TEACHING TEXAS LITERATURE • AUSTIN Wednesday, February 5, 2020

HUMANITIES TEXAS TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP Joe C. Thompson Conference Center • 2405 Robert Dedman Dr. • Austin, Texas

7:30–8:15 a.m. Check-in & breakfast

8:15–8:30 a.m. Welcome and opening announcements

8:30–9:15 a.m. Teaching Texas Literature Amy Earhart, Texas A&M University

9:20–10:05 a.m. Poetry of the Borderlands Emmy Pérez, Te University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley

10:05–10:25 a.m. Break and group photo

10:25–10:35 a.m. Humanities Texas educational resources

10:35–11:20 a.m. Texas Literature on the Screen Juan J. Alonzo, Texas A&M University

11:25 a.m.–12:10 p.m. Incorporating Texas Literature in Your Curriculum Andres Lopez, John P. Stevens High School (San Antonio)

12:10–1:00 p.m. Lunch

1:00–3:20 p.m. Critical reading and curriculum development seminars

3:20–3:30 p.m. Closing announcements

Image: Crossing the Rio Grande, © 1988, Bill Wittlif, Courtesy of Te Wittlif Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University

Made possible with support from the State of Texas and the National Endowment for the Humanities. FEATURED SCHOLARS

JUAN J. ALONZO is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. His research and teaching areas include American literature and film studies, with a focus on U.S. Latinx literatures and cultures. Alonzo is particularly interested in examining the ways Chicanx literature, culture, and identity are transformed in their interactions with contemporary American society. He understands Chicanx culture as contingent, flexible, hybrid, and ever in motion. In his first book, Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in American Literature and Film (2009), Alonzo examined Mexican-American identity’s move “from essentialism to contingency.” In his recent essay, “Ethnic Avengers: Machete, Django and the Uncertain Futures of Race and Immigration in the U.S.” (2019), Alonzo examined the destabilizing effects of immigration debates on U.S. Latinx cultures, and Latinx film’s response to those debates.

AMY EARHART is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. Earhart teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on American literature, African American literature, digital humanities, and Texas literature, on which she developed a course for her department. She is the author of Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, coeditor of The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles, including several focused on pedagogy. She has won four teaching awards including the Association of Former Students' University Distinguished Achievement, Teaching. Her students engage with digital materials, developing projects including The Millican Massacre, 1868.

ANDRES LOPEZ has taught English language arts for over sixteen years. For the last five years, he has taught on- level and dual credit English at Stevens High School, where he established San Antonio's first high school-level Mexican American literature class. Recently, he was recognized as Northside ISD’s 2018 Educator of the Year and was the district's 2018 nominee for the Trinity Prize for Excellence in Teaching. This past October, Humanities Texas awarded him an Outstanding Teaching of the Humanities Award for his pioneering work in the English classroom and in his community. Lopez is also an active member of Somos MAS, a group of educators organized to support Mexican American studies (MAS) in San Antonio and throughout Texas.

EMMY PÉREZ, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face and Solstice. A volume of her new and selected works is forthcoming from TCU Press. She is a recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she is a graduate of the University of Southern California and Columbia University. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. Currently, she is professor of creative writing at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate programs. She is also affiliate faculty in Mexican American Studies and serves as associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies. In 2012, she was a recipient of a UT Regents Outstanding Teaching Award, and, in 2016, a University Excellence Award in Student Mentoring.