Education

Ph.D., M.A., Harvard University; B.A., Wellesley College

---

Bio

Writing has been a part of my life since I can remember and I have done my best to make a lifestyle of writing and reading. My graduate work focused on the transnational exchange of ideas about freedom among poets-three women in particular. This work took me through a series of explorations of Cuba, Brazil and the United States during the second half of the 19^th century. I was especially curious about how poetic language-that is, metaphor-allows people to reimagine space, place, history and self.

More recently, my research focuses on contemporary poets and how they exhibit a certain cosmopolitan poetics in their work and how they envision an idea global citizenship. I am also interested in contemporary poetics as a form of prophetic utterance, building on the trope of the poet-prophet.

While my research gestures outwards in its global scope, my original poetry explores an internal terrain. Right now, my poetry seems to be exploring the ways in which the body undergoes various transfigurations across time and space, how it either reinforces or challenges other forms of identity and modes of human experience that are non-corporeal.

---

What I Love About Emmanuel:

I love Emmanuel's commitment to educating the whole person. I love its respect for the intellectual, social, and spiritual lives of students and faculty.

Courses I Teach

• ENGL4992 Writing Resistance/Resistance Writing: Modern & Contemporary African American and Palestinian Poetry
• ENGL3992 Between the Lines: Global Sensibilities in Modern & Contemporary Literatures
• ENGL2506 Poetry Writing
• ENGL1208 Introduction to Literary Methods

---

Publications + Presentations

Poems:

• "Aeolian" The Healing Muse: a Journal of Literary and Visual Arts (forthcoming)
• "Funeral Singer" Stone Highway Review (forthcoming)
• "Prayer" & "La Canción Verde" Touch: the Journal of Healing (forthcoming)
• "America" & "Prayer" Wilderness House Literary Review (Fall 2010)
• "Celia's Confession," "The Diligent," "La Canción Verde" TORCH: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women. (Fall/Winter 2009)

Books:

• Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics (New York: Oxford UP) March 2011.

Articles:

• "Poetry and the Ethics of Global Citizenship" CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.4 (Dec. 2013)
• "Transnational Black Icons in the Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Brazil's Zumbi and Cuba's Maceo" Loopholes and Retreats: African American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. (Lit Verlag Feb. 2009: 59-80)
• "Race and Redemption in Cristina Ayala's 'Redención' and Frances Harper's 'Deliverance.'" Negritud: Revista de Estudios Afro-Latinoamericanos (Vol. II, No. 1 Verano 2008: 44-63)

Grants + Recognition

• Semi-finalist Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award
• Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Derek Bok Center, Harvard University
• Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship
• Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, Harvard University
• Lemann Fellowship, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University
• Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellowship