Abby Manzella

Abby Manzella, assistant professor of English and creative writing, won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award for her book “Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Displacements.” This award is only given out to one book every three years. Manzella’s book situates the histories of refugees and displaced persons within the United States to make a powerful argument about how precarity is built into the structures of citizenship. She traces the people and literature of the Great Migration, the Dust Bowl, Japanese American incarceration and the migrant laborers of the Southwest to reconceive belonging within the borders.