Biography
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter is a writer, artist, and scholar whose academic and creative pursuits are grounded in language, literature, philosophy, and religion. She is completing an Honors B.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures, with concentrations in Spanish and French and 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. After graduation, she plans to return to the West Coast for graduate study and to further cultivate her artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical commitments. In addition to her native English, she speaks Spanish and French with advanced proficiency, Quechua at an intermediate level, and has recently begun studying Nahuatl.
Her scholarly interests focus on the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of language and narrative. She is particularly interested in Latin American magical realism, which she approaches in relation to the Indigenous peoples and traditions of Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes. That intellectual curiosity also extends to Indigenous languages, philosophies, and religious traditions.
This fascination with language and its mysteries carries into her artistic practice as well. As a fiction writer, Ava explores the porous threshold between the real and the fantastic. Her gothic, surrealist, and magical realist narratives move through elusive realms where dream meets waking and the earthly meets the transcendent. She takes inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine metaphysics, Isabel Allende’s mystic heroines, Leonora Carrington’s occult dreamscapes, and Remedios Varo’s ever-alchemizing imagination. Within this liminal terrain, her fiction returns to enduring philosophical questions: the psychoanalytic tension between Eros and Thanatos, Georges Bataille’s reflections on eroticism, death, and continuity, the Jungian collective unconscious, and the esoteric inheritances of mysticism, theology, and alchemy.
In the visual arts, Ava works primarily in ink, gouache, and oil, creating surreal, symbol-laden landscapes inhabited by hybrid feminine figures—sphinxes, dolls, and wraithlike forms—suspended between sorrow and liberation. Her imagery dwells in the slow convergence of opposites: light and darkness, beauty and decay, loss and longing. By weaving together myth, memory, desire, and disquiet, she creates intimate, dreamlike spaces where lived experience merges with the unconscious and the visible world begins to dream.
Music also occupies an important place in her life. Alongside a longstanding love of genres ranging from psychedelic folk to black metal, she plays piano and has recently begun exploring synthesizers, composition, and songwriting. She hopes to bring her classical foundation into dialogue with the dark, synth-driven textures she has long loved, eventually developing a sound distinctly her own.
Beyond the studio and the classroom, Ava finds creative solace, spiritual depth, and a profound sense of connection in the natural world. Hiking, backpacking, stargazing, and long wanderings through forested trails are integral to her life. From Alaska to Argentina, the diverse landscapes of the Americas—woodlands, deserts, jungles, and mountain ranges—continue to nourish her imagination. Yet it is the towering evergreens, moss-covered forests, and dewy fog of the Pacific Northwest that feel most like home.
Teaching and the cultivation of literacy and multilingualism are just as fundamental to Ava’s sense of vocation. Over the past several years, she has worked as a tutor, mentor, and teaching assistant, and she hopes to continue along this path abroad through international fellowships or assistantships before pursuing graduate study in Religious Studies or Mesoamerican Studies and, ultimately, a doctorate in Comparative Literature.
This website brings together her literary, scholarly, and artistic work—fiction, essays, research, and visual art—while also offering a place to share the ideas, influences, and preoccupations that continue to shape her thought.
Research
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter’s research is interdisciplinary, grounded in comparative literature, Latin American literary and cultural studies, and Latin American intellectual history, with broader commitments to literary theory, critical theory, and philosophy. Her work is particularly concerned with metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, the philosophies of language and religion, and the relation between literature and philosophy. Across these fields, she examines how literary form bears on questions of language, knowledge, reality, and being.
A central focus of her research is Indigenous studies, particularly Mesoamerican, Andean, and Amazonian intellectual traditions. She works with Indigenous cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies through approaches informed by religious studies, the anthropology of religion, linguistic anthropology, Indigenous linguistics, and cosmopolitics. Her research also engages the environmental humanities, including ecocriticism, with particular attention to Indigenous intellectual and ecological traditions, Nahuatl, and the relation between language, poetics, and thought.
Within Latin American literature, she is especially interested in magical realism, lo real maravilloso, and the fantastic, as well as the historical and conceptual conditions under which these modes emerge. Her secondary interests include mysticism, Western esotericism, ritual studies, political ecology, psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, hermeneutics, myth and folklore, and nineteenth-century Gothic literature. Her work is shaped by writers, artists, and scholars including Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Juan Rulfo, José María Arguedas, Miguel Ángel Asturias, João Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Kusch, Miguel León-Portilla, James Maffie, and Jacques Derrida.
She is currently completing an honors thesis in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University. The project examines the relationship between Nahua (Mexica) thought and mid-twentieth-century Mexican literature, focusing on works by Juan Rulfo, Elena Garro, and Carlos Fuentes. Its central argument is that magical realism is a historically mediated narrative formation through which questions of language, being, and reality are rearticulated within the formal, metaphysical, and spatiotemporal conditions of the modern novel.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 