Tavi Gonzalez
Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professor of Humanities and Associate Professor of English
Links
Queer literary studies, including representations of HIV/AIDS; transatlantic Modernism, including the Harlem Renaissance; and the 20C Novel.
Octavio R. Gonzalez is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. He teaches courses on American queer literature and culture, British and American modernism, and the twentieth century novel. Such courses include The Harlem Renaissance; Sapphic Modernism; The Gay 1990s; and Writing AIDS, 1981-Present.
His monograph, Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel, was recently published in the Refiguring Modernism imprint from Pennsylvania State University Press (September 2020). His first poetry collection, The Book of Ours, was a selection of the chapbook series at Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame (Momotombo Press, 2009). He is currently working on a second poetry manuscript, entitled “Limerence: The Wingless Hour.” Some poems from this collection appear in Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight, Anomaly, La Guagua, and the “Taboo” series at La Casita Grande Salon, as well as an anthology of Dominican poets in the diaspora (Retrato intimo de poetas dominicanos, https://amzn.to/2Sz051V). Other poems appear in Puerto del Sol, OCHO, and MiPoesias, among other journals. You can follow him on Twitter @TaviRGonzalez.
Education
- B.A., Swarthmore College
- M.A., Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus
- M.A., Rutgers University-New Brunswick
- Ph.D., Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Current and upcoming courses
Advanced Writing/Poetry
ENG302
A workshop in intensive practice in the writing of poetry. Students who have taken this course once may register for it one additional time.
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Poetry
ENG202
A workshop in the writing of short lyrics and the study of the art and craft of poetry. -
The Harlem Renaissance
ENG295
This is an exploration of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American literature and culture of the early twentieth century, which encompassed all major art forms, including poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as music, the visual arts, cabaret, and political commentary. This movement corresponds with the publication of The New Negro anthology (1925). Literary authors we will study may include Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent. We will also enter into contemporary debates about “the color line” in this period of American history, reading some earlier work by W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, or James Weldon Johnson, in the context of early Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Jazz Age, and transatlantic Modernism. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement (AFR 295 and ENG 295 are cross-listed courses.)