Biography

Dr. Harris Fernández received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2016 in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Her dissertation, De lo más pobre y de lo más lindo: Transnational Borges and Sandra Cisneros, considers how both writers challenge Western notions of time, space, and individual identity in their writing, as well as their interest in local ways of life of working-class communities in the Américas.

With the support of a Mellon Public Scholars Fellowship, Dr. Harris Fernández directed the multimedia project Nos contamos a través de los muros (We Tell Our Stories through these Walls) based on her writing workshops in 2015-16 in a Mexican women’s prison in Mérida, Yucatán. She has also taught writing, through the UCLA Prison Education Program at the Santa Fe Springs Community Reentry Program. Together with the class she edited an anthology of student writings from that class highlighting issues of social justice for women in prison, entitled Liberating Fictions.  She is currently at work on grant-funded research focused on the disappearance of the historic former Mexican American neighborhood of El Arbol Verde followed by demolitions led by the city of Claremont, CA from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. In this project, she is interested in the use and potential of public art to advocate for place guarding and social repair for displaced Mexican American communities.

Dr. Harris Fernández is a writer and literary translator whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harpers, Huizache, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Together with Matthew Gleeson, she translated Amparo Dávila’s influential story collection The Houseguest, (New Directions, 2018). Her classes engage students in the Latinx community of writers through frequent class visits by prominent local authors. Through these experiences and a step-by-step workshop approach to writing, she encourages the talents of the next generation of writers. 

In 2018 she directed UCLA’s Study Abroad Program in Buenos Aires. She has also taught film classes at Mexico’s national film archive, the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City.

A 2023-24 recipient of a California Arts Council/ Los Angeles Performance Practice Emerging Artist Award, she is a member of the Los Angeles-based writing collective Women Who Submit. In addition to her student mentorship work, she has served on the advisory council of UCLA’s Prison Education Program.