Mellon Mays Fellow wins award to work at university press

The Office of Fellowships is delighted to announce that Erika Barrios (WCAS ’20) has been chosen for the 2020–2021 cohort of the Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship! Next year, Erika will be placed with the university press at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Originally from the northeast suburbs of Illinois, Erika is graduating this year with a major in English literature. She began conducting literary research after her first year at Northwestern, when she worked as a research assistant for Open Door Archive, a digital repository and online exhibition space dedicated to hemispheric American literature. The project she worked on sparked her interest in contemporary poetry, open-access publishing, and the digital humanities. A former Kaplan Scholar and current Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Erika recently completed her honors thesis on the use of speech recognition software in contemporary Latinx poetry.

Outside of her academic pursuits, Erika has served as the editor in chief of Helicon, Northwestern's literary and arts magazine, and she has worked to make Northwestern a more just and inclusive community through her leadership in Wildcat Welcome and the Sustained Dialogue program.

Erika’s honors include the 2019 Helen G. Scott Prize for Literature and New Media, election to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, and a 2020 Wildcat Excellence Award.

Over the next fourteen months, Erika will continue to immerse herself in the world of books as an acquisitions assistant at MIT Press and hopes this experience will lead to a career that fulfills her commitment to supporting marginalized communities both in and beyond higher education.

The University Press Diversity Fellowship Program seeks to increase diversity in scholarly publishing by providing recent graduates placements in the acquisitions departments of six university presses—the University of Washington Press, the University of Chicago Press, Cornell University Press, Northwestern University Press, Ohio State University Press, and MIT Press—with the support of the Association of University Presses and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Through their apprenticeship, fellows will acquire deep and specialized knowledge of how editors identify emerging areas of scholarship, work with authors to develop manuscripts, manage the process of peer review and revision, present projects for approval, and represent them through each stage of publication.

Contact Jason Kelly Roberts at jason-roberts@northwestern.edu to learn more about the Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship.