I am a poet and essayist—and the author of two books of poetry, Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012), with a third book Gentlewomen forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2020. My poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. By exploring ideas of indeterminacy, rootedness, and resilience, my current book project, Withness, uses plant thinking as a model for response to our current moment and in thinking towards the future.
My current public-facing work, in the form of Prairie Divination: Climate Counseling and the Ad Astra Community Poetry Project, focuses on helping people connect to their own ecosystems as a source of knowledge and inspiration for strategies to live in their world, to grieve and heal after loss, and to re-align their thinking towards kinship, community, and sustainability.
I am an Associate Professor in English at the University of Kansas specializing in creative writing, 20th and 21st Century poetry and poetics, queer ecology, and the environmental humanities. My work is informed by interdisciplinary research in social welfare, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, as well as previous work in the healing arts and at non-profit environmental organizations.
