Bio

Communicator and Creator

My creative practice focuses on telling stories through geomaterials, biota, and natural fibers.

dif/Fused Ancestry is my latest undertaking. The project maps lost ancestral and human- and nonhuman histories through lands both sacred and desecrated. I am currently focusing on tracing histories using geomaterials in Utah, Oklahoma, and at the sites of turn-of-the-century (aka “asylum-era”) psychiatric hospitals in an attempt to help recover and tell stories that would otherwise remain buried. I am also a peer facilitator for Greater Zion Support Alliance, a mental-health support group I co-founded in Southwest Utah.

I’m also a weaver and fiber artist whose focus is on tapestry, Saori, and a combination of the two. Saori is a Japanese approach to weaving that’s inclusive and affirming. It focuses on the act of weaving as the process of knowing and expressing the self in and through the cloth. I see endless possibilities for weaving as both a form of expression and a means for healing.

I focused on writing for many years. Professionally, I worked as a scientific, medical, and health writer. My work has been published by esteemed organizations, including the American Academy of Family Physicians and Seattle’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Creatively, I wrote poetry and creative nonfiction. My collections include No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, 2026), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2013), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). My poems and creative writing have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX Journal, Muzzle, New Letters, and elsewhere.

I’m from Oklahoma and live in Toquerville, Utah, near Southwest Utah’s wildlands outside Zion National Park, where I learn from the birds and cliffs who are my sky/air and earth/skin.