Natalia Reyes
Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project
(she/her/hers)
I am a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. My dissertation focuses on the emergence of brownness as a racialized and cultural form in the 19th century and its development across the 20th century in the United States with an emphasis on legal and literary discourses.
At Penn, I co-coordinate the Latinx Working Group for 2023-2025 and hold an appointment on the Graduate Student Advisory Board at the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies from 2023-2026. I hold a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Latinx Studies from Penn and a Graduate Certificate in College Teaching from the University of Iowa.
My writing, translation, teaching, and production work have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Nexos, Latin American Literature Today, Iowa Public Radio, and the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. My writing has been recognized with scholarships from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, and The Sun. I have taught at Drexel University, the University of the Arts, and the University of Iowa, where I was Visiting Assistant Professor in English from 2019 to 2020.
I hold a BA in Rhetoric with honors from the University of California, Berkeley (2016), where I was the recipient of the Outstanding Honors Thesis Award in the Department of Rhetoric. I also hold a MFA in English (2019) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I was a 2018 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, a Provost’s Visiting Writer Fellow in Fiction, and the recipient of the Taylor-Chehak Prize. I am represented by Jin Auh at The Wylie Agency.