Degrees

Ph.D., Creative Writing, University of Denver, 2020
M.F.A., Creative Writing, Oregon State University, 2015
B.A., Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010

Research

As a practitioner of forms from fiction to creative nonfiction to poetry, my writing works between and across genre boundaries to explore personal and environmental spaces at the edges of narrative. Whether this means examining the complicated legacy of Antarctic exploration in the American literary imagination or assembling stories of chronic illness that fall outside of medicalized recovery narratives, my writing takes place at the uncomfortable juxtapositions of form and content, where the stories we tell begin to tell themselves.

My first full-length book, In the Antarctic Circle, works in the transitional realm between prose poem and fictional fragment, charting Antarctica as a domestic rather than expeditionary space. My second book, You’re the Woods Too, places poems titled after moss alongside stories of wilderness retreat in order to explore what happens when the binary between the natural and the human breaks down. Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted, my chapbook about living with Crohn’s disease, uses diagrams of ghosts and passages from Clarice Lispector to trace the fuzzy edges of life with a chronic illness.

Each of these works makes use of a hybrid approach to genre as a door into the liminal, the uncertain, the tense. My goal as a writer is to bring the reader to a place where their own imagination can flourish, using my books as a start (or, more likely, a middle-point) to a larger conversation.

Teaching

For me, creative writing is less about cultivating a set of tools that lead to a desired result than about asking a series of questions to guide you through the rich, uncertain spaces you might encounter in the writing process. Who is your writing for and where does it emerge from? What stories do you need to tell? How are structure, form, and language essential to those stories? Where does your relationship to language light up? As I see it, your own answers to these questions will influence your process, your style, and your unique take on a field that is constituted through new answers and, ultimately, new questions.

As a longtime Small Press Editor at Entropy and a former Assistant Editor of Denver Quarterly, I also prioritize context in my approach to creative writing. My classes often involve visits from authors, attendance of Amherst College’s vibrant literary reading series, and an exploration of the conversations that frame the work we read and write. We also build our classroom community through small- and large-group conversations about our writing processes, as well by reading each others’ work. These forays into literary community reflect my understanding of writing as a collective journey. Writing is a conversation, an interaction, a site of communication. By living in that dynamic space together, we create a wellspring for our own writing as well as for our reading of each other’s work.

Selected Publications

Books

The Rolodex Happenings, Stillhouse Press, 2024
You’re the Woods Too, Essay Press, 2023
In the Antarctic Circle, Autumn House Press, 2021
Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted, Ricochet Editions, 2020

Short Stories

 Bayou Magazine 74 (Fall 2021): “Not Because I Am Worried I Will Go in the Night”
The Florida Review 43.1 (Spring 2019): “There’s a Kid Everywhere”
Ninth Letter 15.2 (Fall 2018/Winter 2019): “The Beginning”
Five Points 17.3 (Fall 2016): “Retreat,” “Pilgrimage,” “My Family Abroad,” “Myself”

Essays

The Offing (November 10, 2022): “Neversink”
The Southern Review (Winter 2019): “After the Window”
Witness XXXI.1 (Spring 2018): “The Last Remedy”
Seneca Review 47.1 (Fall 2016): “Real Creek: A Week at Shotpouch Cabin”

Poetry

Ecotone 31: The Climate Issue (Fall/Winter 2021): “When the storm passed”
Poetry Daily (April 7, 2021): “66°27'S 91°54'E”
Diode Poetry Journal 12.2 (August 23, 2019): “Untils”
The New York Times (June 15, 2019): “Transmission”

Reviews

Denver Quarterly 55.1 (Winter 2020): “Unruly Illness and Medical Discourse in Anne Boyer’s The Undying”
The Massachusetts Review (October 28, 2020): “Landscape, Embodied: On Petra Kuppers’ Gut Botany”
The Volta (April 25, 2016): “Define ‘Hybrid’: On Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres”

Selected Awards, Honors, and Residencies

Stillhouse Press Novella Prize, Winner (2022)
Essay Press/University of Washington Bothell MFA Book Contest, Editor’s Selection (2021)
Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, Winner (2020)
Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Resident (2020)
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Resident (2020)
I-Park Foundation, Resident (2019)
Fulbright Fellowship, Malta (2015-2016)
Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions (2014)
Unstuck Flash Fiction Open, Co-Winner (2013)