Biography
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and artist whose work moves fluidly across language, literature, philosophy, and religion. She is currently completing a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures, with a concentration in Spanish and French, alongside a minor in Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Originally from southeastern Massachusetts, she has also lived in Miami, New Jersey, Oregon, Paris, and Santiago. In addition to her native English, she speaks Spanish and French with advanced proficiency, Quechua at an intermediate level, and has recently begun learning Nahuatl.
Her academic interests center on the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of language and storytelling. She is especially drawn to Latin American magical realism, which she approaches not only as a literary genre but as a way of thinking rooted in—and continually informed by—Indigenous worlds of knowledge. Much of her work seeks to understand magical realism in relation to Indigenous peoples and cultures, particularly those of Mesoamerica, including present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and other parts of Central America. For this reason, she often complements her literary studies with a focus on Indigenous languages, philosophies, and religious traditions.
This preoccupation with language and its many mysteries extends naturally into her creative work. As a fiction writer, Ava probes the porous threshold between the real and the fantastic. Her narratives—haunted by the specters of magical realism, the gothic, and the surreal—move through elusive terrains where dream converges with waking, allegory with speculation, and the earthly with the transcendent. She draws inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinthine metaphysics, Isabel Allende’s mystic heroines, Leonora Carrington’s occult dreamscapes, and Remedios Varo’s ever-alchemizing imagination. Within this liminal domain, her fiction returns repeatedly to her most enduring philosophical fixations: the psychoanalytic tension between Eros and Thanatos; Georges Bataille’s meditations on eroticism, death, and continuity; the Jungian collective unconscious articulated by Carl Jung; and the esoteric inheritances of mysticism, theology, and alchemy.
In the visual arts, Ava Linda works primarily with ink, gouache, and oil, creating surreal, symbol-laden landscapes inhabited by hybrid feminine figures—sphinxes, dolls, and wraithlike presences—suspended between sorrow and liberation. Her imagery dwells on the gradual unravelling of dualities: light and darkness, beauty and shadow, loss and longing. By weaving together myth, memory, desire, and disquiet, she seeks to evoke intimate spaces and luminous realms where lived experience brushes the unconscious and the visible world begins to dream.
Music is likewise a central current in her life. Shaped by melancholic and atmospheric genres—ethereal wave, psychedelic folk, black metal, neoclassical darkwave, doom, dream pop, and beyond—she has long loved the piano and has recently begun experimenting with synthesizers, composition, and songwriting. She aspires to fuse her classical foundation with the dark, synth-driven textures she has always cherished, gradually cultivating a sound that feels both exploratory and unmistakably her own.
Beyond the studio and the classroom, Ava Linda finds enduring solace in the natural world. Hiking, backpacking, stargazing, and wandering forested trails are central to her life. From Alaska to Argentina, her imagination draws nourishment from the wilderness of the Americas—woodlands, deserts, jungles, and mountain ranges alike. Yet among these landscapes, it is the moss-draped forests and dew-lit fog of the Pacific Northwest to which she feels most inwardly bound, and which she regards as her soul’s true home.
Equally central to Ava Linda’s vocation is her commitment to teaching and to the cultivation of literacy and multilingualism. Over the past several years, she has worked as a tutor, mentor, and teaching assistant, and she looks toward continuing this work abroad through international fellowships or assistantships—particularly in Latin America—before pursuing graduate study in Religious or Mesoamerican Studies and, ultimately, a doctorate in Comparative Literature.
This website serves as a home for her literary, scholarly, and artistic practice: a space where fiction, essays, research, and visual art converge, and where she shares the questions, inspirations, and constellations of thought that continue to shape her world.
Research
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter’s research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, bringing literary studies into sustained dialogue with philosophy, religion, anthropology, and linguistics, with a primary focus on Latin American traditions. Her work examines magical realism, the marvelous real, the fantastic, and the gothic, situating these modes within comparative and decolonial frameworks that foreground their historical and conceptual entanglements with Indigenous literatures and cosmovisions. Through this approach, she advances a view of the Americas as an interconnected and historically continuous cultural and ontological field. Her research also extends to the nineteenth-century Gothic and Fantastic within Anglophone and Francophone contexts.
Her theoretical orientation is grounded in metaphysics, ontology, and the philosophy of language, drawing on psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and decolonial traditions. She engages closely with Mesoamerican philosophies and cosmovisions—particularly those of the Mexica and the Maya—through linguistic anthropology, religious studies, and historical-comparative approaches to language and belief. In parallel, she works with Amerindian perspectivism and Indigenous epistemologies, attending to forms of ontological pluralism and cosmological expression through which relations among beings, worlds, and meanings are articulated.
Her work in religion and mysticism encompasses comparative theology, Abrahamic and Indigenous religious traditions, Western esotericism, hermetic and alchemical thought, ritual theory, and archetypal psychology. Increasingly, her research intersects with the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and Indigenous eco-ontologies, with particular attention to relational epistemologies, cosmopolitics, and the semiotics of land and language. Additional interests include multilingualism, second-language acquisition, and the relationships between orality, literacy, and literary pedagogy.
Her intellectual formation is shaped by writers and theorists including Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, José María Arguedas, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Elena Garro, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, João Guimarães Rosa, Rodolfo Kusch, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marisol de la Cadena, Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Gustav Jung.
She is currently working on an honors thesis in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Wesleyan University. The project theorizes Latin American magical realism—and the marvelous more broadly—as a cosmopolitical literary practice that enacts Indigenous metaphysics, ontologies, and philosophies of language. Drawing on Mesoamerican and Andean cosmological frameworks, the thesis argues that magical realist texts articulate a relational ontology in which language operates as a generative, world-constituting force rather than a mimetic one, thereby destabilizing binaries such as human and nonhuman, life and death, and signifier and referent. Through close readings of works by Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and related authors, the study positions magical realism as a metaphysical and cosmopolitical intervention that resists modernity’s disenchanted epistemologies and reactivates Indigenous modes of relationality within a pluriversal horizon.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 