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Rafael Walker

@rafaelwalker.bsky.social
2.4K followers 344 following 1K posts

I write on literature and issues in higher ed || Associate Professor at Baruch College, CUNY || Editor of Nella Larsen’s *Passing* for Broadview Press tinyurl.com/2s3kt7w9 || Still fun! 🎡 🌈 baruch.academia.edu/RafaelWalker

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Reposted by Rafael Walker
Brian Glavey @glavey.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
My book, Relatability: Sharing and Oversharing with the New York School Poets, will be out later this year--just in time to stuff it in your stockings--but you can preorder now with the code UCPNEW for 30% off. @uchicagopress.bsky.social press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
press.uchicago.edu
Relatability
An engaging account of how the New York School poets used art to imagine their queerness as something that might be shared with other people.How did Frank O’Hara and other New York School poets—a smal...
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 This seems mostly spot on, but it’s going too easy on Chicago grads!
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
If there was one country singer you could take to both the cookout AND to the circuit party, it was Dolly Parton. She just loved everybody. RIP, queen! 💜😭
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I teamed up with my friend, sociologist Bryan Sykes, to reflect on the awful month DEI has had. We discuss some of the big flashpoints of the past few weeks (Arday's tragic and Tyler Austin Harper's controversial essay), but we're more interested in fixing DEI. www.chronicle.com/article/jaso...
chronicle.com
Opinion | Jason Arday and the Assault on DEI
Colleges should not give up on diversity.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I teamed up with my friend, sociologist Bryan Sykes, to reflect on the awful month DEI has had. We discuss some of the big flashpoints of the past few weeks (Arday's tragic and Tyler Austin Harper's controversial essay), but we're more interested in fixing DEI. www.chronicle.com/article/jaso...
chronicle.com
Opinion | Jason Arday and the Assault on DEI
Colleges should not give up on diversity.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
God, I love us. “As the king made his way across town, New Yorkers were largely unfazed, except for being irritated by the disruption to travel.”
theguardian.com
Dinner on a gold plate, then a snub: an uneven US welcome for King Charles III
Zohran Mamdani said he would not meet UK monarch privately, noting Indian diamond claimed by crown in 1849
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Good morning from Boston University. Pride flags EVERYWHERE
Pride flag in the windowPride flag in a window
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Devin Garofalo @devingarofalo.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE has a cover, a website, and is available for preorder! (Use code NUP2026 for a discount.) See the full contents at the link below — lucky to be part of this extraordinary project and excited to see it in print this fall! ✨🔥 nupress.northwestern.edu/979889948066...
Book cover: THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE, edited by Devin M. Garofalo & Nathan K. Hensley — in black font, against a Barbie pink background, design inspired by 80s literary theory book series. Promotional flyer for THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE. Includes image of cover, description of book, editor bios, and brief promotional blurb by Heather K. Love: “This book makes clear why language, thought, and writing matter, now more than ever.” Discount code: NUP2026. All information included in the flyer, plus more, can be found at the linked website.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Just got my copy of this banger, edited by David Bergman and Guy Davidson and including essays by many hands, including one from yours truly on Walt Whitman! And I promise that the book—dealing though it does with gay men AND autobiography—is not as solipsistic as it sounds.
Photo of me holding aforementioned book and grinning intemperately.
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Nate Wolff @natewolff.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Hey! Is the dream of the 90s (sustained ambitious attention to the fin de siècle American novel) alive? Yes! In this AzQ special issue @rafaelwalker.bsky.social and I co-edited with intro by us & afterword by Jennifer Fleissner 😎 Open access! @hopkinspress.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/issue/56582
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Hopkins Press @hopkinspress.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Read this the whole special issue of Arizona Quarterly for free! #S2O #OpenAccess at @projectmuse.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/issue/56582
muse.jhu.edu
Project MUSE - Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory-Volume 82, Number 1, Spring 2026
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Not sure how I missed this, but 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Our special issue of Arizona Quarterly on the American novel at the turn of the 20th century is now out! In addition to an intro by @natewolff.bsky.social and me, it includes 6 original essays and a bracing afterword by Jennifer Fleissner (which, among other things, urges us back to Lears).
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Our special issue for @j19journal.bsky.social honoring Frances E.W. Harper's 200th birthday is now out! It features *8* terrific essays on intriguing facets of Harper's work and concludes with a stirring afterword by @profkori.bsky.social. @dark-stars.bsky.social @c19americanists.bsky.social
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
One of the things I looked forward to most about writing my first book was giving people something to comment on besides my height, and here I am missing my first MLA post-publication. But Toronto in January? Toront-NO!
