Lives in Cambridge, MA
Born 1974, Stanford, CA
Poet, Teacher
In recent years, I have written about landscape and the American West. I have been interested in the vulnerability and exposure of the human person living in such a landscape. I suppose I have been interested in vulnerability and exposure as much as in landscape itself.
When I am writing, vulnerabilities-states of fear and shame that cannot be endured in life- begin to seem pleasurable out of necessity. The hope is to give them form.
I like a poem that feels logical but is not-a poem in which thinking takes the shape of a hallucination. I like a poem in which all of my intelligence fails. I am forced to use other tools: desire, anger, recklessness. I pursue beauty and memory not to preserve them but to try, against odds, to preserve that perishable pursuit.
2006 Ph.D., Harvard University
1996 B.A., Stanford University
Literature Department Faculty Member, Bennington College
Robert B. Aird Chair of Humanities, Deep Springs College, 2007 - 2009
2006 This One Tree. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University Press
2009 - 2010 Evelyn Green Davis Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
2008 Alan Collins Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
2007 Summer Literary Seminars Fellowship, St. Petersburg, Russia
2006 New Issues Prize for Poetry
