Professor of American Studies, Professor of English

Overview

I am the author of the books Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation (Fordham UP, 2018) and Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (U of Texas Press, 2005; MLA Best Book Prize in Latina/o and Chicana/o Studies, 2006).

My current book projects include:

"The Thing With Feathers: A Novel" (Completed)

"The Music Inside You: Stories" (On Submission; title story in The Iowa Review spring 2020)

"Hammers & Home: A Life in Books" (title essay available at LatinxTalk.org)

"Desubicado: Writing In & Out of Place"

One of the essays I'm most proud of--"Of Hawks and Hands: A Remembrance"--came out in Huizache: The Magazine of a New America (#9; Fall 2022). It deals with my mom's dementia and death and Marie Howe's poem "What the Living Do." It's part of my in-progress essay collection "Hammers & Home: A Life in Books"

Through Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America's Writing For a Broken World series, I had the pleasure of talking with Edwidge Danticat and Jesmyn Ward on Nov 19, 2015 and Cristina Garcia and Dariel Suarez on April 18, 2019. 

On April 28, 2022, I had the privilege of talking with Valeria Luiselli about her new project "Echoes from the Borderlands." The event was part of the Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series.

My teaching interests include Latinx literature, creative non-fiction, contemporary fiction, and critical race studies. I have received teaching awards from the University of Texas, Penn State University, and Brown University.

My projects have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanites, the Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Mellon Foundations, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, and Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities.

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas