I am a lecturer in English at Georgia State University, where I earned my Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. I also hold an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. 

My recent teaching and research interests include experimental life writing, autotheory, feminist new materialism, speculative fiction, and Anthropocene studies. My non-academic, but not uncritical interests include hiking, camping, birding, and indoor and outdoor gardening. I have lived briefly in Toulouse, France, where I had a research fellowship at the University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès, Gualala, CA, and Tampa, FL. These days, I live in Atlanta, GA with my partner, our dog Elvis, and 60 houseplants (mostly philodendrons).

My interest in the Environmental Humanities is grounded in a set of questions about the ways familiar and new narratives about the natural world, and our interactions within it, participate in determining our collective future in a time of global climate crisis. Do the stories we tell ourselves about humans and nature limit our relationships to other living beings? Can we learn to tell better stories about our existence within ecological and planetary contexts? Can those stories teach us to live differently on this planet? This course reflects an extension of that line of questioning into practical spaces where local ecology and community engagement converge, recognizing that there are many ways to tell a story and multiple literacies of place.