Honora Spicer
Honora Spicer is a place-based educator, poet, literary translator, and Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She researches US/Mexico borderlands history, with an interest in migration, the carceral state, infrastructure and communication networks. Her dissertation, POST BOND, addresses the role of the postal service in urban border formation through a study of one square mile in El Paso, TX between 1848 and 1971, at the current sites of an ICE detention center, a NASA office, an airport runway, and an air mail facility. Her public history engagements use critical cartography and counter-mapping in experiential teaching. She taught at El Paso Community College, where she was also a faculty fellow with the Mellon Humanities Collaborative. She has taught with expedition-based learning programs for five years. An advocate of bilingual learning and literature, she is part of the leadership of Cardboard House Press and organizes bilingual poetry readings and bookmaking workshops with Cartonera Collective and des/centro de poesía in Providence, RI. Her essays and literary translations have appeared in The Boston Review, Pesapalabra, Asymptote, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her commentary series in Jacket2, ‘Architectures of Disappearance,’ addresses poetry that confronts physical and linguistic architectures of movement constriction. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library and Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. She is a 2024-2025 Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Doctoral Fellow. photo credit: Giancarlo Huapaya, Harvard Map Collection