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
As I said on the other app, so again here: Thank you, friend, for this encouraging blurb, and let us hope the book lives up to your high praise! #grateful
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Application deadline extended to Jan. 5th. This is a great position whose terms are sweeter than HR will permit us to disclose in the ad, but please feel free to get in touch with me with any questions. Thanks to all for helping to spread the word.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
My book, Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel, is now out with @uchicagopress.bsky.social! Use discount code UCPNEW for 30% off. I'm so excited! 🥳 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
press.uchicago.edu
Realism after the Individual
A study of the transformation of the realist novel in the hands of early-twentieth-century American writers, who adapted this quintessentially nineteenth-century genre to the conditions of their age. ...
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Proofs for the Cambridge History of American Gay Autobiography, which includes my essay on Whitman! As niche as the volume sounds, I'm sure it'll appeal widely—because who doesn't wanna read generations of gays talking about themselves, or, in Whitman's case, as I argue, artfully refusing to?!
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
I can't tell you how significant it is that Manhattan went for our boyfriend Mamdani. When, in these streets, I found white, often straight finance bros rooting for ZM, I knew we had something. People are understanding that voting for their economic interests doesn't mean voting for their tax breaks
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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
I am so thrilled—really! But how long do we have to keep saying that it's high time to vote Staten Island *off* the island! We just are not the same.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
These two stories in today's WSJ make it clear that we all should be reading the Grapes of Wrath right now and make me all the surer about having cast my (early!) vote for Mamdani this morning. This one: www.wsj.com/business/bil...
wsj.com
How U.S. Billionaires Stack Up With the Rest of the World
There are 3,508 billionaires on the planet. Americans dominate their collective wealth.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Our Black & Latino Studies Department is hiring a tenured associate professor in black and/or Latino queer studies (open discipline)! I'm so excited about this hire—excited enough to have agreed to serve on the search committee! Please spread the news. Baruch's great, and so is NYC!
cuny.jobs
Jobs | City University of New York
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
A clear-eyed explanation of the dangers to universities posed by the push for "viewpoint diversity," written by one of the clearest-eyed analysts of argumentation, Amanda Anderson. www.chronicle.com/article/when...
chronicle.com
Opinion | When Viewpoint Diversity Means Conformity
Trump’s compact isn’t just coercive. It’s incoherent.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Happy to announce that both my departments—English and Black & Latino Studies (BLS)—are hiring for TT positions this year! In English, we're hiring in Anglophone South Asian. cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...
cuny.jobs
Jobs | City University of New York
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
Remember that every IG photo you see taken on a busy Manhattan street was taken at the expense of people trying to get somewhere. DO NOT PRESS THE “LIKE” BUTTON!!!
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
Surely, this is the worst-aging book of this century. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/302858...
penguinrandomhouse.com
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker: 9780143122012 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
“If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this—the most inspiring book I've ever read." —Bill Gates A provocative history of violence—from the New York Times...
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Sheila Liming @seeshespeak.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
My friend John died this morning. I mention him in HANGING OUT and, in light of his passing, I can’t help but indulge in memories of our annual backcountry dinner parties.
Text from a book: “This is 
true of all of us except John and Candace, who are camp gourmets. 
They are the ones who taught me how to pack herbs like basil and 
tarragon so that they’ll keep fresh over several days and also how to 
carry eggs up a mountain, because a nice egg, soft-poached in boil-
ing water over a camp stove, is handy meal booster. We never have 
wine to go with our meals because the bottles would be too heavy. 
Sometimes we have whiskey, but even when we don’t, or when the 
first night’s enthusiasm causes us to run out of it too quickly, we 
have other sedatives.
We have the high, still mountain air, which, particularly on the 
eastern slope of the Cascades, grows tawny as the day tilts toward 
dusk. We have our exhaustion and all the miles we’ve already 
sweated now behind us. We have each other and a good year’s 
worth of conversation to catch up on. And, most importantly, we 
don’t have anything else: no screens to divert our attention when 
the conversation lags, nowhere else to be, no concerns apart from 
sore muscles and maybe the search for ground that is flat enough to 
accommodate a tent. Sometimes it rains and we hunker down and 
project our conversations through tent walls, searching each other 
out. Sometimes it’s clear and warm and perfect and we sit in a circle 
with our backs propped against logs or trees or our empty packs. 
And sometimes the bugs are too bad, or the ashes from nearby for-
est fires, and the dinner party ends early in the hopes of better 
conditions to follow on the next night.
