Dez Brown, PhD
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African and African American Studies
Office:765.983.2134
Email:[email protected]
Pronouns:they/he
Department: English
African and African American Studies
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Location: Carpenter Hall, Rm 312
801 National Rd W
Richmond, IN 47374
About Me
Dr. Dez Brown (they/he), publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary and transmasculine Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming (2025), was the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize from Host Publications and was a finalist for the 2026 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. They were a Quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, and they were also designated a 2025 DISCO Network Affiliate.
They served as the 2024 Editor-in-Chief at The Seventh Wave Magazine to curate a folio of creative writing and art focused on the video game genre, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter Journal, wildness, Scalawag, Four Way Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living, among others. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his free time gaming and he plays a mean hand of spades.
Education
- PhD, English, Black Studies, and Gender & Women’s Studies: University of Illinois Chicago
- MFA, Creative Writing: Northern Michigan University
- BFA, Creative Writing, English, and Professional Writing & Rhetoric: Hamline University
Research Projects
- Visiting Researcher at the Adler Planetarium – Summer 2026
Scholarly Interest
- Black Poetics
- Black Trans Ecopoetics
- Afropessimism
- Black Game Studies
- Trans and Queer Game Studies
- Black and Women of Color Feminisms
- Black, Queer, and Trans Speculative Worldmaking
- Queer Politics and Aesthetics
Published Works
- they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming (Host Publications, 2025)
- “On Gaming.”, a digital anthology published in The Seventh Wave Magazine
- “Etymology of flight: a venn diagram” in Scalawag — Cumulative Realities: Queer Poems for the Liberated Future
- “Where did he find his resolve?” in wildness
- “Short film with the raw heads of potatoes” in Foglifter Journal
- “Survivor’s Guilt” and “Sadness is Not the Only Muse” in swamp pink