Siobhan McPherson is a second year student of the class of 2022 from Long Island, New York. Her family raised her to value the arts and her creative pursuits were encouraged from a young age; she flourished in the visual arts, musical theater, choir, orchestra, and creative writing in her hometown’s small high school. At UVA, she has found her place in a loving family of thespians through First Year Players and was involved with their Fall 2019 production of ​Into the Woods​. Additionally, she has funneled her passion for all things loud, proud, and outrageous by performing with Voyeuristic Intention, UVA’s shadowcast for the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She rarely spends a second away from music, and sings constantly; you can usually catch her crooning as she tosses salads on the corner at Roots. She also expresses her love of music by DJing for WXTJ each week. In high school, she channeled her passion for writing through her school newspaper, but has felt an unprecedented freedom to pursue creative writing here at UVA. Since arriving here, she has felt the liberty to pursue poetry writing as a career, along with her other academic pursuits of environmental science and art history. She hopes to double major in environmental science and the area program for poetry writing. Siobhan’s poetry is invested in the idea that the waking world is often stranger than our dreams are. Her writing is often surreal, but rather than deriving these images from dreams or imagination, they are mostly based on the everyday. She is intensely devoted to trying to describe a peculiar sense of alienation we all feel from time to time. In other words, her writing is interested in the bounds of the self and how these borders are both reinforced and eroded by the strange paradox of isolation and social connection we find ourselves in today. Siobhan is grateful to have become a member of the Miller Arts community and is excited to expand upon her work with this encouragement and the newfound access to their resources.