Umme Al-wazedi is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Co-Program Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. Her research interest encompasses (Muslim) women writers of South Asia and South Asian Diaspora, Muslim feminism, and postcolonial disability studies. She has published in South Asian Review, South Asian History and Culture. She also coedited a special issue of South Asian Review titled Nation and Its Discontents with Madhurima Chakraborty, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her coedited book Urban Outcasts in South Asian Literature was published by Routledge in October 2016.
Marta Caminero-Santangelo is Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and a professor in the English Department at the University of Kansas. She teaches classes in US Latinx literatures and the literature of social justice. Her academic research in the field of twentieth and twenty-first-century US Latinx literary studies focuses on the conjunction between literature, group identity, and the ability to promote social change. She has published three books: The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive (Cornell UP, 1998); On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (UP Florida, 2007); and most recently, Documenting the Undocumented: Latina/o Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (UP Florida, 2016). She earned a PhD in English from the University of California, Irvine.
Ezra Cappell is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Inter-American Jewish Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Cappell received his BA in English from Queens College, his MA in creative writing from The City College, and his MPhil and PhD in English and American literature from New York University. Cappell teaches and publishes in the fields of twentieth century and contemporary Jewish American literature, and he is a recipient of the University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. Cappell has published numerous articles on American and Jewish American writing, and he is the author of the book: American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction and co-editor of the forthcoming book: Off the Derech: Post-Orthodox Jewish Writing. Cappell is a frequent lecturer on Jewish American culture and Holocaust writing, and he serves as Editor of the SUNY Press book series Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture.
Robert C. Evans is I. B. Young Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM). He earned his PhD from Princeton University in 1984. In 1982, he began teaching at AUM, where he has been named Distinguished Research Professor, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and University Alumni Professor. External awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Philosophical Society; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; and the Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries. He is the author or editor of roughly fifty books and of more than four hundred essays, including recent work on various American writers.
Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches postcolonial literatures. Her publications include: Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (coedited with Bonnie Zare); Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (coauthored with Amy Bhatt); and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (coedited with Amritjit Singh and Rahul K. Gairola). She is Vice President of South Asian Literature Association (SALA).
Asha Jeffers is Faculty Fellow at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research focuses on literature about the children of immigrants, “the second generation,” across national and ethnic lines, with a particular interest in how these texts represent coming of age, spirituality and myth, and intergenerational relationships. Her article “Means of Escape, Means of Invention: Hindu Figures and Black Pop Culture in Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy” was published in South Asian Review 36.3, and her article “Unstable Indianness: Double Diaspora in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge and M.G. Vassanji’s When She Was Queen” appeared in South Asian Review 37.1. Her short story “The Scar” has been published in The Puritan magazine’s issue 30.
Cynthia A. Leenerts is Associate Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. She teaches British and postcolonial literatures, as well as courses on the graphic novel, literary criticism, and linguistics. In addition to other publications, she coedited (with Lopa Basu) Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and (with George Bozzini) Literature Without Borders: International Literature in English for Student Writers (Prentice-Hall, 2001). An avid student of Chinese language, literature, and literary criticism, she is currently reinventing Literature Without Borders for students in China, as well as doing preliminary work (with Hema Chari) on Tagore’s travel writings, and she serves on the editorial board of South Asian Review.
R. Joseph Rodríguez is the author of Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites, Teaching Culturally Sustaining and Inclusive Young Adult Literature: Critical Perspectives and Conversations, and several journal articles. He has taught English and Spanish language arts in public schools, community colleges, and universities. His areas of research include children’s and young adult literatures, language acquisition, and socially responsible biliteracies. Joseph serves as coeditor of English Journal, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Marion Christina Rohrleitner is Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at El Paso, where she researches and teaches contemporary American literature with a focus on Chicanx, Latinx, and Caribbean diasporic fiction and a special interest in historical fiction through the lenses of affect and queer theory. She is coeditor of Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation (Lexington Books, 2013), and her scholarship has appeared in, for example, American Quarterly, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Gender & Society, Latino Studies, Melus, Symbolism, and The European Journal of American Studies. Her current book project, Transnational Latinidades, explores the production, translation, and marketing of Latinx fiction outside of the United States.
Te-hsing Shan is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Besides journal articles and book chapters in Chinese and English, his publications include Inscriptions and Representations: Chinese American Literary and Cultural Criticism, Transgressions and Innovations: Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies, and Edward W. Said in Taiwan. To his credit are three collections of interviews, including In the Company of the Wise: Conversations with Asian American Writers and Critics. He has also translated nearly twenty books from English into Chinese, including The Challenge of the American Dream, Representations of the Intellectual, and Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. His research areas are comparative literature, Asian American literature, and cultural studies.
Mejdulene B. Shomali is a Palestinian American poet and Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work centers on queerness, femininity, Palestine, and transnational Arab culture. Her scholarship can be read or is forthcoming in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Social Justice. Creative work can be read or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Tinderbox, Diode, The Pinch Literary Journal, Mizna, and The Feminist Wire.
Brian Yothers is the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass (2016), Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville’s Career (2015), Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author (2011), and The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876 (2007). He is coeditor, with Jonathan A. Cook, of Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion (2017); editor of Critical Insights: Billy Budd, Sailor (2017); and coeditor, with Harold K. Bush, of Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2018). He is associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies; coeditor of the interdisciplinary journal Journeys; editor of the Camden House Press series Literary Criticism in Perspective; associate editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online; and coeditor, with Wyn Kelley, of the Moby-Dick/Travel section of the Melville Electronic Library. He was a 2014 winner of the University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.