Reid Gómez

Reid Gómez is a writer and scholar from San Francisco, California. Her research focus is quantum entanglements—slavery/colonization, Black/Indian, and storytelling/translation. Black and Indigenous studies, and the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, shape her epistemic and writing practice. She is interested in what can be done in English, and what can be done in writing—not like a native speaker. She works on and in Black English and Navlish.

She is currently completing a scholarly monograph: The Web of Differing Versions: Where Africa Ends and America Begins. This monograph challenges the limits created by the grammar of colonialism. Her work is in conversation with Silko studies, Indigenous studies and Critical Black studies. She approaches grammar through the “translating consciousness” of multilingualism, theorized through language studies (translation, language revitalization, and linguistics) and feminist theory. Her relationship to language leads to questions of matter and meaning in terms of quantum physics. Gómez’s central intervention is an understanding of language and land as archive, based in Indigenous epistemologies.

She has recently finished a collection of twenty sentence stories about the streets of San Francisco titled ERSHOD, and a novel about a Navajo forger and the repatriation of Apache Playing Cards titled HOME.

Her work is published in: Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women, Still Here: San Francisco, Bay Poetics, Latina: Women’s Voices From the Borderlands, Reading Native American Women:  Critical/Creative Representations, Wicazo Sa Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Diálogo, an Interdisciplinary Studies Journal, Films of the American Indian Film Festival: 1975-2000, and First American Art Magazine.