Speakers
Sarah Cortez
“Latinas Write Their Lives”Sarah Cortez is a poet, educator, editor, and law enforcement officer in Houston, Texas. Cortez is a multi-talented and dynamic writer who lives and writes boldly about her experiences in diverse communities. Her poetry collection received the PEN Texas Literacy Award in Poetry in 2000. She is the editor of Window Into my World: Latino Youth Write Their Lives and Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery. She is also a contributor to the recent volume, Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy Education, co-edited by Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva.
Sonia Gipson Rankin
“Using Our Foundation to Bridge the Gap: Black Women and the Quest for Equal Rights and Justice”
Sonia Gipson Rankin is a member of the New Mexico Bar Association and of the New Mexico Black Lawyers Association, where she serves as Secretary, as well as a Trustee and Vice-Chair for the Ralph J. Brunche Academy—a school-created to focus on the black and minority communities in Albuquerque. She has also spent several years teaching at the collegiate level, specifically at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IIA College, and the University of New Mexico. In 2008, Ms. Gipson Rankin coauthored the textbook Criminal Justice in New Mexico with Ericka Poindexter, Bill Kuehl, and Don Bullis. Currently, she is a Lecturer at the University of New Mexico in Africana Studies where she teaches courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Women, and Black Liberation and Religion.
Elizabeth Archuleta
“Our Stories Are Our Theories: Kinship Relations and Indigenous Women's Intellectual Traditions"
Elizabeth Archuleta started working with Arizona State University's Women & Gender Studies last year after having been with the University of New Mexico's English Department since 2002. She specializes in Indigenous women's narratives and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Grandmothers' Voices Hold Me: Articulating Indigenous Feminisms." Archuleta has published several articles in American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literature, Wicazo Sa Review, and Indigenous People's Journal of Law, Culture, and Resistance, as well as an award winning article in the New Mexico Historical Review. She is a contributor for the recently published collection, National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (U of Nebraska Press) and for an upcoming collection called Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance, Belonging, and Commitment (U of New Mexico Press).
Marisa Clark
“Teacher, Student, Character, Queer: On Being Out in the Classroom”
A native of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Marisa P. Clark received her doctorate in English/fiction writing from Georgia State University. As a graduate student she won the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival awards in both fiction and nonfiction and she has had stories, poems and essays published in a number of literary journals. Currently, she is working on projects concerning her father’s recent illness and death from pancreatic cancer, weddings she has attended, and homophobia surrounding women’s boxing. A lecturer in the UNM English Department, Marisa teaches courses in creative nonfiction and fiction writing, freshman composition and expository writing, and occasionally literature.
Deborah Weagel
“Women’s Writing: Power, Fragmentation, Metaphor”
Deborah Weagel was awarded distinction for her dissertation, “The Metaphor of the Quilt in Contemporary Asian Indian and American Indian Literature,” directed by Feroza Jussawalla at the University of New Mexico in 2006. Weagel will present selections from her new book, Women and Contemporary World Literature: Power, Fragmentation, and Metaphor (forthcoming Peter Lang), as the “Kick Off Work-In Progress” event for the WAC Civic Literacy Colloquia Series. She is guest editor for the journal Perspectives on South Asian Women’s Writing. South Asian Review 29.1 (forthcoming). Weagel’s essays have appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal and South Asian Review. She currently teaches at the Department of English at UNM as a part-time instructor.
Feroza Jussawalla
Feroza Jussawalla taught for twenty years at the University of Texas at El Paso before joining the faculty as Professor of English at UNM. Her Ph.D. in English and American Literature is from the University of Utah. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1985) and the poetry collection Chiffon Saris (2003), co -editor with Reed Way Dasenbrock of Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (1992), and editor of Conversations with V. S. Naipaul (1998).
