I'm a poet in Portland, Oregon, writing at the intersections of the body, folklore, and the natural world. My poems often begin while I'm walking or in conversation with a friend.  On walks, a plant intrigues me, and I go home and read everything I can about it; somewhere in the botany — the root system, the survival strategy, the Latin name — I recognize what I was already carrying.  When I write from folklore or family stories, I explore the layers arising in my body and old storytelling traditions.  Naming, for me, is an act of understanding. It's how I pay attention, and attention is how I love things.

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I've come to this work on my own terms, through a practice of walking, reading, and revising until a poem carries its full weight. I write in the territory where grief and green things are kept under the same taxonomy, where the mundane and the sacred keep collapsing into each other. Alongside writing poetry, I teach at Portland State University and co-founded Reading Is Resistance, a community literacy project — because the belief underneath all of it is the same, that sharing language can be a form of care.