I teach, research, and write about contemporary Chicanx, Latinx, and African American literatures and print cultures. In the classroom and in my written work, I’m interested in who gets to tell their own story, and how, and when, and where. When writers imagine the U.S-Mexico border, who shapes and limits and unfetters that imagination? When writers who have died leave behind their unfinished work, who lives in the borderlands between living and dead to get their stories told? When we set out to document the undocumented, how many textual boundaries must we cross?

I am just as invested in helping my students to find their stories, however, wherever, and whenever those stories can serve them.

I am a proud graduate of Loyola University Chicago, Saint Xavier University, Seton Academy, and Saint Victor School in Calumet City, Illinois.

I am unbelievably privileged to do this work, and I am humbled by it every day.

My Work