Catalina Florina Florescu – författare

In this collection, the author focuses on several contemporary Romanian female playwrights with residencies in Europe and the U.S.: Alexandra Badea, Carmen-Francesca Banciu, Alexa Băcanu, Ana Sorina Corneanu, Mihaela Drăgan, Dr. Cătălina Florina Florescu, Dr. Mihaela Michailov, Dr. Domnica Rădulescu, Saviana Stănescu, and Dr. Elise Wilk.In their bold works, written by female playwrights who are academics, activists, and performers, we are invited to discover variations in the modus operandi of the dramatic language itself from metaphorical to matter-of-fact approaches. Furthermore, while all these playwrights speak Romanian, they also think and operate in various other languages, such as Romani, German, French, Italian, and American English.This book facilitates scholars and students to discover contemporary issues related to Romanian society as presented heavily from a feminine angle and to reveal intersectional issues as seen and applied to dramatic characters in a post-communist country from some authors who experienced communism firsthand. The book is also an invitation to reinvent how we teach dramatic literature by offering 20 interactive, exploratory activities.

In this collection, the author focuses on several contemporary Romanian female playwrights with residencies in Europe and the U.S.: Alexandra Badea, Carmen-Francesca Banciu, Alexa Băcanu, Ana Sorina Corneanu, Mihaela Drăgan, Dr. Cătălina Florina Florescu, Dr. Mihaela Michailov, Dr. Domnica Rădulescu, Saviana Stănescu, and Dr. Elise Wilk.In their bold works, written by female playwrights who are academics, activists, and performers, we are invited to discover variations in the modus operandi of the dramatic language itself from metaphorical to matter-of-fact approaches. Furthermore, while all these playwrights speak Romanian, they also think and operate in various other languages, such as Romani, German, French, Italian, and American English.This book facilitates scholars and students to discover contemporary issues related to Romanian society as presented heavily from a feminine angle and to reveal intersectional issues as seen and applied to dramatic characters in a post-communist country from some authors who experienced communism firsthand. The book is also an invitation to reinvent how we teach dramatic literature by offering 20 interactive, exploratory activities.

Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood presents the accounts of mothers who have suffered a major physical and/or psychically traumatic accident, and, as a consequence, their minds and bodies have been drastically changed. They live under the pressure of having discovered the alter ego of their traumatized personality, and now, distressed, cannot embrace their unconditional maternal love. Instead, they enter into a phase where they face the challenge of revealing who they are as persons before accepting or motivating themselves as mothers. The mothers presented in this volume also seem to have another thing in common: their transnational, fluid, female identity as they enter into an imaginary dialog that transcends geographical and temporal perspectives on womanhood and motherhood. This collection introduces and analyzes recurrent words that define a woman's body and mind today: fear, competition, motherhood and career rights, selfishness, ambition, destruction, distance, and identity. By using unprecedented comparative critical approaches such as phenomenological, medical, feminist, and re-enchantinent theories, and by analyzing works from literature, cinema, and visual arts, this collection attempts to reestablish and redefine a canonical concept with the intention to revitalize an otherwise taken-for-granted image and role.

Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration – Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one’s own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is everybody’s story, and without migration, we could not evolve our human race.

Borderless Thalia: A Multilingual, Pandemic Comic Collection was born out of a need to use comedy as a tool to cope with, at the time, the vast unknown of COVID-19 and to show how, through writing in English as well as in translation, we can be together, we can laugh, and we can show solidarity, thus moving forward. There is the famous Phoenix myth, the bird that manages to get reborn out form its own ashes, and afterwards stay indestructible. In a similar vein, yet in a much more refined gesture, the female playwrights selected for this volume proved that writing remains a therapeutical method, and a way to connect with one another and face any difficulty that may appear insurmountable in the moment. It is women of all kinds who carry the weight of the world, and not Atlas, and yet, these women teach us that we need to make time to see what is inside and around us. This collection includes the following playwrights: Christine Benvenuto, Barbara Blatner, Sarah Congress, Connie Dinkler, Selma Dragos, Tjasa Ferme, Catalina Florina Florescu, Avery Grace, Jinna Kim, Elena Naskova, Joyce Newman Scott, Nella Ohayon, Cindi Sansone-Braff, Ellis Stump, Laurie Tanner, and Otilia Vieru-Baraboi.Dr. Catalina Florina Florescu holds a PhD in Medical humanities from Purdue University, teaches at Pace University in New York, curates the new play festival at Jersey City Theater Center, and she is a mother of a beautiful teen.