Neisha-Anne Green
PhD Candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture
Neisha-Anne’s doctoral thesis, “Breaking Bread, Breaking Cycles: Food, Trauma, and Generational Healing in Black Women’s Writing,” explores how Black women authors use food as both metaphor and method to narrate intergenerational trauma, memory, and resilience. Reading works by Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Ntozake Shange, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Green traces how kitchens, gardens, and shared meals become sacred sites where silence, pain, and healing converge. Through a Black Feminist Critical Autoethnography, Neisha-Anne interweaves literary analysis with mirrors of my own personal narratives to consider how food practices such as cooking, eating, refusing, and creating carry legacies of both trauma and care. Having completed her comprehensive exams and initial analyses of each novel, this fellowship will allow Neisha-Anne to dedicate structured time for writing and deepening her analyses through participation in writing groups and retreats offered by Heart-Head-Hands, supporting significant progress toward completing my dissertation and sharing this work with broader audiences.
For a list of previous Graduate Student Research Fellows, please visit the Archives page.