Speakers

Bryan Betancur is an assistant professor of Spanish at Bronx Community College. His journalistic essays focus on issues related to Hispanic political identity and representation. His work has been published in Truthdig, Fair Observer, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as in scholarly and literary journals. 

Dr. Tina Escaja is a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. Tina Escaja joined the department in 1993 after earning her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published extensively on gender, technology and representation at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and their connections with the turn-of-the-millennium in Latin America and Spain. She has received international recognition as a creative artist and writer and is considered a pioneer in digital poetry in Spanish.

As a teacher and scholar, she has won the UVM’s Dean’s Lecture Award (2010), the Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award (2013), and the University Scholar Award (2015-16), and she has held the university’s highest rank of Distinguished Professor since 2019.

Her awards as poet include the International Poetry Prize "Dulce María Loynaz" for her collection Caída Libre, published in 2004, and the National Campoy-Ada Prize for children and youth literature in 2017. Her collection Manual destructivista/Destructivist Manual (2016), with English translations by Kristin Dykstra, was selected among top ten bilingual readings by Latino Poetry Review in 2017. Escaja’s creative work has been translated to multiple languages and her digital artefacts, including Robopoem@s, CAPTCHA Poem@, Emblem/as, and VeloCity, have been exhibited internationally. Some of her digital and literary works can be experienced at www.tinaescaja.com

Professor Escaja has served as Vice-President and President of the Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (Association of Gender and Sexualities Studies, formerly AILCFH), Vice-President and President of ALDEEU (Spanish Professionals in America), and President of Feministas Unidas, Inc.. She is currently Full Member of ANLE (Spanish Language Academy in the USA), Corresponding member for RAE (Real Academia Española), and Vice-President of Red Poppy, a non-profit dedicated to promoting Latin American poetry in the United States. She is the director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies program at UVM.

-bio from UVM faculty site

Ana I. Simón-Alegre is an Assistant Professor at Adelphi University (Garden City, New York). She earned her PhD from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, specializing in Iberian studies, popular culture, gender, and transatlantic studies. Professor Simon Alegre’s recent scholarship addresses issues of gender and sexuality of pre–Spanish Civil War women writers (1873–1936). She is the author of “Prensa, publicidad y masculinidades a través del periódico madrileño El Álbum Ibero-Americano (1890–1909)” (Historia y MEMORIA, 2021), “Algo más que palabras: Investigar y enseñar siguiendo la senda del lenguaje inclusivo,” in Por un lenguaje inclusivo: Reflexiones y estudios sobre estrategias no sexistas en la lengua española (Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, 2021), and “Face to face with Carmen de Burgos. The influence of other women writers on her career and her work,” in "Multiple Modernities. Carmen de Burgos: Author and Activist" (Routledge, 2017). She just edited a volume for Vernon Press titled: "Del salvaje siglo XIX al inestable siglo XX en las letras trasatlánticas: una mirada retrospectiva a través de hispanistas" (2022). She is the co-editor with Professor Lou Charnon-Deutsch (Stony Brook) of the volume: "Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature Activism, Sexuality, and the Otherness of the “Chicas Raras” (Routledge, 2022). She is also preparing two critical editions in English and Spanish of a number of works by the Spanish writer Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (Renacimiento and Vernon Press). 

-bio from LinkedIn