Keynote Speaker Dr. Jesus Montaño is a scholar of Latinx literatures and cultures, with a particular passion for children’s and young adult books that imagine better worlds—and help build them. His research explores how storytelling can be a form of resistance, healing, and transformation, especially young readers navigating complex identities, histories, and futures. His work focuses on Latinx children’s and young adult literature, where imagination engages resistance and books become blueprints for hope.

His second book, Young Latinx Shakespeares: Race, Justice, and Literary Appropriation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), explores how Latinx writers creatively rework Shakespeare to open up new cultural and literary spaces. These adaptations are radical acts of reimagining what literature can do and who it is for.

Katherine Gillen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), and several essays on race, gender, and economics in early modern drama and on Shakespeare appropriation. She is working on a monograph on Shakespeare’s racial classicism and co-ediing a collection on tradaptation. With Kathryn Vomero Santos and Adrianna M. Santos, she co-founded the Borderlands Shakepeare Colectiva, whose work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Texas, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Vanessa I. Corredera is interested in early modern drama, most especially in examining the afterlives of Shakespeare’s canon in modernity. Her scholarship and pedagogy focus most on Shakespeare in contemporary performance, adaptation and appropriation, and popular culture in both the U.S. and U.K, combining literary history and cultural studies to interrogate the race and gender work early modern drama advances both in the past and today.

She has served as a General Editor for Borrowers and Lenders and is currently a General Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. She is also a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. 

Levi Gore is Director and the current Artistic Director of the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival, where he leads the company’s mission to create bold, contemporary productions of classic works. He is currently directing Red Velvet for the West End Productions. Levi graduated from West Texas A&M University in 2012 and has since worked with companies including Austin Shakespeare, Georgia Shakespeare, Rosedale Shakespeare, and the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival. His directing work spans Shakespeare, modern classics, and contemporary plays. His recent directing credits include Silent Sky for Actors Studio 66, Constellations for The Vortex Theatre, and The Tempest and As You Like It for City Theatre Austin. Levi has also directed Lovers and Madmen: A Midsummer Night Festival for The Stage Austin.

Levi is also an actor with AEA, and he has appeared as Orlando in As You Like It, Henry VII in A Man For All Seasons, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Longaville & Costard in Love's Labour's Lost, Antonio in Twelfth Night, and David in The Rivals.

Levi is drawn to stories that illuminate human connection, ambition, and identity. His work blends respect for the text with imaginative staging, always aiming to make the classics accessible, emotionally resonant, and alive for contemporary audiences.

Performer, Artist, Director, Playwright, Angelica Pantoja is a recent graduate of West Texas A&M University with a Bachelor’s in Theatre Acting. She is a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Regional Award recipient and nominee and has many collegiate and local credits & awards from the Panhandle/West Texas Area

Pictured here with his son Oscar (right), Matthew Harrison is the Marsh associate professor of Shakespeare Studies at West Texas A&M. He has published on a variety of topics: Shakespeare and the contemporary world, early modern women writers, and video games.