Artist Statement

Grown up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, lived in the middle of country and back, and finally settled in the Pacific Northwest. My main priority, through poetry and presence, is to maintain poetry as an accessible form. This includes creating zines, workshops, and hosting spaces that allow mutual participation of everyone in the room to interact with the media of spoken and written word. I personally have yet to create anything that has a paywall, often fronting my own time, resources, and at times, money, to create accessible content. I believe that institutionalized learning, though an asset to many, is not always available to every income, attention, or schedule, and thus, I engage outside of that limiting boundary while still holding the merrit of discussion of form, language, word choice and syntax, and ideas of experience. In the words of the beliefs of surrealists before me, poetry is not just a literary form, but a revolutionary tool to liberate the human mind, and serves as automatic channel to the self as dream-state(s).