I am first and foremost, a writer: I believe in disruption with words, healing with words, human connection with words, revolution with words, escape with words.
I love, more than anything, the way a sun sets behind an un-visited dive bar on a hot, summer evening midweek, the blacktop vibrating with possibility — and I wrote about it in my first full-length book of hybrid poetry, Lived in Bars.
I am multi-genre: I do not conform to one writer’s identity. I write narrative nonfiction, poetry, essay, short fiction, young adult fiction — and blends and bends of anti-genre forms. I have been twice nominated for Best of the Net, a finalist in nonfiction for Ruminate Magazine and So to Speak, finalist in the William Van Dyke Short Story and Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, honorable mention in the Lorian Hemingway Prize for short fiction, and semi-finalist in the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. My first collection of hybrid poetry was the winner of Kingdoms in the Wild‘s annual chapbook contest, Roots Grew Wild, and explores my tendency for poetic hybrid forms through narrative storytelling.
I am a pop culture scholar: I engage in academic research, specializing in pop culture and the horror genre and enjoy fusing the creative & the critical. My current research for an upcoming The Mummy Franchise Anthology uses a queer lens to understand the role of nostalgia and queer coding childhood films by exploring bisexuality in The Mummy (1999).
As I explore the confluence of pop culture, physical media, and identity, I am writing my memoirs-in-essays, Nostalgia Disease. Several essays in this collection have since been published in Chaotic Merge, Under the Gum Tree, Pioneertown, and others.
I am an educator: I am a college writing instructor and teach across the Denver Metro area. I am passionate about media and digital literacy and strongly believe in the fight against misinformation. I aim to empower students with knowledge and tools to fight back against propaganda, mass media, and other manipulative digital-age weapons in our post-truth era. I embrace a decentralized pedagogy, focusing on the study of rhetoric to disrupt, dismantle, and decolonize standard academic practices and gatekeeping to reject harmful power structures that further marginalize learners. I believe that education and literacy by nature, is radical. As censorship threatens access to information, ideas, and literature, is in imperative we join the fight together.
I am an Exvangelical: I recently completed a hybrid format chapbook length memoirs-in-essays If You Loved Me, You Would, which details my personal experience coming of age in the fundamentalist, evangelical faith. At the peak of purity culture and Toxic Americana’s union in the late 90’s/early 00’s, I was cycled through abuse until I eventually left the Assemblies of God church at age 21, divorced and deconstructed from my faith. As part of this journey, I am co-editing the anthology Take the Fruit, Flood the Desert: A Religious Trauma Anthology which offers a platform for other fundamentalist survivors to share their stories.
I am a mother: My hybrid prose and poetry collection All the Parts We Haven’t Lost, intersects mothering in the face of trauma and depression. I believe in love, family, and community; in child-centered kinship and community care to support all parents. This collection is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in July of 2024.
I am a revolutionary: I believe we are not here to simply work until we die. I actively resist toxic productivity culture, dominant culture, and the status quo. I believe it is our responsibility as active participants in society to critique, change, and be radical in our choices to protect the earth and its people. It is our civic and human responsibility to engage, resist, and be vocal in order to build and maintain the world we want for ourselves and future generations. This entails constant, hard work. I refuse to believe the current way of existing together is the best that we’ve got; a better world is possible. For anti-racist resources, please visit Anti-Racism Daily, sign-up for the newsletter and contribute in any way you can as a member of our global society. Denver-based organizations and ways to protect Trans Youth can also be found here. To learn more about abolition and transforming harm, explore this reading list. “No one of us can be free until everybody is free.”
I am a wanderer: I was born and raised in the fragrant orange groves of inland Southern California, but I’ve been chasing that elusive concept of home since I witnessed the vast, east Texan sky bloom on my very first cross-country road trip at the age of seven. I am a true nomad, forever craving the taste of gravel burrowed beneath my gumline: I never stay put, and The Road will always be my mistress, my mother, my true home. I guess I got that ramblin’ bone.
