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About Pamela

Howard County

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 women and girls, and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of seven Maryland State Arts Council Awards, including an Independent Artist Award in literature and an Individual Artist Award in screenwriting; five film-festival awards internationally; a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon… 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 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."

 

  • 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 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.
  • Photo Art for Meditations on a Marriage
    Photo Art for Meditations on a Marriage
    A photo, 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.
  • Opening Lines from Stutter
    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.’”
  • Praise for Meditations on a Marriage
    Praise for Meditations on a Marriage
  • 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 to move forward to 30:40.

Antoine and Me

 

Pamela Woolford's narrative multimedia project Antoine and Me, for which she performs the voiceover in character in addition to being the writer, director, and model, is the opening to a surreal love story contained in handmade photo albums and sound-designed photo narrations, or SDP narrations, an art form which she founded. The work premiered 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, and combining Afrofuturism with archival materials dating back a hundred years.

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 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 pamelawoolford.com/nft.

  • Audio for Antoine and Me Photo 1

    The is the sound-designed photo narration audio for the first photo in Antoine and Me. The are 7 photos in the Antoine and Me SDP narrations and dozens of photos in the accompanying tactile album, which is made from a vintage wood 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
    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
    Antoine and Me
    As a companion piece to the 2022 release of her virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows, which is a retrospective of her work, Pamela Woolford also premieres in 2022 her new project Antoine and Me, a surreal photo album set in an ambiguous time featuring performative photographs of Woolford with captions performed in character by Woolford through voiceovers which are sound designed. Antoine and Me is featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art 11/13/22-3/12/23. Visit www.pamelawoolford.com/antoine-and-me for more info. Antoine and Me is made possible in part with support from Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org.)
  • Antoine and Me NFT Collection
    Antoine and Me NFT Collection

    The Antoine and Me NFT collection is part of Pamela Woolford’s multimedia project of the same name in which she creates the artform of sound-designed photo (SDP) narrations. To hear and find out more, visit pamelawoolford.com/nft. The Antoine and Me project involves the marrying of age-old tactile artforms (contained in handmade photo albums) and new digital technology. Pamela Woolford is the writer, director, and primary voice actor in the Antoine and Me SDP narrations and models as the character in the albums. 

  • Pamela Woolford introduces Antoine and Me at press preview

    This is an excerpt from Pamela Woolford addressing attendees of her Baltimore Museum of Art press preview for her site-specific Antoine and Me exhibition.

  • Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me
    Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me

    Click once to view the image larger and click again to zoom in and scroll through the page.

  • Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me
    Praise for Pamela Woolford's Antoine and Me

    Click once to view the image larger and click again to zoom in and scroll through the page.

Additional Fiction

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.

  • Photo Art for Sleep
    Photo Art for Sleep
    Sleep is Pamela Woolford’s conceived novel-in-stories, a portrait of three interconnected people one fairly sleepless night, exploring each character's past, present, and future. Predominately set in two bedrooms, Sleep is also, more broadly, an exploration of the human spirit and connectivity found in ordinary lives. It takes place in an unnamed city, and certain characteristics of the protagonists go unlabeled, including age, race, and physical features. Sleep examines subtle meaning in actions between people as well as symbolism and suspense in the everyday. Lastly, it is an exploration of the relationship between longing and peace and a celebration of beauty in the quotidian.
  • Opening Lines of Night from Sleep
    Opening Lines of Night from Sleep
    Pamela'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.
  • Photo Art for Pleasant People
    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.
  • Opening lines from Pleasant People
    Opening lines from Pleasant People
    These are the opening lines to Pamela Woolford's Pushcart Prize-nominated story "Pleasant People," which is anthologized in Amazing Graces edited by Richard Peabody.
  • Opening Lines of Threshold
    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.
  • Praise for Pamela Woolford's Fiction
    Praise for Pamela Woolford's Fiction
  • More Praise for Pamela Woolford's Fiction
    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.

  • 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, 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.

  • 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. 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.

Threshold

“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.
  • Opening Lines of Threshold
    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 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 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 pamelawoolford.com/interrupted.

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.

  • 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 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, visit www.pamelawoolford.com/interrupted or see the project description.
  • 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
    Praise for Interrupted
  • More Praise for Interrupted
    More Praise for Interrupted
  • More Praise for Interrupted
    More Praise for Interrupted
  • More Praise for Interrupted
    More Praise for Interrupted
  • More Praise for Interrupted
    More Praise for Interrupted

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 Pamela. 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 verse. 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. 

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. 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)
    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)
    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
    Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed from Bestselling Memoirist Marita Golden
  • More Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed
    More Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed
  • More Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed
    More Advance Praise for Disrupt/ed

Artist Statement for Meditations on a Marriage

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. 
  • Artist Statement for Meditations on a Marriage
    This 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.)