Biography
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter is a writer, artist, and scholar whose work moves through language, literature, philosophy, religion, and the environmental humanities. 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 while continuing to develop her work as a writer, artist, scholar, and teacher. In addition to her native English, she speaks Spanish and French at an advanced level, has a high-beginner foundation in Quechua, and has recently begun studying Nahuatl.
Her scholarly interests center on the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of language, narrative, and culture. She is especially drawn to Latin American literature and culture, which she often studies alongside Indigenous languages, cosmologies, and religious traditions, particularly in relation to Mesoamerica, Amazonia, and the Andes.
As a fiction writer, Ava explores the porous boundary between the real and the fantastic. Her stories move through gothic, surrealist, and magical realist worlds, often lingering between dream and waking, the earthly and the transcendent. In the visual arts, she works primarily in ink, gouache, and oil, creating surreal, symbol-laden landscapes inhabited by hybrid feminine figures—sphinxes, dolls, wraiths, and other threshold beings. Her imagery turns often to the meeting place of opposites: light and darkness, beauty and decay, loss and longing. Through myth, memory, desire, and disquiet, she creates intimate dreamscapes where lived experience meets the unconscious.
Teaching, literacy, and multilingualism are also central 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 this work abroad through international fellowships or assistantships before pursuing graduate study in Latin American Studies, Comparative Literature, or a related field.
This website brings together her literary, scholarly, and artistic work—fiction, essays, research, and visual art—while also offering a place for the ideas, influences, and questions that continue to shape her thought.
Research
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter’s research is rooted in comparative literature, Latin American literary and cultural studies, and Latin American intellectual history, with broader interests in literary theory, critical theory, philosophy, and religious studies. Her work examines how literary form gives shape to questions of language, knowledge, reality, and being, especially through metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and the philosophies of language and religion.
A central focus of her research engages Indigenous studies, particularly Mesoamerican, Andean, and Amazonian intellectual traditions. She approaches Indigenous cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies through religious studies, linguistic anthropology, Indigenous linguistics, and cosmopolitics, with related interests in the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, Nahuatl, and the relationship 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 from 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.
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.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 