PAMLA Officers

Vice President

Satoko Kakihara, California State University, Fullerton

Satoko Kakihara is Associate Professor of Japanese at California State University, Fullerton. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from University of California, San Diego, and her B.A. in English and Linguistics and M.A. in Linguistics from Stanford University. At CSUF, Satoko teaches courses on Japanese language, literature, and culture. At previous institutions (including Nagoya University in Japan), she also taught research methods in cultural studies, undergraduate writing, and English as a Second/Foreign Language. She has published in venues including the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, the Japanese Studies journal, and the CATESOL Journal. She has also contributed to such volumes as Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction (forthcoming 2023), Culinary Nationalism in Asia (2019), Asia-Pacific Film Co-productions (2019), and Migrant Identities of “Creole Cosmopolitans” (2011). Her first book, Women’s Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire, is forthcoming in 2022.

Second Vice-President

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, University of Georgia

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is Assistant Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. Rafiki holds a doctorate in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and his research focuses on Black speculative fiction and film, with an emphasis on horror, and future human studies. Rafiki is the author of Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024) and The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2019), and he co-edited, with Martin Japtok, Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Authentic Blackness/Real Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (Peter Lang, 2011). Rafiki has also authored several book chapters, and his peer-reviewed articles appear in Pacific Coast Philology, Screening Noir, African American Review, Journal of Children’s Literature, and Science Fiction Studies.

Executive Director

Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State University of Denver

Craig Svonkin grew up in Southern California, where he received his B.A. from USC, his M.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. He is Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Craig has had the pleasure of serving as PAMLA’s Executive Director since March 2009.

Craig co-edited (with Steven Gould Axelrod) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (2023), which has been complimented as “multicultural and multifaceted, personal and provocative, witty and wacky.” It has also been described as “a whale of a book” and a “charming, idiosyncratic, and weirdly seductive map to a whole lot of poems.” Svonkin has also published essays including: “From Shingled Hippo to Gay Unicorn: Self-Othering in Bob Kaufman and Other Beats”; “Lubitsch’s ‘Hidden Jewish Touch’: Jewish Anxieties and Gallic Desires”; “From Rebels to Emperors to Jedi Spirits: Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Their Fans” ; “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room”; “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering”; and “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self’.”

Svonkin has also published brief poetry, flash fiction, and short stories, including, in the journal Cholla Needles (issues 78 and 103), the poems or prose poems “Father Never Lets,” “Aphorisms for the Reticent, Lazy, or Verbose,” “Dactyls Are,” and “Sentence,” and the short fiction works “Searching for Linda Manz,” “In the Eye of the Beholder,” and “Dreaming of Abe Vigoda.”

Please email Craig Svonkin with any questions or suggestions about PAMLA: director@pamla.org (or feel free to call: 626-354-7526).

Pacific Coast Philology Editors

Richard Hishmeh, Palomar College

Richard Hishmeh‘s teaching and research interests include Rhetoric, American Literature, Poetry, and Film and Visual Culture. His scholarship has appeared in journals including,  Modern Language Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and the Hemingway Review. Professor Hishmeh is co-editor of Pacific Coast Philology, the official journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA), a regional branch of the Modern Language Association. He  has served as a member of PAMLA’s Executive Committee (2014-2017), and he is the recipient of Palomar’s Faculty Senate Award for Scholarly and Professional Achievement, 2016. With Jason Spangler of  Riverside City College, Hishmeh  is co-author of the textbook, Writing Up: Reading and Writing for College Readiness (BVT 2016). His latest publication, a chapter entitled, “Claiming Their Place: Contemporary Arab American Poetry and Poetics,” is forthcoming in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (2022).

Martin Japtok, Palomar College

Martin Japtok received his M.A. degree in American Studies, British Studies, and Philosophy from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. He is Professor of English and Humanities at Palomar College and co-editor of Pacific Coast Philology. His book Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction appeared in 2005. He edited Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. (2003) and co-edited (with Rafiki Jenkins) Authentic Blackness/“Real” Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (2011) and Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work (2020). He has also published in journals such as African American Review, MELUS, Amerikastudien/American Studies (Germany), The Southern Literary Journal, the Journal of Caribbean Literature, and The Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures (China).  In addition, he co-authored two composition texts, Inside Writing, 8^th ed. (2015) and The Writer’s Response, 6^th ed. (2017). When at West Virginia State University (1996-2004), he was elected Professor of the Year for three consecutive years from 2000-2003. In 2022, his essay “Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, the Internet, and Techno-Utopianism” received the 2021 Weixlmann Prize from African American Review for the best essay about 20th and 21st century literature in that year.

Members at Large

Terms Expire 2026

Jessica Lewis Luck, California State University, San Bernardino

Jessica Lewis Luck is Professor and Chair of the English Department at California State University San Bernardino where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics, American literature, literary theory, and disability studies. She has a PhD in English from Indiana University, which she received in 2006. Her book Poetics of Cognition: Thinking through Experimental Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2023) investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. An award-winning teacher at CSUSB, she has also published essays about pedagogy as well as disability poetry and poetics, with articles on Larry Eigner, Deaf poetry, the poetics of medical imaging, and an introduction to disability poetry in the new Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary Poetry (2023).

