Appalachian State U
Bio
Melissa D. Birkhofer is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnic American Literature in the Department of English at Appalachian State University. Her current project co-authored with Paul M. Worley, Return to La Tama: Indigenous Women’s Testimonies in the Méndez Cancio Inquiry on the Interior of La Florida is under contract with the University of Kentucky Press's Appalachian Futures: Black, Queer, and Native Voices series. An article from this project, “She Said That Saint Augustine is Worth Nothing Compared to her Homeland: Teresa Martín and the Méndez Cancio Account of La Tama (1600),” will be published by the North Carolina Literary Review in 2023. She edited a special edition of Label Me Latina/o on the life and work of Judith Ortiz Cofer, and with Paul M. Worley, co-translated Miguel Rocha Vivas’s award-winning book Word Mingas: Oralitegraphies and Mirrored Visions on Oralitures and Indigenous Contemporary Literatures.
Paper
Teaching the Hyphen: Intersections of Native Nations and Latinx Literatures
This paper will introduce and conceptualize the course, Ethnic American Literatures: Intersections of Native Nations and Latinx Literatures, and give a brief overview of the student presentations.