Luminosity

Afra Ashraf
medium: poetry

​I created this poem from the working draft of my upcoming paper on brown dwarf variability (Ashraf et al. 2021) by using found poetry, a method of poetry that relies on redaction to place additional emphasis on the parts of the text that are remaining after the process of redaction. I hosted a found poetry workshop through the Asian American Writers Workshop, where writers created found poetry based off of this paper draft. I was inspired by what other artists chose to preserve while reading my paper, and this prompted me to create my own found poetry from my work.

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​Afra Ashraf is an astrophysicist interested in the interdisciplinary connections between science and art. Her areas of scientific expertise include substellar objects, spectroscopy, atmospheric characterization of exoplanets and brown dwarfs, and the use of machine learning for astrophysics. She is interested in incorporating artistic methods into her work to expand the audience of her science beyond those within the field of astronomy and to explore creativity and subjectivity within science.