School of Critical Studies

Born in Canada, Zetta Elliott moved to the US in 1994 to pursue her PhD in American Studies at NYU. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, including Show Us Your Papers, New Daughters of Africa, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South; her first young adult poetry collection, Say Her Name, was published by Little, Brown in 2020. Her most recent picture book, A Place Inside of Me, was named a 2021 Notable Poetry Book by the National Council of Teachers of English. Elliott is an advocate for greater diversity and equity in children's literature; her essays on race and publishing have appeared in The Huffington Post, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. She is the author of more than 30 books for young readers, including Dragons in a Bag, a middle grade fantasy novel, which was named an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book and has been nominated for Young Reader’s Choice Awards in seven states. Her plays have been staged in Cleveland, New York, and Chicago. She lives in Evanston, Ill. Learn more at zettaelliott.com.

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Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. Graywolf Press published his second book, Guillotine, in 2020. His first book, Slow Lightning, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship and the National Holmes Poetry Prize, both from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. (Photo courtesy of Matt Valentine.)

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Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where they teach in and direct the UMass Boston MFA in Creative Writing Program. They have previously taught at St. Lawrence University, Ithaca College, and Williams College. They also direct the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival.

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Carribean Fragoza is a writer and artist from South El Monte, Calif. Growing up in the peripheries of the Greater LA region and outside of Chicano communities of East LA that have largely come to define Chicano identity, including in culture and literature, has shaped her literary approach. Rather than sticking to usual tropes of Chicanx and Latinx writing, Fragoza breaks onto new thematic territory with unique character voices and perspectives. A graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Fragoza has published fiction and poetry in publications such as Alta, Air/Light, BOMB Magazine, Huizache, Entropy, Palabra Literary Magazine, and Emohippus. Her arts and culture reviews and essays have been published in online national and international magazines such as Aperture, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, KCET, Culture Strike, and Tropics of Meta. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP), a multidisciplinary arts collective, and is currently the co-editor of Boom California: A Journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and editor of Vicious Ladies, a publication of arts and cultural criticism by BIPOC womyn-identifying writers on the West Coast. Her book, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2020, and her first book of fiction, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, will be published by City Lights (March 2021).

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