photo credit: Markus Steffen

I am a poet, translator, and creative nonfiction writer from the Pacific Northwest. I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and a BA in Spanish Literature from Boise State University. I currently teach creative writing and literature courses as a full-time NTT faculty member at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

I am the author of the award-winning poetry chapbook Heavy Light (Two of Cups Press 2016); my creative work appears in Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, The Cincinnati Review, Brevity, The Journal, Flyway, and elsewhere. My translations of dissident Vietnamese poet Lý Đợi have been published in Asymptote, and received Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize for Translation and Multi-Lingual Texts. I have had the good luck to selected as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, and have been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, PLAYA, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and was a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellow at the Mineral School Artist Residency.

Currently, I am sending out my cross-genre, book-length manuscript that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between SE Asian and Western cultures. Material for the book comes from my living in Hanoi, Vietnam for two years and a following residency there. It includes poetry, flash creative nonfiction, and translations of poems by Lý Đợi, a Vietnamese poet whose work is censored in his native country. With this book I attempt to bring an updated, nuanced understanding of contemporary Vietnam into English, one that acknowledges neocolonialism and the intricacies of culture.

What is left out, unsaid, or lost between the speaker and the reader, the colonized and the colonizer, the self and the object of one’s affection, are common threads through all my work.