Alyiah Gonzales

Alyiah Gonzales (they/them)is dedicated tothe queer, coalitional, and transformative possibilities of literature written by, for, and about Black womxn.Alyiahlocates their research interests in literary fiction that depicts enduring and resilient relationships between Black womxn characters, with particular emphasis on texts and authors thatreimagine the constructions and possibilities of community in their representation of nonheteronormative relationships and queer belonging among Black womxn.

Miranda Castro

Miranda Castro

India Sada Hackle

India Sada (she/her), native to Cincinnati, is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate and First-Year Writing Seminar instructor. Her current research follows the movements of traditional religious beliefs (such as the Kalunga line, cross, and cosmology) from Africa’s Congolese to South Carolina’s Gullah. At the nucleus of her coming thesis is the embodiment, memory of, and communion with water. She seeks to braid Audre Lorde’s term biomythography into her poetry and other inventions. Her writing…

Angelina Campos

Angelina Campos received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Writing from the University of California, San Diego. While at University of California San Diego, she participated in the Ronald E. McNair program where she researched Communists, Socialists and leftists in American children's literature. In her present research Angelina wishes to explore other forms of storytelling such as oral histories and pictographs and hieroglyphic texts specifically in Latin American society. This includes…

Courtney Michelle

Courtney is a writer from Northern California. Her work can be found in The Georgia Review, The Masters Review, Meridian, and elsewhere.

Rogelio Juárez

Rogelio Juárez is a fiction writer from Phoenix, Arizona, a VONA/Voices of Our Nation alum. His writing can be found in J Journal: New Writing on Justice, The James Franco Review, and Zócalo Public Square.

John Anspach

Oona Cullen

Oona Blood Cullen (B.A., Bard College; M.A., Cornell University) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literatures in English, with graduate minors in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Media Studies. Her current research focuses on contemporary North American, British and Irish literature, performing and media art, centering on the material, formal, and narrative valences and entanglements of embodiment and identity. She is a passionate teacher, and the recipient of the 2023 Gitner TA Award and the 2024-5 Shin Yong-Jin Graduate Fellowship for excellence in scholarship and teaching. Her article “Black Queer Cosmologies, Sonic Geographies, and Embodied Entanglement in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays” was the 2023 recipient of the Marvin Carlson Essay Award and featured in the December 2024 edition of Modern Drama.

Elizabeth Violette

Betsye is an Education Coordinator for the Cornell Prison Education Program and has taught college courses in Literature, Writing, and History both inside and outside prison classrooms. Her academic interests lie in “bad girl” behaviors, trash culture, how madness and failure are constructed, and writing in marginal spaces.

Mackenzie Berry

Mackenzie Berry is from Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has been published in Vinyl, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart, and Blood Orange Review, among others. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Program and Goldsmiths, University of London through a Marcus L. Urann Graduate Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection is Slack Tongue City.

Margaux Delaney

Margaux Delaney is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English. Her research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry. Her dissertation project draws on lyric theory, feminist criticism, and early modern critical race studies to read complaint poetry of the 1590s and first decades of the seventeenth centuryfor how it indexes and shapes early modern ideas of empire, race, and print authorship through the figure of the writing woman.

Mackenzie Schubert Polonyi Donnelly

Mackenzie Schubert Polonyi Donnelly is a Pushcart-Prize-nominated diasporic Hungarian poet and the author ofPOST-VOLCANIC FOLK TALES, a National Poetry Series 2023 winner, forthcoming by Akashic Books (2024). Her published work may be found or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Palette Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tupelo Press, Quarterly West, where she was a finalist for their 2022 Poetry Contest, and elsewhere; furthermore, she was A Public Space 2023 Writing Fellowship finalist. Mackenzie is a Cornell University 2022 MFA Poetry Graduate, Lecturer, and 2021 Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize winner.

Michael Lee

Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer and organizer. Michael is the author of The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019), and has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar, his poetry has appeared in Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2018 among others.

Farah Bakaari

Taylor Pryor

Taylor Janeen Pryor is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English, with graduate minors in Media Studies and Asian American Studies. Her work explores the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender in various forms of media. She is particularly interested in representations of identity and the manner in which they inform–and are informed by–socio-political realities. She is an ardent instructor, and two of her students were recipients of the Fall 2022 English 2880 Expository Writing Prize. Her scholarly work has been published in Prose Studies, and her videogame reviews can be found at gamecritics.com.

