The Speakers
Keynote: Gabrielle Fuentes
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maryland. She is the author of the novel The Sleeping World and the short story collection Are We Ever Our Own, winner of the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize. She has received fellowships from Lighthouse Works, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, Millay Colony, Anderson Center, and the Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, One Story, The New England Review, The Common, and elsewhere.
Professor Fuentes will give a short talk and a reading from her latest book.
Moving between Cuba and the U.S., the stories in Are We Ever Our Own trace the paths of the women of the far-flung Armando Castell family.
Related but unknown to each other, these women are exiles, immigrants, artists, outsiders, all in search of a sense of self and belonging. The owner of a professional mourning service investigates the disappearance of her employees. On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a young woman breaks into the mansion where she was once a servant to help the rebels and free herself. A musician in a traveling troupe recounts the last day she saw her father.
Linked by theme and complex familial bonds, these stories shift across genres and forms to excavate the violence wreaked on women’s bodies and document the attempt to create something meaningful in the face of loss. They ask: who do we belong to? What, if anything, belongs to us?
Panel 1: Species & Ecologies
Ayda Donne is a first-year Ph.D. student in the English Department at New York University and the Chief Librarian for the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma. His research interests include Indigenous Studies, queer theory, archival studies, and Marxist theory. He received his MLIS from Syracuse University and is a member of the Osage Nation. He lives in New York City with his cat, Pandora.
Alexandra Franke recently completed her Master's Degree in English at Montclair State University. In her thesis, she examined the way contemporary ecopoetic criticism has shaped our perception of nonhuman animals; the thesis highlights the necessity of reframing these critical approaches in the interest of environmentalism. She wishes to continue researching ecocriticism and animal studies, particularly in the realm of contemporary fiction and poetry. She is currently an English teacher in New Jersey, and she is planning to pursue a Ph.D. in English.
Nikki Paige Gallant (she/her/hers) is an M.A. student in Temple’s 4+1 English program. Her research interests include queer theory and its many intersections with other disciplines, with special focus on archival studies. After her completion of the master’s program, Nikki hopes to pursue her PhD in English where she can continue to explore the multidimensionality of queer studies.
Mary Turkot is a fiction writer, poet, and current English M.A. student ('23) at Georgetown University, where she works as the Program Assistant for the Global Irish Studies Initiative. Her thesis research explores how narrative methods rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems can begin to bridge the divide between the human and non-human in contemporary American literature. Her poem, ""Brigantine, New Jersey""--an homage to her home state--won the 2021 Enid Dame Memorial Poetry Prize and was published online by the Academy of American Poets.
Panel 2: Colonial Binaries
Linda Hamrick is an MA student in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests are in Science Fiction, the medical humanities, and the posthumanities. She has previously presented at conferences on multispecies studies and patient narratives, and has been published in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. She is a Graduate Fellow of the Humanities Research Center’s Health Humanities Lab. She is currently exploring interactions between artificial intelligence and care.
Stacy Santini is a graduate student at Stony Brook University (SUNY). She will graduate this Spring with a Masters of Arts in English. Stacy is currently working on her thesis under the supervision of Dr. Justin Johnston. The focus of her research is based on Animal Studies (the Human/Non-human Divide), the Anthropocene, Queer Ecology, Biodiversity and Postcolonialism. She counts Dr. Kari Weil, Jacques Derrida, Frans De Waal, Julia Kristeva and Timothy Morton among her favorite theorists. Stacy is also an accomplished journalist and published poet; most recently her poem “Edie” was featured in Grabbing the Apple: An Anthology of New York Women Poets.
Nancy Tenorio-Spack is a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literature Program who specializes in Afro-Mexican Literature and Culture. Her dissertation debunks the myth that Afro-Mexican literature is a hybrid of Native American and Spanish European literature. Her work argues that Afro-Mexicans continue to hold onto West African storytelling practices through their folklore, poetry, and short stories and that Afro-Mexicans largely understand themselves as an Afro-diasporic people even though the Mexican government may claim that there are no Black people in Mexico.
Panel 3: Futures of the Field
Rasha Alkhateeb is a second-year PhD student in Literacy Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests are in reflexive writing identities, or how secondary preservice and inservice English teachers understand their identity as writers and teachers of writing.
E.C. Koch is a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, SUNY. His dissertation project seeks to plot the transition from postmodern to New Sincerity literature, concentrating on the work of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Don DeLillo, and Colson Whitehead.
Carolyn Robbins is a third year Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric & Political Culture track. She has a B.A. in Sociology and Philosophy from Baylor University (2018) and a M.A. in Communication with a focus on Rhetorical Studies and dual fellowship from the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core from Baylor University (2020). Carolyn’s research interests include mass incarceration, rhetorics of violence and care, and prison riots/uprisings.
Carina Shi earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature and an M.A. in TESOL Linguistics at Central Washington University. While at CWU, she taught in-person, hybrid, and online First-Year Composition courses as well as ESL courses to students of different language proficiency levels. Informed by the constructivist approach, her pedagogy and research focus on linguistics, post-process, metacognition, writing about writing, and rhetorical theory. She also served as a Peer Advisor in the Career Services Center, and worked with and volunteered for several international organizations that supported local Chinese and Chinese-American communities in western Washington. While in her doctoral program, Carina plans to focus her research on linguistic diversity, translingual and transcultural pedagogy and education for academic English and professional writing literacies.
Panel 4: Feminist Practice in Binary Systems
Gracyn Bird is a second year English MA student at Georgetown University. She graduated from Dickinson College in 2021 with a double major in English and Studio Art. When she's not reading, you'll find her drawing, crocheting, or exploring a museum.
