LaTanya McQueen has been named the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow for 2017-19.
A specialist in creative writing, world and African-American literature, and postcolonial and trauma theory, McQueen received a BFA in writing, literature, and publishing and an MFA in creative writing (fiction) from Emerson College. She is finishing her PhD in English at the University of Missouri, where she is scheduled to defend two dissertations this month: a novel, “When the Evening Comes,” and an essay collection, “And It Begins Like This.”
Her award-winning essays and short fiction have appeared in Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Passages North, Fugue, Carve Magazine, Bennington Review, New Orleans Review, Permafrost, The North American Review, Nimrod, War, Literature, and the Arts, and Potomac Review, among others, as well as an e-book through the Storyfront publishing imprint.
McQueen has taught at the University of Missouri. Beyond the traditional college classroom, she has taught adult students at Jewish Vocational Services, at-risk youth at Prevention Now, and global writers online through the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.
She has served as fiction and nonfiction reader for Gigantic Sequins, an independent literary journal of prose and comics, and as audio and anthology editor of The Missouri Review.
As Dana Emerging Writer Fellow McQueen will work on revising the two book manuscripts of her dissertation for publication. She will also teach Introduction to Creative Writing and a first-year writing course on Afrofuturism.
The Dana Fellow teaches two courses, assists with the administration of the Center for the Literary Arts, serves as an advisor for Open Field literary magazine, and works with students across campus on literary arts programming. The position is half-time, allowing the fellow to work on his or her own writing projects while in residence. The fellowship is named in honor of Robert Dana, the former poet laureate of Iowa and Cornell College English and creative writing professor, who died in February 2010.