Executive Director
Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Craig Svonkin grew up 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 a writer of flash fiction and prose poetry fragments, a Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and a dedicated fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s meta-museum discussed in Craig’s essay “If Only L.A. Had a Soul: Spirituality and Wonder at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.” He has had the pleasure of serving as PAMLA’s Executive Director since March 2009.
Craig’s published essays include “Postmodern Documentary: The Return of the Magus on Video” (2016), “From Disneyland to Modesto: George Lucas and Walt Disney” (2012), “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering” (2010), “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room” (2011), “From Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart: Becoming the Other; Suiciding the White Male ‘Self’” (2008), and “Melville and the Bible: Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, Multivocalism, & Plurality” (2001).
Craig is the co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (2023) with Steven Gould Axelrod. He has also co-authored “Introduction: The Metafamily” (2018, with Steven Gould Axelrod), “A New Parliament of Fouls: The 2015 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry” (with Lissa Paul and Kate Pendlebury), “Old Guard→Avant-Garde→ Kindergarde: The 2014 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry” (with Lissa Paul and Donelle Ruwe), “Outside the Inside the Box: The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry” (with Michael Joseph and Donelle Ruwe) and New Directions in American Literary Scholarship: 1980-2002 (with Emory Elliott), and co-edited the symposium “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books” (with Charles Hatfield) and the special issue of Pacific Coast Philology (volume 53, no. 2, Fall 2018) on “The Metafamily” (with Steven Gould Axelrod).
Please email Craig Svonkin with any questions or suggestions about PAMLA: [email protected] (or feel free to call: 626-354-7526).
Information Director
Sonia Christensen, Independent Scholar
Sonia Christensen holds an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Columbia in the City of New York. Her work has been published in New Pop Lit, Confrontation Magazine, and First Stop Fiction, as well as in other independent magazines. In addition to serving as PAMLA’s Assistant Director, she works as a Social Media Specialist at Lauritzen Gardens in Omaha and is currently working on a novel called My Beautiful Future.
Communications Director
David John Boyd, University of Glasgow
David John Boyd is the Communications Director of PAMLA. He received his B.A. in English Literature and European History at Metropolitan State University of Denver (2011), his M.A. in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the University of Glasgow (2012), and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Text/Image Studies) from the University of Glasgow (2019). David has been a member of PAMLA since 2012 and became the Assistant Director of PAMLA in 2017 until 2022. He is also the co-editor of PAMLA Arts Matter with Juan Delgado. David is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Stirling Maxwell Centre for Text/Image Studies at the University of Glasgow. David’s primary field of research involves the critical theories and film-philosophies of history, embodiment, and temporality in transnational media forms, mainly comics and cinema. He specifically examines the works of Gilles Deleuze and his global contemporaries while reinterpreting established or emergent media forms across their many transcultural incarnations. He has particular interest in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese visual and media cultures and their proliferation in Europe and North America, from transnational silent and early sound film to comic book adaptations and genre cinema blockbusters. You can find his publications here. David’s forthcoming research includes a monograph, From Glasgow to Gotham: The Comics Art of Frank Quitely (Leuven University Press, forthcoming 2025), as well as an edited collection entitled ReFocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2025).
Pacific Coast Philology Book Editor
Lina Geriguis, Cabrillo College
Lina Geriguis received her PhD in English from Claremont Graduate University in 2011. She has served as a book review editor for Pacific Coast Philology and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal since 2010. Her research projects and publications explore questions of disability, environment, race, and ethnicity in American literature. Her essay, “Rich in Pathological Instances: Disability in the Early Reception Theory of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome” received the Edith Wharton Society Award for a Beginning Scholar. Her book chapter, “Ecoliterary and Edith Wharton,” is forthcoming in Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction. Her teaching expertise includes multicultural literatures of the U.S., American Realism and Naturalism, American Gothic, literary theory and criticism, college composition, and ESL. From 2012 to 2019, Geriguis was a lecturer at Chapman University. Currently, she teaches at Cabrillo College.
Conference Assistant
Evan Krikorian, California State University, Los Angeles
Evan Krikorian is a Master’s student of English at California State University, Los Angeles and a 2023-2024 Sally Casanova scholar for the CSU system-wide predoctoral fellowship. He has also received his B.A. in English Education, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric & Composition at California State University, Long Beach. Evan specializes his graduate research on the intersection of digital humanities and pedagogy, focusing on artificial intelligence and augmented reality as a means of liberating disability studies within the compositional classroom. In his free time, Evan tinkers with all forms of analogue, exercising physical media into an interactable, creative space. His upcoming project, reIMAGEination: a series of scholars, constructs a multimodal display of class background, individuality, and the role of technology into one strikingly contemplative exhibit.
Conference Assistant
Angelica Ortiz, California State University, Los Angeles
Angelica Ortiz is a second-year English graduate student at Cal State LA. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Chicanx studies in 2019. Her scholarly interests include multi-ethnic U.S. literature from the nineteenth century to the present, emphasizing race, class, and gender. After completing her master’s degree, Angelica plans to pursue a doctoral degree in English and teach at the college level.