About
I am a poet, author, and creative arts and awareness educator rooted in Birmingham, Alabama.
I teach creative writing and bookmaking with the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project at Auburn University. I am a teaching artist with the UAB Arts in Medicine program. As a Forest Bathing guide, I collaborate with many public and private entities including Wild Alabama, UAB Arts in Medicine, the VA, libraries, schools, and arts organizations. I facilitate meditation programs in the recovery community. I am a founding member of the Quorum Poets, and am part of the monthly Quorum Poets Present reading and open mic.
A graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University, I majored in East Asian Studies with a concentration in Chinese language and literature. I studied in Beijing and in Nanjing with Duke University. I hold an M.F.A. in Book Arts with a specialization in French design binding, and an M.A. in English, in Creative Writing.
My non-academic training includes extensive study in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and meditation practice in the Shambhala tradition, mindfulness-awareness practice, and somatic awareness with Will Johnson, and Ashtanga yoga teacher training. I am a meditation guide, somatic awareness and yoga teacher, labyrinth practice facilitator, and certified Nature Therapy guide.
FACTS ABOUT ME:
I am obsessed with medieval manuscripts.
My book “COWS” was featured in Schooled Books: Education in the Book Arts at the Watson Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
My idea of a fun vacation is to do original research.
I was awarded an Alabama State Council in the Arts grant to study with a master storyteller in the Aztec village of Tepoztlan, Mexico.
I knew that I was a poet when I was 10 years old.
I received the Ireland Award while in graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for travel and original research into the solitary religious anchorites in medieval East Anglia, UK for my first book of poems, Cold Stone, White Lily, published in the UK.
I performed in “The Vagina Monologues.”