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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.