Degrees

2023, B.A. Gender Studies / English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bio

X. (she/her) is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is primarily interested in the construction of racialized queer identities in performance spaces, especially the American ballroom and drag scenes, as they feature in documentary, literature, and television. She is also interested in viewing HIV as a performing subject in AIDS-era American literature. Outside of academia, X. enjoys being a part-time drag queen, discussing communist politics, and writing poetry about her Xicana queerness.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2023, MA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

2022, BA English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Bio

Rene Marzuk is interested in exploring continuities across languages and cultures. He is particularly intrigued by literary articulations of marginalized identities and by literary instances of emergence, widely defined. He is drawn to intertextual approaches that reveal the production of knowledge as a collective endeavor spanning times, cultures, and disciplines.

Awards

William Neal Reynolds Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2013, AS in Fashion Management, Bay State College

2019, BS in Fashion Merchandising & Management, Southern New Hampshire University

Bio

Afro-Caribbean-American writer Dailihana Alfonseca is currently working on her Masters in Health Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her concentration in Literature, Medicine, and Culture continues to amplify marginalized perspectives through her writing and research of the Im/Migrant experiences within America and of the colonial impacts of the past.
In working with what Zora Neale Hurston called “Literary Science,” and what W.E.B. Dubois coined as “Double Consciousness,” her writing marries creative works, archival research, and medical analysis to convey tangible bridges of experiential knowledge. She does this in hopes of expanding the scope of knowledge available to historically under-served communities.

Her poetry has previously appeared in The Bangalore Review, The Global Gazette, and her fiction has appeared in Driftwood Press Literary Magazine.
In 2023 she won a Robert J. Dau Prize and was named an emerging writer to watch by PEN America. Her short story, “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother,” was also nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize.

Publications:

Awards

2023 Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers by P.E.N. America

Degrees

2022, MA English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2016, BA Religious Studies, Wingate University

Bio

A North Carolina native, Joshua Cody Ward joined the program in Fall 2022. His field is Modern and Contemporary American literature broadly (1900-Present), specifically Literature of the American South, of the Appalachian South, and African American Literature. His research interests include the archive, textual studies, editorial scholarship, intertextuality, and the Novel. He is a Digital Content Coordinator for the Latina/o Studies Program, a Junior Coordinator for the Critical Speakers Series, the Graduate Lecture Series coordinator, and a Board Member (2023-2026) for the Thomas Wolfe Society. He is also on the committee for the 2024 Durham, NC conference for the Thomas Wolfe Society.

Publications:

• “Weird Object Relations, Ecology, and Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris.” In New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy: Encountering The Passenger and Stella Maris, edited by Jonathan Elmore and Rick Elmore. Forthcoming.
• “From Commas to Cosmos: The Pervading Influence of Thomas Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy.” The Thomas Wolfe Review. Forthcoming.
• “Publishing the Black Arts Movement: Editors, Anthologies, and Canonization.” South Atlantic Review. Forthcoming.
• [album] The Boron Heist. Ridin’ Rough. Mystery School Records, April 6 2019.
• “Light and Darkness, Sight and Blindness: Religious Knowledge in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.” Wingate Research Review, issue 8, Fall 2016, pp. 87-106.
• “Raison d’être.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 9.
• “On Testing.” Wingate University Counterpoint, Spring 2013, p. 23.

Awards

• Graduate Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022-Present, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• Emerging Scholar Award, Summer 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Southern Futures program.
• John R. Bittner Student Literary Prize, May 27^th 2023, Thomas Wolfe Society Conference.
• LSP Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill Latina/o Studies Program.
• Graduate Student Transportation Grant, Spring 2023, UNC Chapel Hill, Graduate School.
• Languages & Literatures Graduate Student Paper Award Recipient, February 23^rd 2023, 44^th Annual SWPACA Conference.
• 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award Recipient, November 12^th 2022, SAMLA 94.
• Travel Grant, Fall 2022, UNC Chapel Hill, English and Comparative Literature Department.
• The Julian D. Mason Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies, April 29^th 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Graduate Teaching Assistantship, Fall 2020-Spring 2022, UNC Charlotte, English Department.
• Wittliff Collections William Hill Research Award, 2021-2022, Texas State University, For archival research conducted July 2021 in the Cormac McCarthy Papers and Woolmer Collections.
• Anne Newman Graduate Student Travel Grant, Fall 2021, UNC Charlotte.
• Excellence in Philosophy Award, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• G. Byrns Coleman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies, April 24^th 2016, Wingate University, Religious Studies Department.
• University Honors, April 24^th, 2016, Wingate University.

Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2019, BA English Literature, University of Central Florida

Bio

Teaching Awards

Fall 2021 Latina/o Studies Graduate Teaching Affiliate Fellowship

Degrees

2018, MA English, Wake Forest University

2016, BA English, Drexel University

Bio

Krysten Voelkner is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her primary interests reside at the intersection of environmental humanities and contemporary Latinx literature. Recent publications of hers can be found in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, and Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which investigates the ways in which Latinx writers experiment with aesthetics of horror, dread, anxiety, and other ‘bad’ affects associated with the climate crisis. In this regard, she hopes to explore the affective ecologies of Latinx environmental literature and film as they offer ways of thinking within and beyond the Anthropocene.

Publications:

• “Vectors and Vermin: Gendered Violence and the Role of Insects in the Arthropoetics of Natalie Scenters-Zapico.” Chiricú Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2022.
• “Another Way of Seeing: Ecological Existentialism in Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’.” The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021.
• “Memory, Temporality, and Communal Realization: Reading the Nomadic Subject in Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2020.

Teaching Awards

• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (UNC Latina/o Studies Department), Spring 2022
• Erika Lindemann Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition in English 105 (UNC Department of English), Fall 2021.
• UNC Latina/o Studies Program Teaching Award (Fall 2020)

Awards

• UNC Department of English and Comparative Literature Early Stages Dissertation Fellowship, Summer 2022
• Nominee: David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies, 2021
• Ruth Rose Richardson Award for outstanding record in the first year of graduate study, (UNC Department of English), 2019-20
• H. Broadus Jones MA Student Award for Excellence in English (Wake Forest University Department of English), Spring 2018

Degrees

• 2017, BA Critical Studies in English Cultures, Literatures, and Film, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire
• 2017, BA Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire

Bio

emilio Jesús Taiveaho Peláez is a first-generation migrant and a PhD. student—in that order—through the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As both poet and scholar, their work engages the intersection of aesthetic experience and political discipline, blending critical, creative, and archival inquiry. Focusing on 20^th-century hemispheric experimental poetry, their dissertation (tentatively titled Ojos de Hierba: Walt Whitman’s Children & the American Lyric) probes the shared literary and philosophical history of the Américas through the lens of Neobaroque aesthetics, tracing dissonant and dissident relations in the life and work of figures such as Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Néstor Perlongher, and Cecilia Vicuña. emilio’s first book of poetry, landskips (words are a hard look), a latinX exploration of the sonics and optics of our contemporary American Landscapes, is forthcoming through The Concern Newsstand.

Publications:

• Taiveaho, Emilio Jesús. “Cartographies of Refuge, Music, and Survival: A Review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” Carolina Quarterly Online, 2018.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 8: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt. 1).” CQ Speaks Podcast, 25 February 2020.
• Dekeersgieter, Colin, and Emilio Taiveaho Peláez. “Episode 9: Langston Hughes in Chapel Hill (pt.2) ‘Christ in Alabama.’” CQ Speaks Podcast, 3 June 2020.

Teaching Awards

• Latina/o Studies Teaching Grant – 2020

Awards

• 2017 – Present: Mellon Fellow