Melissa D. Birkhofer is a settler scholar who was born in Iowa and grew up in North Carolina. She is teaching assistant professor of English at Appalachian State University. Birkhofer was founding director of the Latinx Studies Program at Western Carolina University and is codirector of the journal Label Me Latina/o. With Paul M. Worley, she is co-translator of Miguel Rocha Vivas’s Word Mingas: Oralitegraphies and Mirrored Visions on Oralitures and Indigenous Contemporary Literatures.