Roame jasmin

History

Roame began writing when she was 6 years old. She was a scrawny punk kid. Eyes that looked like they’d been pierced. She lived in books  – old books, holy books, stolen books. At age 12, she started writing plays and would later join a playwriting club at school. She wrote monologues resonant with hallucinations of hymns. The ruthless conviction of John Proctor in The Crucible. She wrote with Homer’s sword; clashing with centurions, anxious gods and flying horses. This would turn into fiery prologues, the debate team in high school, sermonic poems reminiscent of an Algerian fishermen or Irish union worker.

Down the line, Roame scrounged together a few bucks to self-publish her first collection of poems, The Ghetto of Eden. The book took off. Mostly in church parking lots, strip clubs, dive bars, smoke shops. Good people, but she left the scene penniless. It was like harnessing wind with a fishnet. By age 20, Roame fell into tough times. Evicted, she lived out of the closet in a queer exile that brought her closer to gratitude. Living on the edges of Brooklyn and Queens, she was marinated in the sublime realms of religion and philosophy. She spent daylight on the fire escape reading Vilenkin’s theory of nothingness. Glissant’s opacity. Berlant’s cruel optimism. Einstein’s infinity. All of which had a lasting impact.

Roame was torn between two rival worlds One world was the academic mill, where she churned out critical theory papers and presentations as a Mellon Mays fellow (Princeton, Emory, UCLA, Rice). The other half was in the wild cursing the sport of study. Reeking of Pessoa, Sichuan peppers and sardonic rants on capitalism. At night, she’d stumble through the dark searching for loose ends of those stories she’d long abandoned; fragments of her childish past. She spent the night touring this splintered world. When the sun came galloping back up, she stuffed the stories in a drawer and gave her eyes to the sport of theory. Around 2019, she graduated from NYU magna cum laude with a Masters in Experimental Humanities. After graduation, she began lecturing on a collegiate level.

While living in Portland, Oregon, she began a philosophy lecture series at Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland State University. After some time and a brief stint in Cincinnati, Roame left the U.S. for Europe. For the first time she was out her country, captured at last by something else. While standing on the Baltic Ocean, watching a murmur of black birds cascade through a pink wintry sky, she began penning the words to her forthcoming debut novel, The Curious Exploits of Paulie Sue (Spring, 2027).

Today, Roame’s in Montreal with her wife and their dog. A little out of step still. Tossed amongst the trees. Full of heavy metal. Watching the earth haul the clouds across a puddle.

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