Emilio del Valle Escalante
Emilio del Valle Escalante, now known as Emil' Keme, (born 1970) is a Guatemalan/K'iche Maya  professor and researcher in Indigenous literatures and cultures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written and edited books on his fields of expertise as well as various journal articles. He has also presented talks at other U.S. educational institutions. Career
Keme received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2004. His areas of expertise include contemporary Latin American and indigenous literatures and social movements, cultural and post-colonial studies and indigenous studies. Much of his work has been focused on textual production by Indigenous peoples in Abiayala (the Americas) and how these challenge the usual political and social narratives about Indigenous peoples in Latin America. This is part of a broader theme of colonialism, nationhood, national identity, race/ethnicity and gender. His book, Le Maya Q'atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance and Emancipation From Iximulew/Guatemala 1960-2012, which focuses on the poetry of ten contemporary Maya poets, was awarded the 2020 Casa de las Americas Literary Prize. He has presented his work on the Mayan movements at Penn State Lehigh Valley, and the Guatemalan Civil War at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since the fall semester of 2007. Graduate courses he has taught include Indigenous Literatures of the Americas, Contemporary Central American Narrative and Spanish-American Literature:1880–Present. Undergraduate courses include Mesoamerica Through Its Literature, Introduction to Indigenous Literatures, Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Magic realism, boom and post-boom, Contemporary Latin America: México, Central America and the Andes and Introduction to Latin American Literature. 