Sarah Nance is a writer and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Her research examines illness, embodiment, and memorialization in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, visual art, and culture. Her critical essays have appeared in Literature & Medicine and Arizona Quarterly, and her creative work and reviews have appeared in venues such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, ASAP/J, Iron Horse Literary Review, Belletrist, Faultline, Parentheses, and elsewhere.
Authors | Sarah Nance
Articles on Amodern by Sarah Nance
TRUE CRIME’S POETIC FORM
Consuming Disability in Jillian Weise's “Elegy for Zahra Baker”
In 2010, ten-year-old Zahra Baker disappeared in North Carolina. Baker, who wore a prosthetic leg and hearing aids, became a media sensation in case that quickly became classified as a murder. This essay examines true crime and disability through the lens of Jillian Weise’s long poem, “Elegy for Zahra Baker,” in which Weise describes the period of waiting between Baker’s disappearance and the discovery of her body. In navigating Baker’s case and the larger sociocultural treatment of the disabled body, “Elegy for Zahra Baker” questions boundaries between private and public life, and brings to light the myriad ways in which bodies become a consumable product for public view.