Fiction
Essays
Letter to My First Mother
The Rumpus, 21 Nov. 2024
The girlbossification of historical women
Poetry
“Queering the
Modern Family:
The Transracial Adoptee as Agent/Accessory”
ABSTRACT: This essay focuses on Lily, who enacts queerness in Modern Family‘s portrayal of gay lives. Represented alongside her two white, gay dads, she queers an otherwise homonormative, monoracial family. While various scholars have used queerness to dismantle normative ideas of adoption and kinship, this essay examines instead how transracial adoption’s queering potential is mediated through Lily’s simultaneous commodification as an adoptee. To that end, this analysis considers how her racial identity is imperfectly mobilized to reflect her parents’ sexuality and articulates the ways in which the queerness of transracial adoption must resist the intertwined structures of commodification, colorblindness, and queer liberalism to maintain nonnormative understandings of kinship.
Edited Collections
The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality
The Literary Taylor Swift explores Swift’s engagements, intertextual and otherwise, with literature and treats her songs as literature-as, that is, stories, poems, and other textual forms to which literary-critical theories and methodologies can and should be productively applied.
Featured Chapter: “‘No one likes a mad woman’: The ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Trope and/as Feminist Resistance in Taylor Swift’s Music and Mythology”
The Avatar Television Franchise
Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-08) and its sequel The Legend of Korra (2012-14) are among the most acclaimed and influential U.S. animated television series of the 21st century. Yet, despite their elevated status, there have been few academic works published about them. The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, Fandom and Reception remedies this gap by bringing together a wide range of scholarly writings on these shows. This edited collection is comprised of 13 chapters organized into 4 sections, featuring close readings of key episodes, analyzing how they create meaning as well as illustrating how established theories can guide those readings.
Featured Chapter: “Lessons from the Southern Air Temple:
How Avatar: The Last Airbender Negotiates the Trauma of Imperialism”
Anthologies
FEELWAYS
Co-edited by Adrian DeLeon, Téa Mutonji, and Natasha Ramoutar
Feel Ways is a breakthrough anthology of works by writers of Scarborough, Ontario. It is inspired by the suburb of Scarborough in Greater Toronto, shedding light on its myths and its many stories set in the diverse immigrant communities that arrived in the 1960s and later. It presents us with a “chorus of emotional reality,” in a community in its most vibrant state. The collection includes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and an introduction by the editors.
The Unpublished City Volume II
Co-edited by Phoebe Wang, Canisia Lubrin & Dionne Brand
Orient yourself in the city with these nineteen works of creative non-fiction that offer a different, more multifarious wayfinding. In this second volume of The Unpublished City, imagination is the means by which these writers find detours, shortcuts and convergences. Even as they are inventing and imagining the city, these emerging Toronto-based writers find themselves marked through tender and violent encounters. For them, the city is more than backdrop, but a witness, an accomplice and a lover.
Ryanne Kap 