for Meditations on a MarriageThis is a video artist statement for Meditations on a Marriage, Pamela Woolford's marriage-memoir collection, a group of essays about Woolford’s 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. (Video writing, direction, sound design, and voice-over by Pamela Woolford. Cinematography by Denee Barr. Color edits by David Hester. Sound edits by Tokyo Cigar.)