Jasmine Wang
(she/her/hers)
Jasmine is a third year double majoring in English and Political & Social Thought. She is interested in studying restorative literature, the reciprocal cycle of intergenerational trauma, and the rediscovery of pleasure following sexual trauma. In her free time, she is obsessed with baking for her friends, fueling her Tetris addiction, tying bows in her hair, and wearing platform shoes.
She feels an unsettling rumbling in her chest before she feels the tremor beneath her feet. She opens her face to the sky, which is now thick with billowing plumes of pearly smoke.
Our issue opens with Cheyenne Butler’s piece “What Happens in Vegas Should Stay in Vegas,” when the thin veil of adoration is trespassed.
Mary has lived many lives, as a journalist for People nagazine, a Georgetown University professor, a Discovery Channel documentarian, and a poetry anthologist, but I find her here today, as the living backbone of Iris—or more formally known as Iris Magazine’s program coordinator and editor.
This issue, we are telling the "Story of Iris," which is to say we are telling the story of the writers behind Iris. We paired our writers together to write pieces about each other, for sometimes the truest reflection of ourselves is the one refracted through someone else’s eye.
Dear Beloved Reader,
I am no stranger to the Unexpected. In fact, we are now old friends, but we weren’t always so friendly.
Dear Beloved Reader,
As the semester draws to a close, I have not only been looking forward in anticipation of frightening finals and a relaxing release, but also backwards in reflection of a tumultuous yet thrilling semester.
Every year on my birthday, I write a letter addressed to myself a year from now. I click send (god bless the internet and pre-scheduled emails) and the next birthday, in reading all that I wished for myself, I am renewed with hope and visions of futurity—a gift from the past.
In the fifth grade, as leaves cascaded down into a shriveled crisp and as the autumnal air descended upon us, I begged my mother to be Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween.
Dear beloved reader,
Close your eyes.
Inhale. Exhale.
How do you imagine blindness?
Dear Beloved Reader,
I have a confession to make.
It’s a secret that I’ve been quietly harboring since high school graduation.
I was a band kid.
Most love stories begin with a hello, ours began with a ransacked lunchbox, a stolen spork, and a touch of pyromania.