Poet, Writer, Educator

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

2017, 2018

TA, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

WRT 205: Critical Research and Writing (Spring 2018)

WRT 205 is a sophomore-level writing course in which students engage in various forms of research, composition, writing, analysis, argumentation and reflection. The course is an extension of WRT 105, which teaches that writing is always situated within specific contexts, for specific audiences, about specific topics and with specific stylistic expectations, and that effective writers know how to recognize and adapt their writing to these varied situations.

WRT 105: Practices of Academic Writing (Fall 2017)

WRT 105 is a freshman-level writing course that teaches students to write across different genres and for different situations. The class explores writing and its dealings with culture, community, identity, ideology, technology, and media. This course helps students understand what writing means to them and realize how much freedom and power they have in writing.

Teaching in the Community (Spring 2017)

For a semester, I worked closely on interdisciplinary art projects with middle school students who were immigrants from Somalia and Kenya. The interdisciplinary work the students did was poetry, photography and art. And at the end of the semester, we created an anthology with all the students work in it.

2014, 2015, 2017, 2019-PRESENT

CREATIVE WRITING TEACHER, WITS (WRITERS IN THE SCHOOLS-HOUSTON)

In 2014, I interned at a WITS Creative Writing Summer Camp and was able to teach a lesson on persona poetry to a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade class. In 2015, I interned and worked at the WITS office one day a week and was a teacher’s assistant to two 3rd grade classes and one 4th grade class two days a week for a semester. In 2017, I was a creative writing teacher for a 3rd grade class at WITS Creative Writing Summer Camp. In 2019-2020, I taught creative writing lessons at the Menil Museum. And in 2021, I will teach at the at the WITS Creative Writing Summer Camp again with an 8th and 9th grade class.

2019-PRESENT

ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, LONE STAR COLLEGE

ENG 1301: Composition and Rhetoric I (Fall 2019) (Spring 2020) (Summer 2021)

Intensive study and practice in writing processes, from invention and researching to drafting, revising, and editing, both individually and collaboratively. Emphasis on effective rhetorical choices, including audience, purpose, arrangement, and style. Focus on writing the academic essay as a vehicle for learning, communicating, and critical analysis.

ENG 1302: Composition II (Fall 2019) (Spring 2020) (Summer 2021)

Intensive study of and practice in the strategies and techniques for developing research-based expository and persuasive texts. Emphasis on effective and ethical rhetorical inquiry, including primary and secondary research methods; critical reading of verbal, visual, and multimedia texts; systematic evaluation, synthesis, and documentation of information sources; and critical thinking about evidence and conclusions.

ENG 2307: Creative Writing (Summer 2020)

A brief study of genres of poetry, essay, short fiction and plays. Practice in original composition. Designed as a humanities elective course for students interested in imaginative writing.

(Fall 2020-2024)

12th Grade AP English Language Teacher, Yes Prep North Central

This AP English Language and Composition course cultivates the reading and writing skills that you will need for college success and for intellectually responsible civic engagement. The course will guide you in becoming curious, critical, and responsive readers of diverse texts and becoming flexible, reflective writers of texts addressed to diverse audiences for diverse purposes. The reading and writing you will do in the course should deepen and expand your understanding of how written language functions rhetorically: to communicate writers’ intentions and elicit readers’ responses in particular situations.

11th Grade AP Literature Teacher, Yes Prep North Central

In AP Literature you will have the opportunity to read, write, think, and speak about a diversity of texts, experiences, and connections to your own life in class every day. By the end of the year, you will grow your close reading and analytical response skills across multiple genres, respond to reading through short response writing, Socratic discussion, and selected response questions. You will draft, edit, revise, and publish correspondences, informational text-based essays, personal narrative essays, poems, and more. Finally, you will learn explicit revising and editing skills to enhance your understanding of the English language and its grammar rules.

11th Grade College-Ready English 3 IRC Teacher, Yes Prep North Central

10th Grade Creative Writing Teacher, Yes Prep North Central

(2024 - 8 weeks)

Inprint, Poetry Workshop (POETRY/IN-PERSON 2024-107)

(Workshop topic) I believe two of the most significant concepts in poetry are concreteness and abstractions and I seek to understand the balance between the two. Some poems will lean more on creating a solid world for the reader to live in, while others will rely on conceptual ideas and images that feel less interconnected. There is no right or wrong side, but I feel poems that find ways to encapsulate both sides carry a special weight to them. Whether you try to create a balance between the two in your work or want to lean on one a lot more than the other, it’s important to be aware of how much space each takes up in your work. In this generative workshop, we will learn how to hone in on our own strengths of using concrete images and ideas, and abstract ones. We will explore the work of poets like Terrance Hayes, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, Joy Priest, Marie Howe, Jean Valentine, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Etheridge Knight, William Carlos Williams, Linda Gregg, Diannely Antigua, Sharon Olds and more. Poets at any stage in their writing journey are welcome.

