I am a poet, scholar, and educator based in coastal Maine. I grew up in the American Southeast, a region where I have deep family roots. My work confronts oppressions through the practice of revelatory writing, written work that reaches under the surface.  My newest poetry book, Magicicada (Unicorn Press 2024), contends with juvenile solitary confinement, while earlier poetry books Elegiaca Americana (Littoral Books 2022) and Enough! (Littoral Books 2020). confront political trauma and loss in America. My book of poems, Dolls (2Leaf Press 2021) takes a deep look at trans identity and gender roles in the traditional South. My scholarship likewise is activist, with recent books Photography and Resistance: Anticolonialist Photography in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and Mohawk Rebel: Shelley Niro’s Art and New York State (State University Press of New York 2024) immersed in honoring and understanding Indigenous American contemporary, feminist lens-based art. Earlier books  After Houses- Poetry for the Homeless and Motels Where We Lived (both published in 2014) and The Photographic Uncanny: Photography, Homelessness, and Homesickness (2020) confront homelessness. The poems in Ransom Street (2Leaf Press 2019), and the scholarship in Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South (Routledge 2014), seek to give voice to those on the margins of our country, leveraging poetry and scholarship to face issues of racial and gendered violence and economic injustice. Part of the precariat of academia, I teach for the University of Maine system.

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