While living in the United States, I have started to become more involved in the community. At IU, I have participated in departmental events such as First Thursdays, Portuguese Week, Cafezinho, and Teatro VIDA. For VIDA, I adapted the Brazilian play “O Rei da Vela” (1933), by modernist Oswald de Andrade, and acted in it as the terrible capitalist Abelardo, The First. I presented one of my research projects about Hilda Hilst at our Diálogos conference, the event so well organized by my fellow department colleagues, and I gave a workshop about Brazilian women writers at the 2022 IU International Women’s Day Conference. I am on the organizing committee for an academic and cultural event that will take place fall 2022, celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Semana da Arte Moderna, one of the biggest cultural events in Brazil’s history. I was also a recipient of the 2021 Global Citizenship Award, a scholarship for International Students at IU, in which I did a video telling my life story in a Brazilian family of Syrian heritage. Beyond IU, I am the co-chair of the Portuguese Events Committee for the Indiana chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), where I work with fellow Spanish and Portuguese teachers from all over the state.

In addition to my academic career, I am a performing artist and writer with six books published in Brazil. Recently, I got my first poems in English published in CANVAS Magazine, and one of them, “dead woman,” was selected as the best-written text of the year. I also published a couple of texts internationally, one in the French magazine Revue Internationale D’art et D’artologie (2021) about my literary work as a poet, and one about Brazilian modernism in the prestigious magazine Nossa América (2022), distributed by the Memorial da América Latina. I have also done some interviews in Brazilian newspapers about writers such as Lygia Fagundes Telles and Patrícia Galvão. 

This first year at IU was very challenging, but I am so grateful for this wonderful opportunity and the great reception I have received since I got here. I would like to use this space to thank all my friends and colleagues for the affection and shared support we had this year; and my teachers Estela Vieira, Alejandro Mejías-López, Heitor Martins, Luciana Namorato, K. Allen Davis, and R. Andrés Guzmán for all the incentive inside and outside of the classroom.