(2024 - present)

Awty International School, 9th and 10th grade English Teacher, Creative Writing Teacher

(2024 - 8 weeks)

Grackle & Grackle, Poetry Workshop (Navigating the Page: Exploring Poetry’s Lyric and Narrative Poles)

“that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language.” – Will Harris

Are you a lyric or a narrative poet? Or neither? Or both? Or are you scratching your head right now, with an inkling but no certainty about what either word means? In a writing form like poetry, where many poets themselves can’t agree on what a poem is, you might be asking why it even matters where you stand. In this class, we’ll explore how these modes work now, how they’ve worked historically, and how we can wield them today to strengthen and to understand our own places as poets.

You won’t have to muzzle yourself or swear allegiance to any category or form here, but we’ll write a lot of poems, in a lot of ways, and figure out how lyricism, story, and their many adjacent parts might help you create new, interesting spaces for your own poetry.

To help us along, we’ll read the work of poets like Terrance Hayes, Joy Priest, Roger Reeves, Jean Valentine, Tony Hoagland, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Paul Celan, Diannely Antigua, Natalie Diaz, Solmaz Sharif, and Courtney Faye Taylor.

(2025 - 6 weeks)

Inprint, Poetry Workshop (Poetry/In-person 2024-303)

Workshop Title: The Art of Distance in Poetry

The poet and reader, the poet and speaker, and the poet and the subject of the poem are always in implicit conversation. The distance between them creates a specific effect on the poem. Mastery over the poem is also a mastery over the understanding of the way distance and time manifest themselves in the poem. In this workshop, we will identify how each of our poems play with distance and time and explore further ways to manipulate time for emotional effect.

We will discuss topics such as the ethical implications of persona writing, the poet’s closeness to the topic they are writing about, the emotional effect of time jumps in poetry, along with many others. Poets we will discuss include Terrance Hayes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Roger Reeves, June Jordan, Joy Priest, Evie Shockley, K, Iver, Marie Howe, Solmaz Sharif, Layli Long Soldier, John Berryman, and many more.

(2025 – 2 hour workshop)

Black Labor and Identity: An Inprint Writing Workout @ Freedmen's Town Visitor Center

Labor in Black life is both ancestral and intuitive. Whether we are laboring at our art, laboring in the work of parenthood or growing up, or even laboring to provide for ourselves, there’s something in each task that connects us to the generations before us and towards a shared future. In this multigenerational creative writing workshop, writers will take inspiration from the work of artists Michael Bennett and Martellus Bennett to draw connections between art and daily labor practices. Led by award-winning poet Joshua Burton, attendees will collaboratively create pieces of poetry, prose, and illustrated stories while asking questions like what do we carry and lose from generation to generation, and how are our labor practices connected to our identities?

EDUCATION

2012-2015

B.A. IN CREATIVE WRITING, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

2016-2019

M.F.A. IN CREATIVE WRITING(POETRY), SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (UNIVERSITY FELLOW)

Thesis Adviser Mary Karr, Manuscript title: WALTZ

EDITOR

• BOAAT Press - Poetry Reader (2019)

BOOKS

• Fracture Anthology (chapbook) (Ethel Press)

• Grace Engine (forthcoming poetry collection will University of Wisconsin Press in the Spring of 2023)

PUBLICATIONS

• “A Painting of a Pressed Flower” - Figure1 (2017)

• “Her Ritual”- Figure1 (2017)

• “Grace & Pity” Public Poetry Magazine- POWER Anthology (2018)

• “Asymptotic”- B O D Y Literature (2019)

• “Break” - B O D Y Literature (2019)

• “The Mother, Whole” - B O D Y Literature (2019)

• “My Shadow Keeps Her” - B O D Y Literature (2019)

• “Fracture Anthology” - Mississippi Review (2019)

• “History” – Gulf Coast Online (2019)

• “To my older brother: I forgive you” – la Tundra (2020) (illustration by Zumbambico, translation by Alonso Llerena)

• “Joshua” – la Tundra (2020) (illustration by Zumbambico)

• “Elegy for Threats with Grace” – Conduit Magazine (2021)

• “A Consequence (Passing)” – Cobra Milk (2021)

• “Grace Division” – The Rumpus (2021)

• “Giving Laura Grace” – The Rumpus (2021)

• “A Confession” – The Rumpus (2021)

• “Letting Go of the Lyric” – Sybil Journal (2021)

• “To those who think I won’t set this country afire with me still in it” – Sybil Journal (2021)

• “Grace as Kin as Sin as Skin” – Sybil Journal (2021)

• “Bayou City Season” – Group Head Magazine (2021)

• “A Constant Conjunction” – Group Head Magazine (2021)

• “Grace & Separation” – TriQuarterly (2022)

