Ruth Christopher, Outstanding Senior in English
On Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021 UC Davis English faculty and students gathered virtually for our annual end-of-the-year awards celebration. One of the honors announced was the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Outstanding Senior award which went to Ruth Christopher. Below you’ll find Chirstopher’s remarks.
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When I first transferred to Davis in 2019, I felt like it was a fluke. I was terrified that at any moment some administrator or other would email me and say, “we’re sorry but there’s been a dreadful mistake and we’re going to have to ask you to leave.” Although I am not the first person in my family to go to university, I am the first to go to somewhere other than a Christian college. This is an extra big deal because my siblings and I were homeschooled from kindergarten through high school. My parents told us they would only help us pay for school if we chose a Bible-believing, homeschool-friendly institution. I was the only one to turn them down. Of course I was afraid that by choosing something other than a Bible/home-school serving school I would never get on.
But my first quarter came and went and the email telling me it was all some huge mistake never arrived. I began to make friends and, with the invaluable help of Lynda Jones and Francis David, learned how to navigate the university. And then in my second quarter here the pandemic hit and all the progress I had made adjusting to the “real” world seemed to go right out the window. I lost my job as a dance instructor and my fiancé Cyrus had his hours slashed. There was no turning to my parents for help because they had turned their backs on me when I turned my back on God and sold my mind to a pagan institution. As we ate through our meager savings just to survive, I began obsessively applying to every scholarship, grant, and writing contest that I heard about, eventually winning the Osher Scholarship and a Provost Undergraduate Fellowship. I told Cyrus that if I was going to go into debt to be here, I was going to get my money’s worth!
And then, as if a pandemic were not enough, last May George Floyd was lynched on camera and the world erupted in protest. Suddenly “getting my money’s worth” didn’t feel like a worthy enough goal to strive for. Cyrus and I wanted to do our part but with immune systems weakened by surviving covid ourselves, going protesting didn’t seem like the way to do it. We asked ourselves what we were good at, what we uniquely had to offer. We are both poets and in conversations with our friend and L.A. poet Arthur Kayzakian, we found our answer and Mad Mouth Poetry was born. Mad Mouth is a collective of multicultural poets that support one another in the writing process, produce reading series and workshops, and create space for community in the digital environment that we were all forced into in the age of social distancing. Our first curated reading was Black Poets Matter, an 8-week series holding space for black poets and artists to self-express and the rest of the poetry community to listen. Our collective grew throughout the summer of 2020 and we added members from Davis and my hometown of L.A.: Damieka Thomas, Maya Alexandria, Ideas Aubrey, Melanie Manuel, and David Gale. The rest of the poetry community began to take notice of our work and we were able to collaborate with IALA, the International Armenian Literary Alliance, to produce a series bringing awareness to the atrocities taking place in Artsakh.
Like my time for this speech, my time as an undergraduate at Davis is coming to an end. I am proud of what I was able to accomplish here, especially under the duress of this past year and online learning. I am proud of the ongoing work of Mad Mouth Poetry and I invite you all to connect with us on social media and to come read at our virtual open mic Hollywood Poets. Big things are in the works for us as we collaborate with IALA, Third Iris, and The Poetry Lab. So stay connected—or, as my little brother would say, “stay stapled.”
Before I end I want to thank a few people, without whom I would not have been successful during my time here at Davis. Thank you Francis David and Lynda Jones for teaching me how to college and for letting me cry in advising hours. Thank you professors Roy, Vernon, Jerng, and Werth for blowing my mind wide open. Thank you Professor Ronda for advising both my creative and critical honors theses. Thank you Professor Stratton for being flexible, supportive, and understanding the quarter that I went broke and missed a lot of deadlines. Thank you to my classmate and quarantine pod Victoria Mapson for teaching me stuff like how to apply for CalFresh as well as being my best friend in Northern California. Thank you to my father-in-law, Dadzilla, for calling me and Cyrus everyday during the pandemic and for helping us to weather it financially. Thank you to the Mad Mouth team for your hard work and your words. Thank you to my lover, my partner, my fiancé: Cyrus Sepahbodi. Despite being a Valley Boy basically his entire life, when I got accepted to Davis, it wasn’t even a question: we were moving up north together. He has supported me throughout my time as a student, proof reading every paper, celebrating every publication. I couldn’t have done it without you Aziz. And finally, thank you to the Undergraduate Committee for conferring on me the Outstanding Graduating Senior Award! I am honored to receive this recognition and grateful to the entire English department for accepting me as one of their own. Thank you. And go Ags!