Hello and welcome to my brief bio. In terms of academic and creative interests, I have a plethora. Overall, I can say that I am an exuberant generalist. And, I tend to favor the part of me that is an experimental poet in a bio—I mean, who wouldn’t? I love that language is so versatile—and, if you ‘break language’ in the process of constructing, you can, well, re-construct otherwise. I also have a poet’s interest in literary theory and philosophy that stems from my undergraduate work. My creative work with language is built on the foundation I nurtured during art school, where I worked primarily in the wood studio, with some exciting forays in the small-metals and fiber arts studios. Prior to art school, I worked for several years at Donna Karan/DKNY in NYC as the lead design assistant to the head of home interiors. I was also co-founder and co-editor at Letter [r] Press, which published the literary journal Small Po[r]tions. My poetry and poetics manuscript, The Feminology of Spirit, was named a finalist for the 2017 Slope Editions Book Prize.
Education
M.F.A, Creative Writing and Poetics, University of Washington Bothell, 2015; B.A., Philosophy, St. John's College, 1994.
Teaching Style
On writing: I am committed to helping students view the writing process as a collaborative effort, to see writing as writing-in-community, voice as something we cultivate in conversation with other writers. My hope for students is that they develop both subjective agency and a genuinely relational approach to writing. I work to help students recognize and locate their own poetic rhythms, to transform what always arrives as an external demand or ‘assignment’ into an invitation to experiment with and explore language. This involves helping them see that, even while I want to help them achieve clarity and meet standards in their academic writing, I also want to help them achieve some distance from the demand that they duplicate normative structures and reproduce the ‘discourse of the university.’ I am dedicated to taking up each student’s writing as already theoretically and poetically interesting (and not just potentially, in some future, yet-to-be-realized form). The desire to join the broader (and, indeed, potentially more normative) writing community needs to come from students themselves if it is going to come at all.