Press & Public Writing
Awards
Prism Award, Paulette Curkin Pride Resource Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2026
John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association, 2025, for Masculinity in Transition (University of Minnesota Press, 2023)
Excellence Award, Emerging Leader, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2025
Monette Prize for Best Dissertation in Gay and Lesbian Studies, CUNY Graduate Center, 2018
Podcasts & Interviews
Gender Stories with Alex Iantaffi, “Masculinity in Transition,” October 23, 2023
In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer, “Masculinity in Transition,” December 4, 2023
“K. Allison Hammer Imagines the Queer and Trans Possibilities of Masculinity,” interview by Lauren Herold, Autostraddle, February 8, 2024
University of Minnesota Press Podcast, “Masculinity in Transition: In Conversation with Kale Fajardo,” March 21, 2024
Keynotes
Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies, 44th Annual Conference, Lisbon, 2024
17th International Conference on Persons, Berlin, 2024
Recent Talks
“Late Style, Late Times: Mrs. Dalloway and Mutt,” roundtable “Late Style, Late Times: Literary Study at the End,” ESSE 2026 (European Society for the Study of English), Santiago de Compostela, August 31, 2026
“The Future of Trans Masculinity: Beyond the Manosphere,” lecture, and workshop “The Wound of Divided Virtue: Unruly Alliance and the Queer/Trans Critique of Fraternity,” Masterclass “Transformations of the Present” (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Colby Gordon, and Jack Halberstam), Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School, Freie Universität Berlin, June 2, 2026
“The Future of Trans Masculinity: Beyond the Manosphere,” hybrid lecture, Center for Diversity, Media, and Law (DiML), Justus Liebig University Giessen, May 28, 2026
“Trans Feminism and Popular Film: Meeting the Anti-Gender Moment,” lecture series “The United States in the Twenty-First Century and after Trump,” GCSC, Justus Liebig University Giessen, May 18, 2026
“Exuberant Embodiment: A Trans Utopia for an Unbearable Present,” Justus Liebig University Giessen, 2024
“Diversity Issues and the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections,” invited lecture series, Justus Liebig University Giessen, 2024
“The Holy War on Transgender Communities in the United States,” Justus Liebig University Giessen, 2023
Recent & Forthcoming Writing
“Transmasculine Life Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Masculinity, ed. Brad Congdon (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
“‘I Do Not Appear’: Marianne Moore and the Trans Modernist Poetics of Withdrawal,” in Trans Modernism, ed. Chris Coffman and Mat Fornier (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming)
“Exuberant Embodiment: A Trans Utopia for an Unbearable Present,” Utopian Studies 36, no. 1 (2025)
“How to Make an Enemy: Transmisogyny and the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election,” in Diversity Issues in the USA (transcript, 2024)
“Book Banning in the U.S.: A Call for Multi-Generational Activism,” in Queering Desire: Lesbians, Gender, and Subjectivity (Routledge, 2024)
Review of Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Hypatia Reviews Online (2024)
Earlier Public Essays
“Toward a Theory of Female Phallicism,” EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts (2022)
“‘Jettisoned’: Angelina Weld Grimké and the Banning of Social Justice in U.S. Classrooms,” Frontiers Augmented (2021)
“Relinquishing the Sacred Quest for Thin,” The Lifted Brow (2017)
“Plastic Inertia,” The Lifted Brow 36 (2017)