My classes question traditional genre distinctions and approach the creative writing process in ways that empower personal and collective wellbeing. My own essays and poems are often about pre-sickness, sensations in the phenomenon of "falling ill," and post-viral, chronic and mysterious illnesses in individual, societal, and environmental body-scapes. A central question to my writing and teaching is: What is a poet in the age of mass extinction?
I also paint Wall Poems, whichare large-scale calligraphic installations/interventions that have exhibited nationally in museums and galleries and are in conversation with other artists who imagine the dismantling of walls from their necropolitical origins. They are also inspired by a story: In 1919, amidst pandemic, civil war, and famine, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva lived in an attic apartment and kept a notebook. In one entry, after recording in meticulous detail the daily tasks necessary to survive, she describes dismantling the attic steps, board by board, burning each plank for warmth, until the entire staircase completely disappears. She writes: "I didn't write down the most important thing: the gaiety, the keenness of thought, the bursts of joy at the slightest success, the passionate directedness of my entire being---all the walls are covered with lines of poems..."
I have given readings in Syria, Lebanon, Japan, Taiwan, and throughout Europe and North America. Chapters from my nonfiction novel, MW: A Field Guide to the Midwest, are published in PEN America, Denver Quarterly, and on the Poetry Foundation, among other places. My recent manuscript >SHE is a work I've dubbed autoimmunefiction and talk theory.
