“Blackboxing it”: A Poetic Min/d/ing the Gap of an Imposter Experience in Academia

Entering academia is a journey often fraught with many intense emotions, including shame, self-doubt, and fear. As such, this exploratory paper aims to expose and “dwell poetically” (James, 2009) on such feelings of novice academics, particularly the “imposter syndrome” experience, through an act of creative vulnerability and meaning making. Employing critical poetic inquiry, this paper offers and examines found poetry mined from a first year language and literacy education PhD student’s early academic writing. This poetry writing was done while simultaneously “minding the gap” existing in the “black box” of the PhD experience (Stanley, 2015), and framed through the lenses of the “personal” as “political” (Hanisch, 2000) and shame resilience theory (Brown, 2006), resulting in a poetry “cluster” (Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009) that “speaks shame” (Brown, 2006), composed with the aim to invite comfort, connection, and community, particularly with emerging scholars