Riché Richardson

Riché Richardson, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, isaprofessor of African American literature and chair in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, whose faculty she joined in 2008. Her other areas of interest include American literature, American studies,black feminism, gender studies, Southern studies, cultural studies and critical theory. She was the 2019-20 Olive B. O’Connor Visiting Distinguished Chair in English at Colgate University. She graduated from Spelman College with a major in English and minors in philosophy and women’s studies in 1993. She received her doctorate in American Literature from the English Department at Duke University in 1998, along with a Certificate in African and African American Studies. She taught at the University of California, Davis from 1998-2008.In 2001, she received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and spent the 2001-02 year in residence at the Johns Hopkins University. She is a 2002 recipient of a Davis Humanities Institute Fellowship.She served as the UC Davis campus representative for the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) from 2006-08 and received an award from the university for Diversity and the Principles of Community in 2008. She is the 2016 recipient of the “Educator of the Year Award” from St. Jude Alumni & Friends, and in 2023, was among alumni featured on the first poster released in Montgomery artist Bill Ford’s series of drawings of important people and events in the history and legacy of The City of St. Jude. She is a 2017 Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellow with the Op-Ed Project whose pieces have appeared intheNew York Times,Public BooksandHuff Post. Her interviews have been highlighted in news media such as NBC’sThe Today ShowandNightly News,CNN,Al Jazeera’sNewshour,On Point Talk,Let’s Go There, theAP, NPR, theNew York Times, Time,theBBC,theWashington Post, the Boston Globe, Forbes, Business Insider, ElleandFrench Elle, Good Housekeeping, Town and County, Insider,USA Today, Essence,theOprah Magazine, Black Press USA's Let It Be Known,theMontgomery AdvertiserandWSFA TV News.She served as the educator and collaborated withTED–Edon the short animation “The Hidden Life of Rosa Parks”(2020). In 2017,Course Heroselected Richardson's Beyoncé Nation course as #8 among 14 Fun College Classes You Wish You Could Take. In 2021, Richardson was selected as #8 onDismantlemagazine's list of 8 Thinkers Who Influenced (How We Understand) Black History, for being a groundbreaking,brilliant scholar who does beautifully interdisciplinary work, as well as for her pivotal contributions to dialogues in the media advocating for the removal of the Aunt Jemima stereotype, which PepsiCo dropped in 2020 in the wake of the loss of George Floyd.

Jehan L. Roberson

Jehan L. Roberson is a writer, educator, and artist using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary scholarship and art practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s research takes the early 20th century proliferation of Black literary movements as its genesis. She explores transnational Black allegiances and solidary between the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and Negrismo and their concerted effort to map Blackness into the global memory in ways that disrupt colonial…

Shacoya Kidwell

Shacoya Kidwell’s research interests are a product of her fascination with African diasporic storytelling and its contributions to the study of literature as cultural manifestations. Kidwell began studying literature as cultural manifestations during her Fulbright research grant in Trinidad and Tobago where she conducted interviews across the twin-island nation to examine the function of art in communicating the ideological structures of a society. Kidwell plans to continue investigating Black literature as cultural manifestations but through a more specific lens that explores the relationship between adverse atmospheric conditions and oppressive ideologies.

Banseok Heo

Lars Johnson

Lars Johnson studies the lineagesand linkages between medieval literature and neomedieval fantasy. He is particularly interested in exploring how cultures and constructions of gender, sexuality, and spirituality translate from the medieval period into the contemporary fantastical imagination.

Laura Caicedo

Laura Caicedo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, with an emphasis on Latinx literature and culture, women of color feminism, and queer of color critique. Their dissertation, tentatively titled Memory’s Home; Spatiotemporal Imaginaries in Latinx Literature, examines the function of memory and home as concepts within Latinx literature, while also using them as lenses to analyze the narratives crafted around different Latin American countries and immigrant groups. In their research, Laura considers how contemporary Colombian, Caribbean, and Latinx novelists take memory seriously as a vehicle through which to establish counternarratives that are often in tension with national and institutional forms of remembrance. The testimonials that operate as situated forms of memory then shape our understanding of home as both a concept and a practice. Throughout their dissertation, Laura looks to Colombia as a case study in the use of home and memory across national histories, archives, and literature to give insight into the practices which Latinx writers and artists utilize to craft imaginaries not solely beholden to the narratives of U.S. and Latin American relations. Their work has been published in the Latin American Literary Review.

Chijioke Onah

Chijioke K. Onah is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literatures in English Department, at Cornell University. He specializes in African and African Diaspora Literature, Anglophone Postcolonial Literature, and Environmental Humanities. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Combined English and History at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. For his Masters degree, he studied at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, with an Erasmus-funded exchange at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Before coming to Cornell in 2020, he spent a year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bonnie Chung

Bonnie Yonbom Chung is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English, completing her dissertation, The Asian Diaspora’s Polyphonic Archive: Articulating the Islands of East Asia. She was awarded the Zhu Fellowship in the Humanities for Academic Year 2024–25 by the College of Arts & Sciences, and her research has been supported by the Cornell Library, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, American Studies Program, and the East Asia Program.

Masha Raskolnikov

After receiving her BA from the interdisciplinary College of Letters at Wesleyan University, Masha Raskolnikov went on to earn her MA and PhD at UC Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric; at the time she arrived at Cornell, she had never actually been, officially, a member of an English Department, but she finds herself quite comfortable in this one. She is primarily interested in critical theory as a project of unmaking “common sense,” and in working with medieval literature as a means of doing so; she is also interested in feminist, lesbian, gay and transgender/transsexual studies. She is the author of Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021) and Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory (Ohio State University Press, 2009).

Huimin Hao