Sonia Barrios Tinoco, Seattle University

Sonia Barrios Tinoco is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Modern Languages and Cultures Department at Seattle University. She was born in Venezuela where she studied Literature at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, and then earned her Spanish Literature master’s Degree at Washington State University and a Hispanic Languages and Literatures Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Her main area of study lies in marginalized and out of the law subjects, hence she has published essays such as “Reconceptualizing the ‘American Dream’ for Undocumented Immigrants: The Yearning for a Lost Sense of Family, Identity and Belonging”; “The Construction of Identity through Violence: Joaquín Murrieta’s Corrido,” “Maria Moura, a woman outlaw,” among others. She is also deeply invested in migration studies and for more than a decade has been teaching a course entitled “Buscando visa para un sueño”: Cultural products on (Ill)legal Immigration.

Terms Expire 2027

Alicia Rico, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Alicia Rico received her licenciatura from the University of Alicante, Spain, and master and doctorate from the University of Kansas. She was Co-director of the language program at the University of Kansas, where she also coordinated several levels of Spanish while doing her doctoral degree Dr. Rico has taught all levels of Spanish at the undergraduate and graduate level; she regularly teaches on special topics such as Mexican authors, monsters in Hispanic literature or Food Representation. Her research focuses mainly on the representation of women and women’s issues in modern Mexican and Spanish literature. She has published articles on Mexican-Jewish authors and Food Representation in contemporary literature in peer reviewed journals and has presented extensively at national and international conferences. At UNLV, she received the Rita Deanin Abbey Teacher of the Year Award (2013) and the William Morris Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018). She was nominated to the William Morris Award for Excellence in Research (2006), to the William Morris Award for Excellence in Teaching (2004, 2012), the Rita Deanin Abbey Teacher of the Year Award (2012) and the Alex G. and Faye Spanos Teaching Award (2016).

Matthew Warshawsky, University of Portland

Matthew Warshawsky (PhD, the Ohio State University) is Professor of Spanish at University of Portland, where he has taught since 2002. His teaching ranges from introductory Spanish to courses about the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures of medieval Spain; women authors of Golden Age Spain; Don Quixote; and Latin American Jewish literature and culture. Most recently, he is the author of From New Christians to New Jews: Seventeenth-Century Spanish Texts in Defense of Judaism (Juan de la Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs, 2024), and he has published two articles in PAMLA’s journal Pacific Coast Philology. His collaboration with undergraduates has led to coauthored publications in peer-reviewed journals of undergraduate research on the literature of Iberian authors of Jewish origin. Previously he has served on the national screening committee for Fulbright English Teaching Assistantships to Spain, as vice president of conference programs for the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, and as chair of the Department of International Languages and Cultures at University of Portland.

Terms Expire 2028

Toshiaki Komura, Meiji Gakuin University

Toshiaki Komura is Professor of English at Meiji Gakuin University, where he teaches American literature with a focus on modern and contemporary poetry. He received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2011; he also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Cornell University and a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College. His monograph, entitled Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11 (Lexington Books, 2020), was awarded the ALSJ Book Prize in 2021. He is currently co-authoring a book project on multiethnic comparative poetics, entitled Contemporary Japanese American and Mexican American Poets: Lyrical Solidarity (under contract with Routledge). His main research fields include modern and contemporary American poetry, elegy studies, grief studies, translation studies, and animal studies. His scholarly and poetic work has appeared in a number of academic and literary journals, including ELH, Bishop-Lowell Studies, and The Louisville Review.

Enrico Vettore, California State University, Long Beach

Enrico Vettore is Professor of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach and Chair of the Graziadio Center for Italian Studies. His research interests are Zen Philosophy and Literature, Jungian and Post-Jungian ecocriticism, and Ecopsychology. He has published articles on Petrarch and Schopenhauer, Rossellini, the concept of eternal justice in Sciascia and Borges, Sciascia and Manzoni, Pasolini’s Medea, a Zen/ecopsychological reading of Gianni Celati, and two Zen interpretations of Pirandello: one of the last volume of his short stories and one of the novel, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand.

Lisa Weston, California State University – Fresno.

Lisa Weston is Professor of English at California State University – Fresno, where she teaches a wide range of courses in Medieval and Early Modern literature. She has written and presented primarily on Old English and Anglo-Latin texts viewed through feminist and queer theoretical lenses. Her publications have engaged with (to mention a few topics) female monastic literary production, the queerness of virginity in hagiographic narrative, the poetics of wyrd, and the subversive potential of the “obsolete” Old English dual pronoun, with further forays into the materiality of medieval literacy practices and artifacts, Old English metrical charms, and later Medieval image magic. Lisa has also served as Department Chair and as (by turns) Treasurer and President of the campus chapter of the California Faculty Association.

Graduate Student Representative

Term Expires 2027

Graciela Sierra-Moreno, University of California, Santa Cruz

Graciela Sierra-Moreno is a PhD student in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She focuses on Chicanx, or Mexican/American, literature and cultural productions. Her dissertation research aims to understand how affect is portrayed in Chicanx media and if affect is/can be culturally specific, while exploring the acceptability of negative emotions in the public sphere. In addition to her research, Graciela strives to aid students, particularly first-generation students, as a Graduate Student Program Coordinator at UCSC’s American Indian Resource Center (AIRC). Graciela is from the Central Valley in California.

2026 Nominating Committee

PAMLA Past President and Nominating Committee Chair Peter Schulman and previous PAMLA Presidents Yolanda Doub and Juan Delgado serve on the 2026 Nominating Committee.