Cohort 1:

Keturah “Keke” Nichols is a PhD candidate at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UT Austin. Her research examines contemporary texts written by Black women authors between 1999 and 2022. Using a critical disability framework, she investigates how chronic illness and other forms of trauma are depicted and how they impact the writers and their communities. Keke’s work seeks to understand how literature can create spaces of care, community, and healing for those who navigate the complexities of identity, displacement and the afterlives of slavery in Dominican and Haitian diasporas.