Recent News
October 2023: Pleased to join Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School in the development of their brilliant new Master of Creative Performance Practice postgraduate degree. This cutting-edge Masters encourages students to deepen their own and others’ creative performance practices via a decolonised world view.
September 2023: Thrilled to graduate from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz with a PhD in Literature and Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies! Special thanks to my advisors Eric Porter, Carla Freccero, Christopher Chen, and Derek Conrad Murray.
August 2023: I write about the rich variety of Pacific artists in the World Weather Network for Contemporary HUM.
May 2023: I review Jess Richards' stunning new hybrid memoir Birds and Ghosts for Columbia Journal in "Through the Eyes of Winged Things."
And I speak with debut novelist Sara Freeman about genre, fragmentation, and feminist literature for The Common in "Sentences worth Keeping."
March 2023: A new essay about Cyclone Gabrielle, climate change, and the liminal spaces that disaster creates at The London Review of Books.
February 2023: Thank you History of Consciousness for interviewing me for this profile!
April 2022: "Long Shadows," my travel essay about the culture and heritage of Ukraine and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, is published at The Common.
Spring 2022: Teaching for Massey University's intermediate creative nonfiction writing course.
December 2021: Chairing and presenting work in a panel on nonfiction and poetry at NonfictioNOW 2021: "Associative Energies: the Crosswalk between Nonfiction and Poetry." View the recording in the conference digital archive.
November 2021: Presenting a paper on poetry and the nonhuman, "Animal, Mineral, Writer: Posthumanism and the Literary Arts" in the 2021 ASLEC-ANZ conference Ngā tohu o te huarere: Conversations beyond human scales.
September 2021: "Outbreak Narratives," a lyric essay about the personal, environmental, and conceptual implications of the pandemic, is published in Landfall 242. Copies are available to order from the website, or please contact me for a PDF copy.
May 2021: Presenting a public lecture as part of my Visiting Scholar role at Te Herenga Waka--Victoria University of Wellington: "Unrestrained Refrains: Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary US Black Poetics." May 27th, 12-1pm, 81 Fairlie Terrace, Room 103, on Victoria University's Kelburn Campus. All welcome.
April 2021: Reading translations of poems by Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, and fiction by Rogelio Guedea, as part of the exhibition "De la milpa a la mesa" at Te Auaha Gallery in Pōneke/Wellington, NZ.
Spring 2021: Teaching on two coasts in the Zoom era: Nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University, and Political Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
February 2021: Presenting the "What if the City was a Theater?" academic symposium on performance and public space. Read about it in Article and join us from 11-13 February on the waterfront in Pōneke/Wellington, NZ.
Fall 2020: Facilitating an Advanced Nonfiction creative writing workshop at Columbia University. I'm also offering long-distance reiki sessions via Zoom. Contact me directly or connect through Minka, Brooklyn.
Summer 2020: Teaching "Political Writing," an upper-division undergraduate workshop and seminar, at UC Santa Cruz, for the History of Consciousness department. Open access syllabus available here.
July 2020: Offering virtual Reiki for Orenda Tribe's auction for Dził Asdzáán (Mountain Woman) Command Center, a collective of Diné matriarchs providing support to the US Diné indigenous community. Learn more.
June 2020: Join me on Zoom for "Spirit-Guided Writing," a workshop to benefit the New York Writers Coalition at their annual Write-A-Thon. Sunday June 7th, 7:45am-8:45am EST.
February 2020: Panelist on the Quarto Magazine industry panel: "Living And/Or Writing: a panel on making a living as a writer." February 28th, Dodge Hall room 413, Columbia University. All welcome.
January 2020: Pleased to be back at Columbia University, teaching "AUTO—Writing the Self," a seminar that examines the political economy of different forms of self production in creative writing. Open-access syllabus available here.
January 2020: Panelist at the MLA 2020 conference in Seattle, WA, on: "The Space Between Creative Nonfiction and Literary Criticism: Theorizing, Writing, and Publishing Critical-Creative Hybrids," Friday, 10 January, 2020, 3:30pm, Sheraton -- Ravenna AB.
August 2019: Thrilled to be teaching a class on the lyric essay at Columbia University this fall semester. I'm also offering Reiki and He Rongoā sessions at Minka, Brooklyn.
March 2019: A new lyric essay about tragedy, white supremacy, and colonialism: "Oceanic Feeling, After Christchurch," at Lit Hub.
February 2019: I speak with Columbia University journalist Helen Benedict about border crossings, both personal and geopolitical, for The Common, here.
