Stephanie Marker
Stephanie Marker is an English instructor at The University of Alabama, where they serve as a co-founding faculty advisor for the student-run publishing house, Red Rook Press, housed in UA’s English department.
Their teaching areas and research interests include zines and experimental publishing, experimental fiction, short story theory, fiction craft, speculative fiction, world literature, African American literature, Southern literature, and American literature.
Their creative work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, and The Rupture (formerly The Collagist), among others.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas, where is she Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies. She is at work on her first monograph, entitled Black Aliens: Navigating Narrative Spacetime in Afrodiasporic Speculative Fiction. Black Aliens offers a contemporary critical framework for analyzing blackness, immigrations, alienness/alienation, temporalities, and nationalisms within broader matrices of slavery, (de)colonization and nation-building, and the politics of embodiment. The monograph explores Black aliens as literary figure and as metaphor in what I call Afrodiasporic speculative fiction, or fiction that addresses what Rasheedah Phillips terms “the first great Indigenous African Space-Time Splintering” which was inaugurated by the transatlantic slave trade, and continues to take on new forms in our present moment. To that end, Black Aliens traces the emergence of the Black alien in Afrodiasporic speculative fiction through figure of the enslaved and their descendants, undocumented workers, refugees, extraterrestrial aliens, immortals, and interstellar settlers.
She is the co-editor of five volumes: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (UP of Mississippi 2022), BOOM! Splat!: Comics and Violence (UP of Mississippi 2024), Afrosouthernfuturism (in progress), and Transgressive Teaching and Learning: Critical Essays on bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy (in progress).
Her scholarly work appears or is forthcoming in south: a scholarly journal, Mississippi Quarterly, The Cambridge Companion to New Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP 2022), The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel (forthcoming, Cambridge UP), A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge UP 2021), Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (Routledge 2022), and Small Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU P, 2017), among other places. Her work on comics has appeared in The Comics Journal, Snapshots: Teaching Love and Rockets (forthcoming 2023), Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (U of Mississippi P, 2017), and The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (U of Mississippi P 2010). She is the illustrator for Educating for Social Justice: Field Notes from Rural Communities (Brill/Sense 2020).
Her areas of teaching and research include Africana Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Literary Theory, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comics Studies, Southern Studies, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Literary Studies. She is currently serving as Member at Large for the William Faulkner Society, and is the First Vice President of the Comics Studies Society. Before joining UNT, she spent nine years at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Kaeli Nieves-Whitmore
Kaeli Nieves-Whitmore is a PhD Candidate at The University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences with a concentration in Library and Information Science. She received her Bachelor’s in History from The University of Iowa, and her Master’s in Library and Information Science, and Graduate Book Arts Certificate from The University of Iowa School of Library Science and Center for The Book.
Her research interests include, library anxiety, academic library building design, information literacy, library pedagogy, library assessment, diversity and inclusion in libraries, and the history of the book.
Her doctoral research focuses on the relationship between physical library spaces and library anxiety, with particular attention paid to the embodied experiences of library spaces and the emotional and physiological effects of physical library spaces on students’ use of academic libraries. Her first publication on the topic is now available in portal: Libraries and the Academy and can be accessed at doi.org/10.1353/pla.2021.0027.