MultiDisciplinary
Anterior Cruciate Ligaments
By Alexis Jenkins
Alexis Jenkins definitely is very active from the start. Sports have always been her passion; growing up, you could always catch her outside at the softball field playing with her high school, tournament team, or family. This all was until she had an almost career-ending injury occur not just once but twice. Luckily, she could continue to play two years of college softball, but she always wondered why tearing your ACL, also known as your Anterior Cruciate Ligament, was such a big deal. Now years later, she is a Senior here at Millersville studying Sports Journalism. After graduation, she plans to work her way into the ESPN world to eventually become an ESPN Broadcast Journalist.
Strengthening Identities Through Spoken Word
by Nathaniel Warren
I presented two spoken word poems in a group of eleven students led by Dr. Corkery. Like the other students, my poems were deeply personal. I wrote my poems out of personal experience with disabled and transgender identities. My poems are titled Criptid and Network.
The event was organized so that we did not have to read our poems back to back. Before the event, I decided with Dr. Corkery and my peers to read Criptid first, because I wanted my poems to have the greatest impact I could deliver to others. Criptid deals primarily with disability and my being a cane-user because of endometriosis; however, my disability is inseparable from my gender. Specifically, I reference having a uterus while being male.
About the Author
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Nathaniel Warren was born in Bethlehem, PA and grew up playing in the woods around Lehighton, PA. As a child, he loved reading and hiking, and still does to this day. He is the middle child, with an older and a younger brother. He attended the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in middle and high school, and is currently pursuing a B.S.E in English with a specialty in Linguistics at Millersville University. Although he is fluent only in English, his interest in linguistics began when taking Latin, German, and French in high school.
Nathaniel began to discover his LGBTQ identity in late 2012, quickly realizing that he did not fit in with the “L”, but the “T”. He began to present more masculinely and came out to family members. He has publicly introduced himself as male since fall 2013. In the following year, he began to show strong chronic illness symptoms, and was later diagnosed with endometriosis. Living with intertwined pain and gender dysphoria has been hard for him, but he wishes to find a way to manage both and continue forward in life and hopes to become a teacher that will help others.