My research and teaching focus on language politics, settler colonialism, and contemporary writing. I am especially interested in experimental works written between and across languages. In my first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics, I argue that such works deepen the linguistic density of other literatures in order to refute the easy equivalencies of formal legal equality and the familiar narratives of a meritocratic, colorblind present.
My newer scholarly book, Here Is a Figure, also examines a number of texts that include more than one language, but this book focuses on the supine, prone, and recumbent figures that have become ubiquitous in contemporary literature. I argue that these figures draw on a range of apparently-opposed precedents, from the dead body left in a field to the art-historical odalisque, from to the protester dying-in to the patient at home, sick in bed. By combining and remediating these highly recognizable, even iconic precedents, contemporary texts register the effects of dispossession and assert ongoing relationships to territory. They also consider what literature does in the world, and what it asks us to do in turn.
In addition to my scholarly practice, I am also a poet. I’ve published three books and several chapbooks of poetry, and I am actively committed to numerous poetry communities. My most recent collection, Entering Sappho, combines archival research into the history of Sappho, WA, a no-longer-extant town on the Olympic Peninsula, with experimental translations of Sappho’s poetry. My work as a poet is closely connected to my research and teaching, and I enjoy working with students whose projects combine the creative with the critical.
Teaching Interests:
Literary theory; contemporary poetry and poetics; translation theory; contemporary Indigenous literatures; American literature; Canadian literature; gender and sexuality studies; feminist and queer theories and methodologies; cultural studies; creative writing.
Recent and Forthcoming Publications:
Books:
Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form. Northwestern University Press, 2024. (Literary criticism.)
Entering Sappho. Coach House, 2020. (Poetry.)
Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism. University of Iowa Press, 2018. (Literary criticism.)
DOWN. Coach House, 2014. (Poetry.)
Security Posture. Snare, 2009. (Poetry.)
Special Issues of Journals:
“Lyric beyond Containment.” differences 36.2-3 (2025) (Co-edited with Dr. Claire Grandy.)
“Body and/as Procedure.” Amodern 11 (2023) https://amodern.net (Co-edited with Dr. Jane Malcolm.)
Journal Articles:
“Idling.” Radical History Review. (Forthcoming 2026.)
“Introduction: Lyric beyond Containment.” differences. 36.2-3 (2025) 1-11.
“Monolingualism, Dispossession, and the Biopolitics of Language.” PMLA. 137.5 (2022) 902-908.
“Elimination, Dispossession, Transcendence: Settler Monolingualism and Racialization in
the United States.” American Quarterly. 73.3 (2021) 439-460.
“Grief, Bodies, and the Production of Vulnerability.” Canadian Literature. 243 (2021) 155-
“Property, Priority, Place: Rethinking the Poetics of Appropriation.” Contemporary Literature. 60.1 (2019). 98-125.
“Elimination, in the Feminine.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
21.6 (2019) 787-802.
