Victor Hugo Mendevil

Victor Hugo Mendevil is an English Ph.D. student at Northeastern University, having previously earned his M.A. in English at Northeastern as well. His primary scholarly interests are deeply rooted in the fields of Native American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous literature/storytelling, disability studies, postcolonial/decolonial poetry, narrative medicine, and creative writing as pedagogy. As an MA student, Victor founded the NU Writing Center’s Creative Writing Group and participated in the Co-op Program with the non-profit writing centre, Mass Poetry, as an Events and Communications Coordinator. He also served as a Storywriter and Editor for the Indigenous linguistic projects DAILP, the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence and its sister site, Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way (CWKW) (both projects by Dr. Ellen Cushman). During his PhD, Victor’s paper dissecting the Blackfeet Nation’s enrollment requirements affects on identity won the English Department’s 2024 Graduate Essay Contest for Literature and Literary Studies. Victor conducted research and led a small team on Hitch Stories, an intergenerational, tribally-led environmental storytelling collective, as a project leader with Dr. Jeremy Sorgen at Mills College. He has both served as a TA and a presenter in the courses, Global Literatures 1 and 2, and presented his findings on Indigenous Pacific storytelling through materiality and visual media at Northeastern’s 2024 Island Stories: Global Archipelagoes and Environmental Humanities Symposium (coordinated by Dr. Alison Glassie). Victor has taught in the NU Writing Program at Northeastern since 2023. Outside of academia, Victor has received creative writing fellowships from Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise Conference in St. Petersburg, the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, and the Sancho Panza Literary Seminar in Dublin. He is a shortlist recipient of the 2025 DISQUIET Literary Prize in Poetry and a Finalist in the poetry category of the 2026 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. Victor’s work has been published in The Malahat Review (University of Victoria), Fourteen Hills (San Francisco State University), Kitchen Table Quarterly, Azahares Literary Magazine (University of Arkansas – Fort Smith), ANMLY, Pangyrus LitMag, and Harbor Review. His poetry has been anthologized by Quillkeepers Press, Z Publishing (“America’s Best Emerging Poets”), and the City of Boston.