Transformative Art
Art is a transformative force. I practice and produce art as an intervention in reality– a way to commune and communicate what is most important. Art is also a passageway, a portal between this world– and the more marvelous ones disguised by our current reality.
Performance Poetry
The first artistic voice I discovered was a poetic one. I began writing and performing poems as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, and dove into the world of Poetry Slams, where eventually I won the Collegiate National Poetry Slam Championship. I have since toured the country performing poetry and was the NYC Bowery Poetry Club Grand Slam Champion, going on to represent NYC at the National Poetry Slam Championships.
Teaching & Publishing Poetry
In 2013-2014 I received an Artist in Residency with the English Department at UC Santa Barbara, where I taught a class called The Poetics of Struggle, and worked with the Anti-Racism Inc. Working Group to create work around language as an intervention in the current moment of racism in this country.
The Poetics of Struggle
The class focused on the ways that language and art are used as an intervention in reality and included students writing and performing their own poetry in addition to the study of poetry and language in a transformational historical context.
Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters
During my residency at U.C. Santa Barbara, I worked with a group of professors, artists, and organizers, from across the country on a project which is published by punctum books, titled: “Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters”. A selection of my poems are published as part of the collection, along with articles from leading academics.
From the editor:
“Antiracism Inc. considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The collection focuses on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, the collection focuses on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who work to build the worlds they envision.”
Digital Poetry
As a poet, both the page and the stage felt too limiting to me, so I began teaching myself how to code so that I could program my own poetry, in my own voice.
I have not stopped coding since the day I started, and in 2017 I completed my master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunications at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Programming Poetry
These are my experiments in programming poetry. My hope is to continue iterating towards a set of tools to help other people explore the creative possibilities of digital poetry.
Digital Text
Beyond just writing poetry, I am passionate about using code to do all sorts of cool, weird, and meaningful things that allow us to more completely express ourselves and understand each other.
Creative Coding
The Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU is a sort of ‘laboratory for the recently possible’. It combines physical computing, with computer science, from an arts driven approach. It was at ITP that I also began to create more digital art outside the bounds of text.
