People

Elizabeth Young teaches courses on American literature, women’s writing, film, and visual culture. Her courses often focus on intersections among gender, race, and sexuality in U.S. culture and on combinations of literary and visual materials. Her scholarly research includes the books Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor,  Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War, and Pet Projects:  Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive.

Samuel Ace is a poet, sound artist and photographer. Widely published, he is the winner of the Astraea Lesbian Writers and Firecracker Alternative Book awards, as well as a two-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and National Poetry Series. His first two books will be republished by the Belladonna* Cooperative in 2018. A new collection, Our Weather Our Sea, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books. Research interests include LGBTIQ poetry, 20th and 21st century poetry, experimental and hybrid forms.

Christopher Benfey teaches American literature, specializing in Emily Dickinson and cultural relations between the United States and Asia. He is the author of four books about the American Gilded Age; A Summer of Hummingbirds won the 2009 Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. He writes for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Benfey has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2016, he won an NEH Public Scholar Award to research Rudyard Kipling and America.

Iyko Day's research and teaching focus on race, capitalism, settler colonialism and Asian American literature and visual culture. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016).

Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. The editor of Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology (William Morrow/Avon Books) and the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry and fiction in numerous publications including The Nation, The Iowa Review, and The Best American Poetry.

Andrea Lawlor is the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016) and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (Vintage, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary and a CLMP Firecracker Award. Lawlor, a 2020 Whiting Award winner for fiction, has also been awarded fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary, Radar Labs, and the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College. Their prose and poetry have appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, Electric Lit, the Rumpus, Mutha, and Ploughshares.

Mark Shea is an applied linguist with a focus on second language acquisition and pedagogy. His research focuses on quantitative and qualitative approaches to describing language development in postsecondary contexts. At Mount Holyoke, his courses include First-Year Seminars and courses on public speaking, academic writing and various aspects of multilingualism.

Kristen Wright's work exists at the intersections of African-American drama (from the 19th century to the present), Black performance studies, and critical theory. Wright is also a playwright and dramaturg, and her plays Apple Core, Miss Anne, The Shirt (Civility), and Jamal From Empire, Jodeci for White Girls, and The Pop Cycle were produced at Cornell University and the Spring Writes! Literary Festival.

Shana Hansell is the English Department Academic Coordinator. She manages the budget, purchasing, online course catalog submissions, events, award applications, and supports the faculty and majors. She has been at Mount Holyoke College since 2022.