December 2018: Delighted to have a lyric essay, "Santa Cruz Journal," from my "Oceanic Feeling" series, performed in concert by musician Melodie Michel, in Santa Cruz, CA.
October 2018: I speak with debut fiction author Crystal Hana Kim about her new novel If you Leave Me.
July 2018: For The Common, an interview with Iris Martin Cohen about "Salons, New York City, and the Litriarchy."
Less Recent News
December 2017: For BOMB Magazine, I write about two books that made 2017 livable, here.
Reading with Lacy Warner and Allan Allen at KGB bar, Manhattan, NYC, on December 7th, 2017, 7pm, for Columbia Selects.
September 2017: Interview with debut nonfiction writer Sarah Perry for Literary Hub, here.
Fall 2017: Thrilled to join the incoming PhD cohort in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And with this, a change in coasts!
August 2017: Interview with Mensah Demary for The Common, here.
Spring 2017: Pleased to announce I am now represented by Renee Zuckerbrot of MMQLIT Literary Agency.
June 2017: In residence at the Tinos Quarry Platform in Tinos, Greece, presenting new work in the show Reassembly, opening 07.05.17.
May 2017: An interview with Alexander Chee for First Person Plural.
May 2017: The Female Writer is Political: an interview with Oddny Eir for The Common.
April 2017: Poem with a very long title published in UK magazine, Gutter, Issue 16.
Nonfiction writing resident at the Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, Illinois.
March 2017: All That is Risky: an interview with writer Sonya Chung for Entropy Magazine.
February 2017: Co-facilitator of the Aurora Writers' Creative Writing Retreat in Lauder, Scotland, Feb 24th-26, 2017. Full details here.
January 2017: Leaving New York City: an interview with poet Cathy Linh Che for The Common.
December 2016: Beyond Sound: a conversation with G Douglas Barrett for Guernica Magazine.
October 2016: Fall resident at the Catwalk Institute Arts Residency, Catskill, NY.
September 2016: Writing fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Virginia, USA.
September 2016: Pleased to be included in Ugly Duckling Presse's forthcoming Emergency Index of performance practice.
August 2016: In residence at the 2016 Akrai multidisciplinary arts residency in Sicily, Italy; wrote about the experience here.
June 2016: In residence at the Tinos Quarry Platform in Tinos, Greece, presenting new work in the show Curiosity, 07.02—10.31.16
April 2016: In dialog with Stephen O'Connor for BOMB Magazine.
April 2016: In dialog with Ruth Ozeki for Electric Literature.
April 2016: My lyric essay "On the Silencing of Voices," is published in The Pariah Anthology, by SFASU press.
March 2016: At #AWP16 , LA, 03.31: panelist in "From the Margins: Literary Magazines Supporting Writers of Color," representing Apogee Journal, alongside The Offing, Mosaic, AAWW, and TAYO.
March 2016: Congratulations to Margo Jefferson, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Autobiography! Our interview for Electric Literature here.
Really-not-recent News
November 2015: My interview with nonfiction writer, poet, and lyrical essayist Wendy S Walters is published at The Common here.
November 2015: I discuss White Allyship and race in the U.S. on The Anti-Americana Podcast in Brooklyn, NY. Listen here.
October 2015: Guest resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude; creative writing lecturer for the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
September 2015: "Bergen: Discourse and Context," on Public Books here.
September 2015: The Peripheral Writer: an interview with Hamid Ismailov, BBC writer-in-residence and Uzbek writer in exile, is published on Electric Literature here.
August 2015: My review of Norwegian composer Lene Grenager's Landscape with Machines appears in German print
journal Positionen.
May-June 2015: I take part in an arts residency at USF Verftet, Bergen, Norway, and teach workshops on "Unblocking Creativity."
Decemeber 2014: My essay "Dissolve" is published in Issue 14 of Cura Magazine.
December 2014: The Hairpin interviews me about writing and activism, for its "Women of our Year" series here.
December 2014: A short story, "You Make Me Opaque," in Conjunctions Journal.
September 2014: "Stay" receives a recommendation from the NY Times Opinion Pages.
September 2014: My essay about the self-mythologizing required of inhabitants of NYC, "I Believe New Yorkers," is published by The Common.
January 2014: I write about the politics of gentrification in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NYC, in "Bed-Stuy - Buy or Die?" for The Common and The Brooklyn Eagle.
September 2013: "Not Just Guilty: a white response to the George Zimmerman case," my essay on the politics of language misuse in the trial of George Zimmerman, is published by Apogee Journal.
Background image by Benjamin Breen for The Appendix