Values

Community

I believe an artistic experience is a community building experience. I seek to hold generous, compassionate space for community members from all walks of life—from infants to elders. I am committed to understanding and generating accessible space.

Diaspora

I create work that draws from themes of belonging across ancestry and geopolitical borders. I create with a lens of shifting identities; finding kinship and affinity amidst the complexities of migration and shifting realities of home. 

Multiculturalism

I value cross cultural empathy and aim to create hospitable space for inclusion and reciprocity across nationality and language, honoring the worldview that each language and global context brings.

Decolonization

I am committed to movement work that confronts and dismantles hegemony and oppression—remembering the wisdom of ancestors and Afro-Indigenous communities to restore healing in communities. I confront capitalist notions of productivity and individualism, and strive to orient around collectivist wellbeing, the holistic wellness of self and community, and sustainability.

Activism

In collaboration with movement leaders, I am committed to holding space empowering people and communities to speak, live, and act from their own power. I am committed to daily actions that include relationship building, research, and organizing for direct action when the moment calls.

Spirituality & Faith

I approach creativity and movement building as a mystic, spiritually rooted practice, recognizing Spirit as a source of liberation across global faith traditions and creeds. I cultivate ecumenical alliances across faith denominations and spiritual traditions.

Queer Intersectional Feminism

I am committed to a feminist analysis that destabilizes boundaries believed to be fixed and examines the embodied experience of power differences and marginalization. I participate in movement work that honors the dignity, wholeness, and personhood of QTBIPoC (queer, trans, black, indigenous people of color).

Books I love:

• Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa

• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

• Hiking the Horizontal by Liz Lerman

• The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martín Prechtel

• The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk

• Dancing Across the Page: Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing by Karen Barbour

  
  

…and much, much more in past, present, and progress from poetry to academia to fiction to biography.