Rebecca Givens Rolland is a writer, photographer, and clinician/educator whose work often integrates these areas. She is interested in questions of language learning and loss, identity, and spectatorship, both from a theoretical standpoint and in relation to her clients in speech-language therapy. She completed her clinical work at the MGH Institute of Health Professions and was involved in research at the MGH Voice Lab. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
While living in Greece, Rebecca
began a series of poems investigating the cultural icon of the Delphic
Oracle in modern society, particularly in a world where Western medicine
seems to negate such inspired predictions. She took as her subject an
imagined group of stroke patients with aphasia, a language disorder
characterized by an inability to find words. These poems
investigate the losses such patients experience, as well as
theoretical issues surrounding linguistic expression and thought.
Rebecca's poems appear or are forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Cincinnati Review, Southeast Review, Many
Mountains Moving, Witness,
Carolina Quarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Meridian, Southeast
Review, and Florida Review, and have won an Academy of American Poets Award and a
Dana Award. She has been the recipient
of the
National Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and several
prizes from Yale University. She is fluent in French and German and
translates from these languages as well.
Rebecca can be reached by email at rebecca.g.rolland@gmail.com.