Emil' Keme

Emil’ Keme is an Indigenous K’iche’ Maya scholar, and professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory University. He is the author of Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021; Spanish, 2020 and 2022), which won Cuba’s prestigious Casa de las Americas Literary Criticism Prize in 2020, and Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala (2009; Spanish 2008). His current research focuses on Indigenous struggles for self-determination in various parts of Abiayala (the Indigenous ancestral name of the Americas). His work aims to highlight the potentialities of building trans-hemispheric Indigenous alliances by critically exploring the field of Indigenous studies, settler colonial borders, Indigenous forced migration, Indigenous approaches to environmental justice, and Indigenous women and LGBTQ2s+ rights. Keme is a co-founding member of the binational Maya anti-colonial collective, Community of Maya Studies, Ix’balamquej Junajpu Wunaq’, and volunteers as a cultural advisor for the International Mayan League in Washington, D.C. He is also a trustee of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he serves in the Governance, and Repatriation Committees.