I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in North American literature, poetry and poetics, gender studies, critical writing, creative writing (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism), and pedagogy. I worked as an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Bard MAT Program, where I taught graduate students in literature and pedagogy, and as the Associate Director of the Kelly Writers House, where I coordinated online learning initiatives, before becoming Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach undergraduate and graduate students. I am also an Associate at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.

A combination of interdisciplinary grounding in teaching methods and immersion in community pedagogical spaces drives my belief in the classroom as a site of critical literacy. I am committed to differential models of close reading that move beyond the teleological mastery of literary works and instead toward reading and writing practices that investigate how texts are produced, read, and mediated. I aim to empower my students to reflect critically on their own habits of learning and to approach the classroom as the place where we question our shared assumptions about language and meaning. When encouraged to draw on and expand their multiple sources of knowledge, students become more confident, curious, and creative writers and thinkers.

I wrote a series of commentaries on teaching William Carlos Williams inside a teacher training program for Jacket2. And I have given conference presentations on poetics, queer theory, critical literacy, and pedagogy at the Modern Language Association and elsewhere (see Research). In 2017 I was given a Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences.