About

I am a poet before I am anything else. Everything I do, whether writing, teaching, creating public art, or developing tools for expression, begins with that: the impulse to name, to listen, to reach for meaning. My work is about language, but not only in the way it is typically thought of. I am interested in the spaces between words, in what resists articulation, in the silent tension between the known and the unspeakable.

I was raised in a house where language carried weight. My mother, a community organizer and professor of political science, kindled it with precision. My father, a public defender, relied on its power to shape justice. I grew up learning that words are not neutral. They both save and condemn, bind and break. Later, through academic and artistic exploration, from the lessons that can only come with lived-life, and the slow realization that so much of human experience remains outside the limits of language, I came to see words as both a gift and a limitation: a means of structuring the unstructured, making the invisible seen, and naming the forces that shape us.

I teach at Middle Tennessee State University, where I help students wrestle with language as both a tool and an experience. I also lead writing workshops for frontline workers, trauma survivors, and communities navigating loss, where I guide people in reshaping the stories that shape them with careful attention paid to the channels through which language can be crafted and manipulated to achieve greater personal and community wholeness and well-being.

My most current work takes many forms:

• Lingwell– A digital tool that refines how people articulate complex emotions, offering clarity in moments where words often fail.
• The Iona Initiative – A public engagement project that builds spaces for shared expression, shared experience, and belonging.
• Stations – A site-specific public art project that explores loss, presence, and the language of impermanence.
• The Center for Linguistic Health – A research initiative dedicated to understanding the relationship between language, trauma, and healing.

I do not see language as something fixed or final. It is alive, shifting, breaking, reforming. It can wound or heal, confine or liberate. My work is an ongoing attempt to listen to it more deeply, to follow where it leads, and to invite others into that listening.