I love this dinner party, which happens on repeat for about four 
or five nights in a row each year.” Text from a book: “I make a lot of sacrifices — plane  of enduring multiple cross-country flights in hiking boots—
in order to secure my annual place at it. And I never regret the 
cost, though the climb can be arduous, the weather punishing, and, 
sometimes, when we emerge from the mountains via the wrong 
trailhead, I’m the one who gets stuck with the responsibility of flag-
ging down a stranger’s car and hitchhiking back to the right one. (I 
have done this, quite recently, and it took a lot of crying to convince 
the person to let me ride with them—another sacrifice, of dignity 
in this particular case.) But each time I do it, I know that I’m seiz-
ing one more link on a finite chain of possible moments. The oldest 
members of our little party are in their seventies. We will not be 
able to do this forever, so we have to do it now, to the best of our 
abilities. For “When shall we live, if not now?” asks Fisher.12 She is 
paraphrasing the stoic philosopher Seneca here, yet she is asking 
what is perhaps the most important rhetorical question about time 
of all time. When shall we seize and take that time for ourselves, if 
not in the short space of time that is to be found in a day—in this 
day, perhaps?”
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
As I watch Cuo-NO’s campaign pivot to free transit for NYers who earn under a certain amount—essentially signing on to a program that exists already (peak desperation!)—I wonder afresh at the audacity of a person who had a big job, fucked up that big job, and thinks he should have another big job.
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Ian Petrie @icpetrie.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
BLOCKED AND REPORTED
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
And all that they could find on Obama is that he wore a tan suit. 😔
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
I did not know that Bruno Mars has 16 Grammys.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Forgot about this moment in George Schuyler's 1931 novel *Black No More*, but whoa! 🤯 "You can't deport citizens, silly," Buddy remonstrated. "That don't stop you from advocating it. This is politics, Big Boy."
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dr. thrasher, an american writer in ex(archia)(xile) @thrasherxy.bsky.social · 26/06/2025
Mamdani wins the primary with hearty support from the Jewish left, cross-endorses with Brad Lander, wins the Upper West Side, wins Dan Goldman's district, gets Jerry Nadler's endorsement The NYT:
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Call me a pessimist, but I'm not rejoicing yet. If Cuomo runs as an independent, he gets both his initial Dem supporters (a considerable number) AND Republicans.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
you know shit's bad when kathy's cursing
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
TFW the IRS mails you a certified letter because you owe them $5.23. 🙄
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
OMG, Bruce Robbins activates full BEAST mode in this interview!
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Knight First Amendment Institute @knightcolumbia.org · 21/04/2025
📍WED. 4/23 at 10:00am ET: @ramyakrishnan.bsky.social will appear before a federal court in our challenge to Trump's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian protests. Register to listen: forms.mad.uscourts.gov/seating-sign...
forms.mad.uscourts.gov
Request for Courtroom Seating/Audio Access
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
We do not talk enough about how unhelpful it is that three train stations in the northeast corridor are named Penn station.
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Venus Bivar @vbivar.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Very thoughtful piece on Junot Diaz by @rafaelwalker.bsky.social .
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
I've been uneasy about Junot Díaz's treatment by the mainstream media for a while now, but seeing him get nixed from the Norton anthology was the last straw for me. I've put my thoughts down here. Thanks, as usual, to my editor, Len Gutkin! www.chronicle.com/article/juno...
chronicle.com
Opinion | Junot Díaz’s Forced Disappearing Act
The great writer has been exiled from the Norton anthology.
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
It keeps getting better! They cut Chinua Achebe too. An anthology of world literature without the father of African literature?
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Rafael Walker @rafaelwalker.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Oh. Just realizing that the 5th edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature nixed Junot Díaz. Wow!
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Arielle Zibr👻k @zibrak.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
The Audiobook of 12 STORIES is now available! Here's a free preview of me reading the introduction, but the real treat here are the professional voice actors' interpretations of these stories @penguinclassicsusa.bsky.social calls "iconic" 😉 2ly.link/25hky #booksky #academicsky #amreading
play.google.com
Twelve Stories by American Women by Arielle Zibrak - Audiobooks on Google Play
Twelve Stories by American Women audiobook written by Arielle Zibrak. Narrated by Arielle Zibrak, Karen Murray, Elena Rey, Tanis Parenteau, Caroline Hewitt, and Catherine Ho. Get instant access to all...
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Arielle Zibr👻k @zibrak.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
SO EXCITED to get my hands on this thing. Pre-order, Pre-order, Pre-order!
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Karen L. Cox 📚🏳️‍🌈 @drkarenlcox.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
The EO that included restoring monuments/memorials on federal property is a full-on embrace of Confederate ideology. Beginning Monday @uncpress.bsky.social will make my book No Common Ground available to read FOR FREE for the next two weeks. Educate yourself about what this embrace means. ✊
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