WSQ “Chronic” Special Issue Launch

Nancy K. Miller teaches life writing and cultural criticism at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature. Her most recent books are the memoir My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism, and with Tahneer Oksman, the edited collection Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology.

Tahneer Oksman (tahneeroksman.com) is associate professor of writing at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. She is author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs; coeditor of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself; and coeditor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology. 

Amber Jamilla Musser is a professor of English, Africana Studies, and incoming chair of Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research lies at the intersection of race, sexuality, and culture. Her books include: Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (2018) and most recently Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (2024)

Mathew Rodriguez is a New York-based writer and editor and student in the Biography and Memoir program at CUNY Graduate Center. He is a former senior editor at The Atlantic and his first memoir, Tough Guy, is forthcoming in January 2027 from Abrams Books. 

Angela Francis’s scholarly research examines how we write about passion, recognition, and the body. She currently serves as associate director for student success at the CUNY School for Professional studies and was most recently published in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology (2023).

Kate Schnur is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at CUNY Queens College. Her research focuses on the intersections of modernist literature, the history of medicine, and gender, sex, and reproduction and has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Electric Literature, Medical Humanities, and The William Carlos Williams Review.

Alana Guarino was a musician and artist living in Central Florida. She was drawn to the idea of using artwork and creativity to explore life’s meaning, to process emotions, and to reflect upon life experiences. 

Maria Susan Guarino is a teacher who currently lives in New York City, where she attends school. She drifts between disability studies, feminist thought, and the arts. She can be reached at [email protected].

Rachel C. Lee is a Professor of Gender Studies, English, and the Institute of Society & Genetics at UCLA & a former Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women/ Barbra Streisand Center.  Her collaborative works on chemicals, mold, disability, and care for those with environmental illnesses have appeared in the MDPI journal Humanities, the edited anthology Posthuman Convergences (Edinburgh UP, 2025) and will be forthcoming in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature.

This special issue of WSQ takes the contemporary phenomenon of long COVID as its point of departure to consider the social, affective, and political consequences of living with chronic illness.

The articles and hybrid work included in the issue map the critical and scholarly intersections of chronic illness with disability and critical race studies, care, affect, and feminist eco-theory. WSQ: Chronic explores new ways to live with and understand the challenges of chronic illness, and in the process, following activism and scholarship in the fields of health humanities and graphic medicine, proposes new paradigms of health and healthcare.