Raye Hendrix

Raye Hendrix

Raye is an incoming PhD student in English and will be working in the areas of 20th and 21st Century American Poetry & Poetics and Queer/Disability (Crip) Theory.

She graduated from Auburn University with a BA and MA in English and, most recently, from the University of Texas at Austin with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), where she won the Keene Prize for Literature and the Michael Adams Thesis Prize in Poetry.

Raye is also the winner of Southern Indiana Review’s Patricia Aakhus Award for 2018 and has worked for the literary journals Bat City Review and Southern Humanities Review.

Her research looks primarily at the body—both the physical body and the body of the poem—as a site of inheritance: as the human body has a DNA heritage, so too does the body of the poem in tradition.

Raye investigates traces of trauma in these inheritances, particularly in the poems of queer and/or disabled authors who fall outside societal perceptions of “normativity.”

With the support of the Raymund Fellowship and the English Department, Raye hopes to gain the knowledge and experience necessary to create inclusive and accessible curriculums for students in her future classes and increase the visibility of authors in marginalized communities.

Raye is honored to be a member of the 2019-2020 Raymund Fellows cohort and is excited to continue her research as a part of this inspiring group of scholars.