UMD Professor’s Poem Becomes Play-Opera About Women in Prison

For someone who had spent her life immersed in language and learning, it was the image of a woman being strip-searched and shackled multiple times in one day just to attend a college class that stayed with Fatemeh Keshavarz.

The University of Maryland professor was struck by the January 2023 story of Alexa Garza in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Incarcerated in a maximum-security prison in Texas, she had to be transported to a men’s facility to attend courses unavailable at her own prison. It took Garza nearly her entire 20-year sentence to complete a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

“Despite all of that, she did it,” said Keshavarz, a poet, professor of Persian and director of UMD’s Roshan Institute for Persian Studies. “I couldn’t stop thinking about her.”

That impulse became a 10-page extended poem Keshavarz wrote over the next five months—an attempt, she said, to give voice to incarcerated women beyond their crimes and to close the distance between “us” and “them.”

The work will soon reach audiences in a new form: a stage piece titled “For Women Serving Time,” created in collaboration with pianist and composer Adrienne Torf. Blending theater and opera, it opens March 20 at Dupont Underground in Washington, D.C., before traveling to Baltimore in April.

Keshavarz, who started writing poetry at age 8 while growing up in Shiraz, Iran, first shared the poem over lunch with Timothy Nelson, artistic director of Washington’s INseries Opera. The two had collaborated in 2019 on a project involving the Sufi mystic Rumi’s poetry, an area of Keshavarz’s scholarship.

“Right away I thought ‘there’s a piece of theatre here,’” he said. “There was a theatricality to the poem that I really felt would allow for a musical approach.”  

Nelson introduced the poem to Torf, who got to work dramatizing and composing. The resulting hourlong piece features six performers portraying incarcerated women, a warden and a prison administrator. The administrator represents society and presses questions about punishment and accountability. Torf plays piano throughout the piece. 

Rather than follow a traditional operatic arc, the work unfolds in a series of repeated days inside a correctional facility, as a way to explore the women’s hopes, dreams, fears and daily experiences. It blends recitation and song, weaving threads of Fauré’s “Requiem” with jazz inflections and moments of stark a cappella singing. 

“It’s introspective,” said Louisa Waycott M.M. ’16, who performs the role of “G,” a serial killer. “You meet these women, you learn what led them here, and then you’re left with your own thoughts. It tests the listener to ask: What do we want the jail system to be? Does that change based on what someone has done?”

For Keshavarz, seeing her words transformed into music has been a new and gratifying experience. The opera, she said, reflects the way she has long understood poetry: as something rooted in daily life and capable of reshaping how we see one another. It is a belief that has shaped her work as both a scholar and teacher.

In “For Women Serving Time,” that means restoring complexity to a population often reduced to the worst thing they have done. 

“I felt If I didn’t talk about these women, they would be silenced,” she said. “They would remain invisible.”