Helena María Viramontes is a professor, scholar-activist, and renowned author of works of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has been anthologized and is read widely in the United States and abroad. For many of her readings and speaking engagements she arrives wearing a rebozo, a shawl worn by Mexican and Chicana women living on both sides of the US–Mexico border. Once, when asked about her rebozo, Viramontes explained that the pre-Columbian icon is her “security blanket,” which she embraces in order to find comfort. For her readers, her writing functions like a "rebozo de palabras,” a shawl woven with words that nurture. As Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs points out in her insightful introduction, not only has Viramontes’s work not yet received the broad critical engagement it richly deserves, but there remains a monumental gap in the interpretations of Chicana literature that reach mainstream audiences. Rebozos de Palabras addresses this void by focusing on how the Chicana image has evolved through Viramontes’s body of work. With a foreword by Sonia Saldívar-Hull, this collection addresses Viramontes entire oeuvre through newly produced articles by major literary critics and emerging scholars who engage Viramontes’s writing from multiple perspectives.

Thinking en español takes the important literary figures who shaped our knowledge of Chicano authors and places them in the dynamic arc of Chicana/o criticism and literature. Jesús Rosales interviews foundational Chicana/o literary critics and, through conversations, establishes the path of Chicana/o criticism from 1848 to the present.

The CW's long-running series Supernatural follows the adventures of brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they pursue the "family business" of hunting supernatural beings. Blending monster-of-the-week storylines with the unfolding saga of the brothers' often troubled relationship, the show represents Gothic concerns of anxiety, the monstrous, family trauma and, of course, the supernatural. The lines between human and monster, good and evil, are blurred and individual identities and motivations resist easy categorization. This collection of new essays examines how the series both incorporates and complicates Gothic elements related to traditional tropes, storytelling, women and gender issues and monstrosity.

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability." Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.

In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz’s imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing—especially his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world. Saldívar examines several aspects of Díaz’s career, from his vexed relationship to the literary aesthetics of Whiteness that dominated his MFA experience and his critiques of the colonialities of power, race, and gender in culture and societies of the Dominican Republic, United States, and the Américas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldívar shows how Díaz’s works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.

A Study Guide for Helena María Viramontes's "The Moths", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Latinos comprise the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, and this interdisciplinary anthology gathers the scholarship of both early career and senior Latina/o scholars whose work explores the varied and unique latinidades, or Latino cultural identities, of this group.