Samuel Aftel (PhD) received his AB in History from Princeton University in 2020 and, just recently, his MA in English at the University of Kentucky. His MA thesis examined queer spatiality and relationality in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. More broadly, Sam’s research interests include queer theory, postcolonialism, affect theory, Marxism, and twentieth-century British and American literature. Before graduate school, Sam served as a teaching fellow for AmeriCorps in a Newark, NJ high school. There, he taught English language arts to ninth-grade students.
JK Anowe (MFA+MA – Poetry) currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at The Nation, as well as Poetry Editor at Sycamore Review. He is an Igbo-born poet, and recently completed his MFA in creative writing at Purdue University. His poems interrogate the existential, absurdist, and autobiographical landscapes of the psyche, especially as these relate to memory, mental illness, and such externals as the body, family, faith, art, and country. Anowe’s work has appeared in Bakwa Magazine, THE SHORE, Glass Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, Agbowo, 20.35 Africa, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Sky Raining Fists (Madhouse Press, 2019) and The Ikemefuna Tributaries (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016). Anowe is currently working on his debut collection of poems.
Dawn Angelicca Barcelona (MFA+MA – Poetry) is a Filipina-American writer originally from New Jersey. She is an alumna of The Fulbright Program to South Korea (2014-2016), Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. She serves as the Acting Poetry Editor for Epiphany and volunteers as a speaker and support group facilitator for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In 2022, she was awarded the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry. Her work can be seen in 2River View, Epiphany, Trouble Maker Fire Starter, Red Ogre Review, Quiet Lightning, and Atlanta Review (forthcoming).
María José Cornejo Griffin (PhD) graduated from Universidad de Chile in 2020 with a BA in Literature and Linguistics and recently earned her MA in Literature at the same university. Her main interest is early modern English drama, especially Shakespeare and Marlowe. She focuses on the relations between drama, imperial expansion, and the advancements in cartography during the sixteenth century, topics that she hopes to continue during her PhD studies.
Jinjia (Grace) Hu (MA) received her BA in English and Psychology from Wesleyan University in 2023. Her research interests are in early modern literature, with a focus on the roles of women, including characters and audience, in Shakespeare’s plays. She is also a translator whose co-translated work One Hundred Favorite Folktales was published in 2021, and a creative writer.
Hannah Kadin’s (PhD, CLS) academic interests include speculative fiction, decolonial theory, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Black studies, utopia, critical theory, the avant-garde, music and arts subcultures (especially the Chicago experimental arts communities), and Marxism.
June Shou Li (PhD) just completed her undergraduate degree at University of Southern California, where she majored in English Literature with a minor in American Studies and Ethnicity. Her research centers liberatory affects, proleptic imaginaries, racial orientations, radical whimsies, and Fanonist pedagogies. Her broad-scope academic goals are to establish a pragmatic affective space under the Josephson Storm model of metamodernism that eludes the essentialist/reductionist and sociopaternalist tendencies of the “-studies”
Barbarita Polster’s (PhD, CLS) current work is framed by the study of code-switching/code-mixing, as applied to a range of research, including a semiotic code-switching when applied to visual and literary texts, a sociocultural code-switching in exchanges between people of different backgrounds, and an infrastructural code-switching in the anthropological study of the repurposing of public goods and services according to specific material needs. Understood as a historical bellwether, the cultural texts of Latin America and the Caribbean provide insight into contemporary questions of democracy, economy, and society; the region’s cultural producers operating at the intersection of all three of these modes point to the revolutionary potential of their time. Drawing theoretical connections between such concepts as Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and Glissant’s creolité, Polster proposes the application of this loose framework to undergird further research into the cultural production of this region.
Sof Sears (MFA+MA – Fiction) is a Mexican-American writer from Los Angeles who just earned their BA from UPenn, majoring in English and Gender Studies. They’re primarily interested in monster theory, feminist horror, and experimental fiction; their undergraduate thesis is about Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, trauma, and girlhood. Sof’s work has been published in Diagram, the Sonora Review, Waxwing, and others.
Emely Taveras (MFA+MA – Fiction) is a Dominican writer who started from zero in the United States after finishing high school in the Dominican Republic. She graduated from Borough of Manhattan Community College in 2020 with an AS in Early Childhood Education, and from the College of Staten Island in 2022 with a BA in English and a concentration in Creative Writing. She graduated with honors from CSI and made the dean’s list. Her honors project is a fiction excerpt of a larger story she is working on currently – a story about a high school student who has a stalker, a girl she had a sleepover with once when she was younger. Emely plans on exploring the psychological aspects of the girls’ obsession and developing their different personalities. She plans on making their story into a novel as her studies continue. She loves to read to her little brother and is learning to play the guitar.
Heather Williams (PhD) is a writer and editor who recently moved from Prague to Chicago. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and Five Dials under the pseudonym “Missouri Williams,” and her first novel, The Doloriad, was published in the US last year by FSG . She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in English Literature in 2013, and earned an MA in Medieval Literature and Renaissance Studies from University College London in 2021. Her research interests include animal studies, ecocriticism, literary theory, and medieval literature. She co-edits the film journal Another Gaze.
Han Xu (MA) is from China, and earlier in the year received his BA from Skidmore College with Honor in English. His undergraduate thesis theorized that Shakespeare portrays “metaphorical blackness” as a contagious disease. By incorporating existential writings from Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Fred Moten to diagnose the word “black” in Othello, Han pointed out that Othello’s physical blackness could be invisible in the context of Venetian politics, identifying the contradictory nature of the black subject and free subject as well as the letter “O” in Othello.