About

image description: Preston is pictured in foreground smiling in blue plaid Ralph Lauren shirt with magen David necklace. A table and chairs, plants, and stairwell are in blurred background.

I’m the Associate Director of Native American Studies at Stanford University, where I teach courses and conduct research in queer Indigenous studies, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational American studies. My writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in American Fiction, The Moth, New Reader Magazine, and other venues.

I have expertise in instructional design and curriculum development. I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Miami, where I will defend in June 2023.

Current Research

My current book project, entitled The Literary Protest: Ghosting in Transnational American Cultures of Protest, demonstrates how contemporary American cultural texts deploy the ghost, a figure often associated with the horror genre, to trouble both the “ghosting” of marginalized stories and the problematic optimism of progress narratives. The works examined are part of what I call the “literary protest” genre. Rather than staging fictional protests, these texts perform literal protests distinct from protests like sit-ins or marches. Reframing major scholarship in Queer and Indigenous Studies, consecutive chapters on Black and Native cultural production show how literary protests, like ghosts, are spectral: imagined or speculative confrontations with power, neither embodied in the flesh, nor dis-embodied or invisible. The literary protest is also inherently queer, as it has an indefinite form and temporality, which displaces more normative forms of protest that may only be accessible to the white cis-hetero settler. I conclude that these works are part of cultures of protest that—while critiquing structural problems like settler colonialism and racism—are ultimately skeptical of or ambivalent about the possibilities of reparation. Instead, these texts evoke new social realities where the ghosted haunt the beneficiaries of power, a nonviolent act that begets justice and retribution.

Writing

My poetry was awarded the First Annual Writers’ Harvest Student Reading Award from the Department of English at Clemson University. My poetry and/or fiction has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Chronicle, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Moth, Poetry Quarterly, and New Reader Magazine. I was a reader and blogger for Spry Literary Journal and Flash Fiction Editor for Crack the Spine Literary Magazine. Since 2016, I have been the Editor-in-Chief of KAIROS Literary Magazine, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization I co-founded while at Clemson University. KAIROS publishes four times annually, including a print paperback volume, and is a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).