about

I teach creative writing and composition in the English Department at KU. You can find my faculty page here. And here are some resources I’m happy to share with anybody else doing the strange, incredible work of teaching poetry to college students. If you find something particularly useful in these resources or spot an error, please email me about it! As a writing teacher, I think more than most about LLMs, the text-generating subset of the technologies people usually call “AI.” Thoughts and resources about that here.

I have degrees from the University of Arkansas (M.F.A. - poetry) and Baylor University (B.A. - philosophy). Here are some thoughts on my previous institutions.

I’ve worked in litmag editing for about eight years. I was the print designer for the Arkansas International from 2019-2021; I served as design editor and later managing editor of EcoTheo Review from 2022-2025.

I live in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s common to see pictures of John Brown here. My home is just a few streets away from where Langston Hughes spend part of his childhood. He attended, if local information is correct, the schoolhouse that I walk past with my dog most mornings. In the years after Hughes lived in the Pinkney (formerly Pinckney) neighborhood of Lawrence, government officials and locals instituted both de jure and de facto forms of segregation that reshaped Lawrence and drove Black people out of the area for generations. That history is still largely unresolved, and is reflected in part by the ways the City of Lawrence has criminalized and harassed our homeless neighbors.

I am a convinced Quaker, which means that I became a Quaker by choice as an adult. I’m also an atheist. These two things do not, as far as I’m concerned, contradict one another. I attend (when I attend) Oread Friends Meeting. It’s an unprogrammed meeting, which means we don’t have a pastor or have any specific creed or set of necessary beliefs. Even so, there are ideas and values that are generally shared by the Quakers I’m in community with: egalitarianism, abolition (prison, police, war...), humility, concern for the natural world, honesty. I like this explanation of Quaker processes and recommend Sarah Ruden’s work, particularly her introduction to her Gospel translations, as a good way into understanding Quaker thinking on theology (which, in my experience, is mostly just...not thinking about it all that much).

[home]