About

I am a transmasculine identified queer PhD candidate in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow (2018-19). I was raised in the West Texas transnational border community of El Paso, TX, where I lived and taught for over 25 years. At Texas Tech, I study postcolonial comparative literature of West Africa, with a special focus on LGBTQIA  literature. I will defend my dissertation, titled “‘When We See It, We Shall Be Happy’: The Mbari Movement, Queer Emergence, and Counterpublics in the Production of African Literature,” in Spring 2019.

Mbari cut across the languages and also across the different arts. In Mbari we had the painters, the poets, the musicians and the actors. And once people came into that kind of community, they simply absorbed the principles…none of us at that time knew what a great thing we had; nor could we imagine what a terrible level of national disintegration we could reach.

-Wole Soyinka, Interview with Ulli Beier