Rose Botaish is an English literature M.A. student from Denver, Colorado. She graduated from Davidson College in 2020 with a major in English and minor in history. For the following two years, she worked as a college adviser at a nearby high school. Her research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, women’s life writing, travel writing, and gender and class performance. She is looking forward to exploring a new part of the country. In her free time she enjoys hiking, browsing used book stores, and spending time with friends, family, and pets.
Andreea Moise is a Master’s student in the British Cultural Studies programme at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She is currently working on her Master’s thesis, which analyses queer heterotopias in the works of Ali Smith and Olga Tokarczuk. Her interests are Modernist and contemporary female literature, women in translation, and queer and mad identities.
Alyssa Schwendener is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, where she is completing “It’s the 90s: Lesbian Chic in Context,” a dissertation that uses early-1990s lesbian visibility in mainstream U.S. media as a focal point for analysis of visibility politics and linear narratives of progress.
Panel 5: Queer Storytelling
Edward Daschle (he/him/his) is a student of fiction in the University of Maryland’s creative writing MFA program. His fiction also appears in Grim & Gilded, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Defunct, and OFIC Magazine and is forthcoming in After Dinner Conversations.
MacKenzie Guthrie, an M.A. literature student at UMD, focuses on the intersecting roles of place, space, (de)colonization, and mourning in literature from the Maghreb. Her work aims to highlight modes of resistance employed by poets in a variety of languages and consider how the Maghreb functions within a web of North-South and South-South relations with Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. In Fall 2023, she will be starting her PhD in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illiniois at Urbana-Champaign.
Brian K. Sateriale is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Literature & Criticism Program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he currently teaches as a Teaching Associate. He is the former President of the English Graduate Organization and winner of the 3-Minute Thesis Contest in 2020 after presenting his theory “Androgynism: Finding Balance in the Gender Binary”, which he is presenting at the GEO Conference.
Harshita Srivastava is a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) for Hindi language at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She completed her Master's in English Literature from St. Xavier's University, Kolkata (India) where she was a gold medallist. Her research interests include the Divine Feminine in Hinduism, Partition Literature, Language Teaching Technologies and Queer/Gender Studies. She writes poetry and has a volume of poetry published by Writers Workshop titled "Corona Diary, Before and Beyond".
Panel 6: Binaries in Media
Emma Bailey is an M.A. English Literature candidate studying Gothic and horror fiction and films. Her academic research explores the genre's cathartic power for mediating personal and collective trauma as well as its broader relationship with socio-political issues.
Alexandra Bowman is an English MA student at Georgetown University, expecting to graduate in May 2023. She is a freelance writer, focusing on film, TV, theater, and popular culture as a current Contributing Writer for Washington City Paper and DC Theater Arts and the Vice Chair of the National Press Club's Freelance Committee. Alex received her BA from Georgetown University with a double-major in English and Art in May 2022. Alex has had work published by BBC News, BBC Books, Puffin Books, the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service, the National Wildlife Federation, and Penguin Random House UK, and for the John Kerry and John Kasich-founded environmental organization World War Zero and The Lincoln Project as their political cartoonist.
Lindsey Palmer (she/hers) holds an MA in English from the University of Toronto and a BA from the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include writer activism in fiction through lenses of postcolonial theory, critical refugee studies, disability studies, and environmental and climate justice. She hopes to pursue a PhD in English examining the social impacts of environmental disaster, especially displacement, disablement, and death, as they appear in contemporary literature.
Panel 7: Critiquing Race(d) Binaries
Lauren Barker Bedsole will finish her Master’s degree in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in May 2023. She returned to academia to research race relations in the South and the way cultural theory and literary ethics influence the development of a region and a nation. She wants to report on how we got to the place of unrest we find ourselves today and what it means for future problem-solving in her beloved South, as well as its greater influence on the Global South.
Timmy Bridgeman (He/Him) is a scholar from Mississippi, whose work focuses on African American, LGBTQ studies, and their intersections. He received his Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Tougaloo College and is now a graduate student in the University of Maryland’s Ph.D in English program.
Temitope Ojedele is a first-year PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech. She is a Nigerian. She worked as an Academic in the Department of English, University of Lagos, Nigeria, prior to her PhD program. Her research interests are in feminist research methodologies, Black representations, rhetoric of identity construction, and popular culture and media.
Jorden E. Sanders is a Ph.D. student in the Literatures in English program at Rutgers University. She has earned a B.A. in English from Westminster College of Fulton, Missouri (2014) and an M.A. in English from Georgetown University (2016). Her work deploys Black Feminist frameworks to explore how early African American listening and print culture(s) disrupt assumed relationships between the book, the body, and the body politic.
Panel 8: Gaming Queerness & Disability
Hima Agarwal graduated in 2021 with a BA as well as a diploma in Advanced Research in English and Creative Writing from Ashoka University, after which she worked at Yoda Press as an Editorial Assistant. Her areas of interest include new media, board gaming, postcolonialism, digital humanities, contemporary literature, and translation. Her translation of Satya Vyas' Banaras Talkies has been published by Penguin Random House. When not working, she enjoys playing Dungeons & Dragons, reading popular science, or listening to music.
Jhanys Gardner is pursuing a Master's of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She is the co-creator of the school's Herbert Hirsch Genocide Library which is currently being put together and cataloged. Over the summer, Ms. Gardner will be pursuing the study of the history of the bardic tradition and orature. In addition to studying, Ms. Gardner works at the Office of the Dean for the Medical College of Virginia.
Noah Leiter is a grad student at Georgetown University studying English. Currently, Noah works at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown and writes features for RPGFan. His personal interests include queer theory, poetry, videogames, and watering his plants.