Ibrahim Williams is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Mississippi whose research focuses on African and Black diasporic literature and film. His dissertation, Familial Reformations: The Migrant Family in Contemporary African Diasporic Migration Narratives, brings the migrant family to the analytic center of African diaspora studies, arguing that migration reorganizes kinship in ways irreducible to the experience of any one migrant. His scholarship and public writing have appeared in Comedy Studies, Dictionary of Literary Biography, African Studies Review, Africa Is a Country, African Writer, and The Republic, with additional work forthcoming in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. His public humanities work includes the Immigrant Dad Podcast, which he created and produces to explore immigrant fatherhood and the familial dimensions of migration.

Jeffrey Caliedo is a Ph.D. student in Rice University’s English Department researching Black poetics, southern literature, and queer theory. Before coming to Rice, he received his B.A. in English Literature and African American Studies at Yale University. There, his thesis traced a trajectory of African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance into the contemporary. Prior to his move to Houston for the doctoral program, Caliedo returned to his high school alma mater in Jackson, Mississippi where he taught English literature.

Dr. Regina Young is Assistant Professor of English at University of the Cumberlands. She researches twentieth and twenty-first century literature and the environment, specializing in the bodily impact of industrial labor. Her current book project, Mining the Body: the Embodied Sacrifice Zone and Diversity in Coal Mining Activism, excavates the intersections of resource extraction and bodily exploitation in coal mining, positing that activism and union organizing respond to the use of the body as an “embodied sacrifice zone.” While focusing on Appalachian literature, her research demonstrates that diverse modes of activism in the coalfields occur both transregionally and transnationally, with writers and filmmakers positioning their craft/s as vital activist work. Her writing has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, About Place, and FOLK Magazine, with a forthcoming article appearing in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945.

James Hoyle graduated from Concord University in 2016 with a Bachelor’s Degree in English with a minor in History. He also graduated from Marshall University in 2019 with a Master’s Degree in Journalism. After working for a year, he returned to Marshall University, earning a second Master’s Degree in English. He is currently an English PhD Candidate at the University of Kentucky. His research interests are varied, and include Ecocriticism, Digital Humanities, Early Modern literature, Shakespeare, 20th and 21st century American film and literature, and the Fantastic. He has won multiple awards and has presented in conferences as far away as Germany. Upon graduation, he hopes to earn a full-time position at either a university or a community college.

Bethany Weston is a Literature Ph.D. student and teaching fellow at the University of North Texas. After earning her BA in English from Texas Woman’s University (TWU), she taught middle school Language Arts courses in Denton ISD while pursuing a Master’s degree in Library Science at TWU. She completed additional coursework in graduate English studies at the University of North Texas and returned to TWU to teach First Year Composition and First Year Seminar. As an independent scholar, she has presented at numerous conferences including the South Central Modern Language Association’s annual conference and Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s biennial conference. Her research interests include Southern studies, Gothic literature, Critical Race Theory counterstory, African American literature, and their intersections. Her award-winning scholarship has been published in CCTE Studies, the annual journal of Conference of College Teachers of English in Texas, and The Mississippi Quarterly.

Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home. Her creative and academic work have been supported by organizations like Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Kenyon Writers’ Workshop, McCormick (formerly TinHouse) writers’ workshop, and SWWIM Residency at The Betsy. Her work has also been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Write or Die, Electric Literature, The Pinch, Grist, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly. Her debut collection WORM GIRL is forthcoming in Spring 2027. 

If you would like to contact the ESO executive council, please send an email to emergingscholarsorg@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter/X. 

Save

Save