Bio

Communicator and Creator

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

dif/Fused Ancestry + suf/Fused Fiber is my latest undertaking. The project maps lost ancestral, 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 also co-founded and serve as a peer facilitator for Greater Zion Support Alliance, a mental-health support group serving Southwest Utah

I am 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 is 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. My poetry 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 JournalBarrow StreetCALYX JournalMad in America, MuzzleNew Letters, and elsewhere.

I am 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.

Latest Notabilia

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  • The new pigment in town. I managed to successfully pull a decent amount of pigment from the Iron Springs Formation… Read more.

  • I got lost in making. In order of the making, which is last photo to first photo: A dorodango. An… Read more.

  • I found these photos of my mother, her siblings, and her parents in Oklahoma in the 1940s. They were framed… Read more.