TEACHING LITERATURE • Thursday, February 6, 2020

HUMANITIES TEXAS TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP Education Service Center Region 20 • 1314 Hines Avenue • San Antonio, Texas

7:30–8:15 a.m. Check-in & breakfast

8:15–8:30 a.m. 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–

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. Teaching the Writings of Sandra Cisneros Patricia M. García, Te University of Texas at Austin

11:25 a.m.–12:10 p.m. Texas Literature on the Screen Juan J. Alonzo, Texas A&M University

12:10 a.m.–1:00 p.m. Lunch

1:00–3:15 p.m. Critical reading and curriculum development seminars

3:15–3:30 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 Kronkosky Charitable Foundation, with ongoing support from 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 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 Award, Teaching. Her students engage with digital materials, developing projects including The Millican Massacre, 1868.

PATRICIA M. GARCÍA is a lecturer in the Department of English and faculty affiliate of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She has published numerous book reviews on Latina/o literature, English Renaissance literature, and English pedagogy in the journals Choice and Seventeenth Century News and coedited a special issue of the scholarly journal Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics entitled “Latina/o Literature at the Crossroads: The Trans-American and the Trans- Atlantic in Critical Dialogue.” She has contributed chapters on pedagogy to various collections on teaching literature and specifically the work on Latina writers. She is also a faculty member in the Free Minds Program, teaching humanities courses to post-traditional students returning to college learning. She has won numerous teaching awards in her career, including most recently UT’s Harry Ransom Award for Excellence in Teaching.

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 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.