Antonio López

Antonio López (he/his/él) was born and raised in East Palo Alto, and holds degrees from Duke University (B.A. African American Studies & Cultural Studies), Rutgers-Newark (M.F.A. Poetry), and the University of Oxford (M.Phil Modern Middle Eastern Studies) where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. In his master’s thesis, Come Come Wherever You Are, López conducted an ethnographic study of a Turkish mosque in North London founded and led by followers of Fethullah Gϋlen, also known as hizmet, who fled to the UK after their movement was accused of orchestrating the 2015 failed Turkish coup. As a third-year PhD student in Modern Thought and Literature program at Stanford University, his research interests are at the intersections of oral & literary histories, urban planning & social policy, and ethnic studies/critical race theory. His doctoral dissertation, The Most Expensive Hood in the World builds upon scholarship on majority-minority cities and towns in urban California, most notably D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land (2005) and Emily Strauss’s Death of a Suburban Dream (2014). Interviewing past and present civic leaders, community member organizations, and newspaper archives, López hopes to produce a creative history of East Palo Alto that honors the city’s historic ethos to protect the most vulnerable populations living in the shadow of the Silicon Valley. His debut poetry collection, Gentefication, was selected by Gregory Pardlo as the winner of the 2019 Levis Prize in Poetry. Antonio is currently fighting gentrification in his hometown as the newest and youngest councilmember for the City of East Palo Alto.