Cameron Awkward-Rich is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts. His research and teaching creatively combine trans/feminist/queer theory, disability studies, black studies, studies of contemporary American literature, poetry, and other forms of experimental writing to explore transgender aesthetics and cultural production; the conflicted histories of trans/feminist/queer thought in the U.S.; and collective affect/feeling—particularly “bad” feelings like loneliness, dissociation, depression, withdrawal, and ambivalence. His essay “Trans, Feminism or Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual” appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and was the 2017 winner of the journal’s prestigious Catharine Stimpson Prize. Awkward-Rich’s other essays have appeared in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Science Fiction Studies. Awkward-Rich is also author of two collections of poetry. Dispatch, recently published by Persea Books in December 2019, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and has been featured in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Set against the contemporary media environment,Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of past and present of anti-black/anti-trans violence in the United States. Awkward-Rich’s debut collection of poetry, Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and was listed on Entropy’s Best Poetry Books & Collections of 2016. He is also a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine.