Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I have worked mostly in forms that straddle poetry, fiction, and essay, sometimes incorporating video and sound, and often seen through the lens of translation. As with translation, much of what propels the work comes down to the question of how to exist with and alongside others, how to uncover commonalities while refusing to erase difference, how to use language/s to combat the force of received structures and beliefs while remaining both vigilant and, somehow, open. Most of what I write fuses narrative, research/quotation, personal data/autobiography, and conversations (real or imagined) with others (living or dead).

While at Headlands

My plan for the Headlands is to work on two projects: Participation, a fragmented speculative fiction of resistance that treats authoritarianism, intimacy, memory, drought, and the geo-cultural impact of the eucalyptus tree (world’s biggest weed), set in an isolating and surveilled, post-internet near future; and OFB, a two-channel video piece in progress that takes on walking, hoarding, hospitality, plundering, poetry, depression, waiting, antagonism, and friendship, structured around Homer’s Odyssey and histories of land use and abuse in upstate New York.

Selected Texts

Draft (September 29, 2016), The Brooklyn Rail

Flat White (20/20), BOMB (reprinted in You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, Coffee House Press, 2016)