Education
Teaching Interests
My courses include Introduction to Poetry Writing, Introduction to Speculative Fiction, Advanced Workshops in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction, The Lyric Essay, Living Writers, Writing About Place, Monstrosity in Literature and Film, Apocalyptic Literature and first year seminars on immigrant literature, dystopian fiction, and bodies in transformation. I also teach Writers in the Schools, whereby students teach creative writing at local elementary schools and am the advisor for the literary magazine, Muses. I co-facilitate creative writing, organizing such events as a trip to the Dodge Poetry Festival, an emerging writers conference, and the creative writing awards.
I encourage students to become omnivorous readers and passionate writers and to let new knowledge unsettle and transform them. I teach that texts are dispatches from other worlds that offer us a complexity that approximates the textured world we live in. For this unquantifiable information about humanity, we will even walk into the depths of hell with Dante. At the center of my pedagogy is the belief that by engaging with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Students can identify inherited narratives, imagine alternative subject positions, acquire new ways of seeing and intervene in unquestioned or policed modes of being.