About
I was born and raised in Chicagoland, within earshot of the el (Blue Line, if you’re curious.) My parents are musicians, and as a child, I napped under their piano. Many of my earliest memories are Bartók, Chopin, sun, dust, and the sound of trains rattling in the distance. When I was six years old, my father, Ira, gave me an old textbook to read while he practiced, and I read Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and poems from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Poetry and melody, rhythm, sleeping, and singing tangled up together and have never come apart. Along with my parents, I was fortunate to have another in-house artist: my older brother is the musician Joe Goodkin. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I wrote poems and stories, and learned to play musical instruments. I also walked all over Chicagoland, alone or with co-conspirator Anna Colliton. Ever since, walking and conversation animate everything I generate. Creation never happens in a vacuum; my work in part belongs to the people with whom I have walked and talked.
After dropping out of high school, I worked behind counters and wrote fragments of poems and essays on the ends of receipt paper that wouldn’t fit into the printer. During these years, I also started teaching the traditional dance music of Ireland for the Chicago Academy of Irish music, performing around the U.S. and in Ireland. Eventually, I enrolled in the art and design program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where thanks to the influence of professors Carrie Brecke and Vainis Aleksa, I accidentally started working at the Writing Center. My understanding of walking and conversation expanded. After a couple of years at UIC, inspired by writing classes with Simone Muench and Rone Shavers, I changed my major to English with a concentration in creative writing. In this community, I learned about literary publishing. My first published poem appeared in Fourteen Hills from San Franciso State Universty. It felt like magic: someone on the other side of the continent read something I made and shared it with people around the world.
Leaving Chicago wasn’t a breakup, but it felt like one. A few years after finally finishing my BA, I moved to Northern Virginia near the DC Metro (orange line, if you’re curious) and spent three years in the Creative Writing MFA program at George Mason University. I learned from and with poets Jennifer Atkinson, Sally Keith, Eric Pankey, and Susan Tichy. Virginia is so different from Chicago. For one, it is covered in azaleas: in spring the highways are lined with hedges of pink and purple and white. During and after my MFA coursework, I taught in the English department (composition, literature, creative writing, research writing, writing center pedagogy…) and served as editor for the literary magazine Phoebe. I also accidentally became the interim director of GMU’s writing center during a faculty transition. I wrote and published poems and reviews, read compulsively, and walked all over the DC metro area with Lucy Biederman and RJ Hooker. After NoVa, I moved to Denver, Colorado to take a position at Regis University, where I directed Writing Center and Tutoring Services (on purpose, this time) and taught English classes. With Brandi Homan, Mairead Case, and Jess Stoner, I also led weekly creative writing workshops in the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. Denver was dry and live, like the skin of a reptile. Because of the altitude, I walked more slowly in Denver, but I had a lot of people to walk with. As I learned more about myself as a teacher and a scholar, I began to identify my interest in hybridity, and my own practice of hybridizing scholarly and creative methods. Poetry and melody, rhythm, sleeping, and singing tangled up together and have never come apart. Public humanities work lights up this same intersection for me: places, spaces, and ideas that invite a combination of shared experience and private sensation, a rapid exchange between discourse and interiority.
A lot of people say they hate humidity, but I like it. For that reason, among others, I eventually left Denver for North Carolina. In the three years after moving I carried and delivered two children and two books of poems: one chapbook from dancing girl press and one full-length collection from Moon City Press. My full-length book, Crybaby Bridge, explores intersections of individual and collective experience anchored in myth, ghost stories, and folkloric representations of haunting. In North Carolina, I walked around a lot of lakes and hiked through second or third-growth woods tangled with kudzu and wisteria sinensis. I also found a home in the local community of traditional Irish musicians, with whom I continue to play and perform several times a month. In 2021, I enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where under the mentorship of the humanities scholar and poet Karen Kilcup I have been expanding my scholarly writing capabilities to book-length projects, currently, my dissertation on African-American women’s environmental writing. At UNCG my interests converged: public-facing research and writing, place and environment, poetry and poetics, walking and conversation all inform my research. UNCG also gave me many opportunities to work on public humanities projects, including the Community Placemaking Action Lab and the Humanities Network and Consortium.
I continue to experiment with genres, hybridity, and musicality. One of my current writing projects is a mixed-media hybrid collaboration that uses poetry and photography to explode domestic life like an anatomical diagram explodes the body. A poem from this new project recently appeared in The Pedestal. Another recent project, Site Fidelity, takes its title from the animal behavior of returning to the same location year after year, especially to raise offspring. This book parses all definitions of “site” and “fidelity” as I consider the relationships between human living and place in a highly mobile era. Poems from Site Fidelity have been published in Cagibi, GreenTower Press’ Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology,Laurel Review, and elsewhere.