Donna Aza Weir-Soley, President
Associate Professor, Florida International University
Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley (Aza) is the author of Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings (University Press of Florida 2009, 2017) and two books of poetry: First Rain (Peepal Tree Press, 2006) and The Woman Who Knew (Finishing Line Press, 2016). She also co-authored the groundbreaking anthology Caribbean Erotic (with Opal Palmer Adisa, Peepal Tree Press, 2010). Weir-Soley teaches in the departments of English, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women Studies and Latin American Studies. Her courses include surveys in the literatures of African and New World subjects in the nineteenth century and in the Harlem Renaissance period, women’s writing in the Caribbean and in the African Diaspora, and multicultural women’s literature in the USA. She also teaches seminars in literatures of enslavement and colonialism, African women’s writings, Caribbean poetics, and on Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison. Weir-Soley has been honored with the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, the Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Travel Fellowship, the 2015 FIU Award in Service, and the 2016 FIU Engagement Award for her partnerships with university students, poets and charitable organizations to build houses and fishponds ain Haiti. She is also a facilitator for prison educational exchanges and collaborations, including Exchange for Change.
E-mail: weirsole@fiu.edu