Alan Pelaez Lopez

Alan Pelaez Lopez, Ph.D., (They/Them) is a researcher invested in the Black Indigenous imagination, undocumented social movements, trans* studies, and cultural production. Alan migrated to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico as an unaccompanied minor and lived as an undocumented person for almost twenty years. They have a history of anti-solitary confinement organizing as well as queer and trans migrant justice organizing. In their poetic and visual work, Alan attends to futures where Black trans* people are safe, and the messy work of Indigenous (Zapotec and Mixtec) kinship after forced migration. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona, 2023). 

Alan's writing has been published in Women's Studies Quarterly, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Best American Experimental Writing, the Georgia Review, and others. Prior to joining UC Davis, Alan was an assistant professor of queer and trans* ethnic studies in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University and a Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow at New York University. As an artist, they have been a poet-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora, an art practice fellow at Brown University, and is alumni of Vona Voices. Their latest solo exhibition N[EG]ATION was on view at Harvard University's Art Wing in the Winter of 2023. They believe that solidarity is an everyday action that requires us to be open to failure, mess, contradiction, and transformation.