• “Death/Machine/Ruin” – Black Warrior Review (2022)

• “Man in a Hole” – Grist Journal (2022)

• “The Mirror Myth” – Grist Journal (2022)

• “The Worst Houston” – Grist Journal (2022)

• “Grace Engine” – Grist Journal (2022)

• "The Hearing We Inherit” – Indiana Review (2022)

·       “Giving Mary Grace” – Southeast Review (2023)

·       “The Gardener” – The Common (2023)

·       "As I Grace Myself into a Rephrasing Freedom" – Poetry Northwest (2023)

AWARDS & HONORS

• Gulf Coast Undergraduate Poetry Award 2014 (University of Houston) (Winner)

• Howard Moss Poetry Award 2014 (University of Houston) (Winner)

• Howard Moss Poetry Award 2015 (University of Houston) (Runner Up)

• Bryan Lawrence Non-fiction Award 2015 (University of Houston) (Runner Up)

• Claire Keys Poetry Award - Salem State 2017 (Finalist)

• Writers @ Work Annual Writing Competition 2017 (Finalist) (Judged by Kevin Prufer)

• Summer Literary Seminars 2017 (Finalist)

• Public Poetry - “Power” Contest 2018 (Finalist) (Judged by Tony Hoagland)

• Leonard Brown Prize in Poetry 2018 (Syracuse University) (Runner Up)

• Cave Canem Retreat 2019 (waiting list)

• Tin House Winter Workshop 2019 (Scholarship Winner)

• 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize (Honorable Mention) (Judged by Dawn Lundy Martin)

• Scholarship for Juniper Summer Writing Institute 2019 (Scholarship Winner)

• Mississippi Review Prize 2019 (Finalist)

• 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) (Fellowship Finalist)

• Best New Poets 2019 (nominated by Syracuse University)

• The Joyce Carol Oates Award in Poetry 2019 (Syracuse University) (Winner) (Judged by Nicole Seeley)

• Scotti Merrill Award (Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer 2019) (Finalist)

• The Lemon Tree House Residency (declined)

• Kenyon Review Writers Workshop 2020 (declined)

• Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing 2020-2021 (WICW) (Finalist)

• CAAPP Book Prize (Center for African American Poetry and Poetics) (Finalist)

• Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program - Jesse H. Jones Fellowship (2nd Runner up)

• Grist Pro Forma Contest 2020 (Runner up) (Judged by Joy Priest)

• The Georgia Review - 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (Finalist) (Judged by Ilya Kaminsky)

• Miami Book Fair's Emerging Writer Fellowship in Poetry 2020 (Finalist)

• Brittingham & Pollak Prizes // WICW Poetry 2020 (Finalist)

• The Iowa Review Poetry Award 2021 (Finalist)

• Omnidawn Poetry 1st/2nd Book Prize 2021 (Finalist) (Judged by Kazim Ali)

• 2021 Palette Poetry Prize (Longlist)

• Brittingham & Pollak Prizes // WICW Poetry 2021 (Finalist) (Judged by Brian Teare)

• Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize 2021 (Finalist)

• Jake Adam York Prize Book Prize 2021 (Top 8 Finalist) (Judged by Dana Levin)

•      Disquiet Literary Contest 2022 Poetry (Shortlist)

•     Elizabeth George Foundation 2023 grant recipient

• Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize 2023 (Finalist)

·       P&W Debut Poets 2023

·       Furious Flower Poetry Contest 2024 (Finalist)

·       2025-2027 Tulsa Artist Fellowship (Finalist)

·       Writers' League of Texas Book Awards 2023 (Discovery Prize Winner)

·       University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2024 (Longlist)

WORKSHOPS & CONFERENCES

• Boldface Conference 2013 (Workshop leader: Sophie Klahr)

• Boldface Conference 2014 (Workshop leader: Martin Rock)

• Tin House Winter Workshop 2019 (Workshop leader: Solmaz Sharif)

• Cave Canem Retreat 2019 (waiting list)

• Scholarship for Juniper Summer Writing Institute 2019 (Workshop leader: Ross Gay)

• Kenyon Review Writers Workshop 2020 (declined)

·       Gulf Coast Reading and Talk 2023

·       Boldface Conference 2023 (Feature Writer, Reading/Talk)

·       DISQUIET International Literary Program 2023 (declined)

·       Inprint Educators Institute Author Talk (2023)

·       2024 AWP Panel: Heretic: Confronting Religious Trauma Amid Growing Extremism"

·       Inprint Poetry Workshop Spring 2024 (8 weeks) (Instructor)

·       Grackle & Grackle Poetry Workshop Fall 2024 (8 weeks) (Instructor)

·       Inprint Poetry Workshop Spring 2025 (6 weeks) (Instructor)

·       Black Labor and Identity: An Inprint Writing Workshop @ Freedmen's Town Visitor Center (partnering with Inprint) (Instructor)