Hello everyone! My name is Eileen Hernandez, and I am a senior majoring in English. However, I transferred to Emory last year, so this is my second year here. Some background about me is that I am a first-generation Cuban American from Miami, Florida. Growing up in a culture built on shared narratives, I have been impacted by storytelling of various kinds. One initially unnoticeable form of storytelling, for example, is hearing my grandmother apply her handy mental list of Cuban idioms to almost every dilemma we encountered. Although my grandmother’s figurative wise words often sounded amusing, I realized that such phrases hold rich history, emotions, and experiences specific to her home environment and community. I also fostered a strong love for literature when my mother read picture books to me every night as a child, essentially what influenced me to study English today.
Ironically, I love reading fiction but shy away from creative writing. I feel more confident when writing analytically but often struggle when trying to write a creative piece. I have written a few poems in my lifetime, but have not felt fully satisfied with them. I hope I can get more exposed (and desensitized) to creative writing so that I could feel more comfortable with my writing and an openness to have others critique my work. For this class that is based largely on analyzing texts, I hope we learn about the mechanics of close readings and how readers can best focus on a central topic without going off on tangents. In most of my previous English courses, close reading is implied to be a skill rather than something that could be learned and refined, so I would love to have an instructor who can try to “teach” it from scratch. I feel like this could help enlighten even those who are skilled at reading because everyone approaches texts differently and could benefit from new insights.