L. Rain Prud'homme-Cranford

Biography

Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (Dr. PC, previously Goméz Ph.D.): Reads too much, drinks too much black tea, and watches too much SF/Fantasy/Speculative Fiction. Dr. PC's home department is English and she is also affiliated faculty, International Indigenous Studies / Political Science at the University of Calgary. Dr. PC's research specializations include: Louisiana Creole cultural formation;  Fatness,  Wellness, & Body Aesthetic Studies; Environmental Humanities; Indigenous, Creole, Cajun, Redbone, Black, and Méstizo cultures of the Gulf South; Cultural Rhetorics & Literatures; Gender, Sexuality, & Queerness; Global Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous Cultural Studies; TEK/STEM within rhetoric, writing, & culture; and U.S. Southern literature and cultures often highlighting her Louisiana Creole and Gulf coastal homescapes.

Dr. PC teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous studies;  Multimodal IBPOC Rhetorics; Art as Activism; Gender, Sexuality, & 2SQ studies; Environmental humanities; Body, Fatness, and Health/Wellness literatures; Creative Writing; and Global Indigenous studies. Her classes are community discussion-driven and highly multimodal: “We read a lot. We talk a lot. We tell and listen to stories. We watch and listen to a lot. We laugh a lot and even cry. We witness and tell stories to be better relatives and we think through the tensive spaces to imagine better futures.”

Dr. PC's recent and upcoming publications include Post-Contact Afro-Indigeneity and cultural méstizaje within Gulf Creole/Creole-Cajun formations; Fat/Obesity and Gender/ Sexuality; TEK and Rhetorics; Creole Poetics & Tidaletics; Creole Afro-Indigenous Futurisms; and Critical Mixed-race Theory. Her recent books include the edited collection, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (eds. Rain Prud’homme-Cranford; Darryl Barthé, and Andrew Jolivétte, 2022); Miscegenation Round Dance: Poémes Historiques (2021); the forthcoming monograph Gumbo Stories: Quantum Relation-Making in the Creole South (2026); and Singin’ the Tides Home: Poems in Call, Response, and Chorus (2025), with Carolyn Dunn & Maaliyah Papillion. Dr. PC's current projects in progress include the monograph "Gather at the River": Spiritual Ecologies in Red/Black Literatures;” the edited collection "Genealogies of Water (Re)Storying the Indigenous Gulf Circum-Caribbean: A Collection of Thought and Arts" (eds. Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Carolyn Dunn, and Jean-Luc Pierite); the collection “Nobody Loves a FAT Girl”: Obesity, Obsession, Exile, and the Largeness of Literary Resistance; and a series of multimodal paintings/artworks titled Terra Pinguis exploring bodies of size in harmony with their ecologies.

She is a FATtastically queer (dis)Abled poet-scholar-teacher-musician-artist, whose works oft centers dialogues on/with/about Louisiana Creole, Indigenous & post-contact Indigeneity, IBPOC arts & literatures, and/or circum-Gulf cultures and landbases alongside issues of gender, environmental sustainability/justice, fat/body, and disability/chronic illness.  She is grateful to live and work on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot (Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai) Nations, the T'suu Tina, the Stoney Nakoda, and Métis Nation of Alberta (Districts 5 & 6) peoples. Rain is also the Executive Editor, Publisher, and "Book Doula" of That Painted Horse Press, a borderless non-profit p.o.d. publishing house.