long story short

Hey, you found me.  Thanks for visiting my site.  

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I'm originally from the Denver area, where I survived the Columbine shootings in 1999. I have since been interested in the power of writing to make sense of crises, to heal from traumas, to build communities, and to resist and advocate.

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I'm really proud of the publications I have played large and small roles in.  As a student at the University of Colorado Denver, I co-founded the student literary journal that went on to become Copper Nickel.  Later, I co-founded and co-edited the literary journal Bat City Review along with the poets Jessica Piazza, James Capozzi, and Kurt Heinzelman. 

 

I'm also grateful for the journals and editors who have chosen my poems for publication and, sometimes, even for recognition with awards.  My poem “Habits of Creature” was chosen by Kaveh Akbar to receive the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters, and my poem "Indelible in the Hippocampus" was nominated by The Worcester Review for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. I was a published finalist for the 2018 Tupelo Quarterly Broadside Prize and the 2021 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize.  Recent poems appear or are  forthcoming in CutBank: All Accounts & Mixture, Denver Quarterly, peculiar, and the anthology Without a Doubt (New York Quarterly Press, 2022).

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I also hold a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Texas at El Paso.  I have presented and published research on failed crisis responses to ecological disasters, teaching and learning during extreme situations, diversity and cancel culture, queer representation in contemporary literature, and the poetry and poetics of HIV/AIDS.

 

I worked for many years as a medical editor and grant writer for cancer research at the University of Washington School of Medicine. I now teach science writing and health communication at the Medical University of South Carolina. As part of the MUSC Office of Humanities, I regularly assist with health humanities courses, events, and outreach programs, such as MUSC’s annual Septima P. Clark Student Poetry Competition.