🧙🏻‍♂️ a bit about me

My name is Wilfredo Flores, but you can also call me Wil if that’s too hard (just please don’t call me Alfredo or some other name 🙂). I'm a queer, Mexican American, foster care alum who grew up on the Southside of San Antonio, TX. My last name means "flowers" in Spanish, and I worked as a florist for three years. After dropping out of community college, I went back to undergrad at the University of Texas at San Antonio and received a degree in English with a concentration in professional writing. After, I received a master's in technical communication and specialization in rhetoric, as well as a certificate in teaching technical writing, from Texas Tech University. I graduated with my PhD in writing and rhetoric from the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, along with a certificate in Indigenous Studies, at Michigan State University in 2022. During my time in my PhD program, I spent most of my energy working with and in communities in Lansing, MI. You can read more about that on my Consulting page, and I'm always happy to chat more about it, too.

Now, I'm an Assistant Professor of Digital Cultural Rhetorics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies. I'm a qualitative researcher and rhetorical scholar whose thinking and writing constellate across theories of health and medicine, science and technology studies, digital cultural rhetorics, settler colonial studies, and Black / Native studies. My work has been featured in PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, Literacy in Composition Studies, and is forthcoming in other academic spaces.

Beyond the academic grind, I’m a huge gamer, and you can occasionally find me streaming over on Twitch (I'm usually playing single-player, narrative-driven games). I recently beat the Dark Souls trilogy and made my way through other FromSoftware games (I'm about 140 hours into my first playthrough of Elden Ring), and I’m currently lost in a Baldur’s Gate 3 run. I love talking about video games and science fiction, so if you ever want to chat me up, feel free to do so!