United States
I am a creative, intellectual worker and learner, passionate about community organizations, public engagement, and education. I write with accuracy, enthusiasm, and tact, I work well under deadlines, and I am a confident public speaker. Whether inside or outside of the academy, I seek to support and promote organizations that utilize cultural heritage to better their communities and leverage the academy's resources for the public good. I have pursued these goals through museum education, curation, administration, and research at the Climate Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, and in editorial work with Cornell University Press. I am currently an Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. As a creative and scholarly writer, I seek the places where the lyric intersects with the world. My debut poetry collection is To Leave for Our Own Country (Black Lawrence, 2024), and my poetry appears widely in journals. My nonfiction manuscript, Demolish the Fence, blends literary theory, historical research, and intellectual memoir to explore the complexities of ecological and social engagement through lenses of race, power, and place. My scholarship on L. H. Bailey appears in The Sower and the Seer (Wisconsin Historical Society, 2021) and soon in PMLA. I am series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press and have edited three volumes of Liberty Hyde Bailey's writings. I am a passionate educator. I believe strongly with Bailey that "the power that moves the world is the power of the teacher," and I feel humbled by that calling. I taught K-12 classes for the Frederick A. O. Schwartz Education Center at the Museum of the City of New York; coursework in environmental literature, introductory literary studies, critical theory, and fiction and nonfiction writing at New York U and Centenary College; nine sections of multimodal and place-based composition courses at Iowa State U (ISU); and a graduate-level course on research and writing at Valparaiso U. I have TA experience in creative writing, literature survey courses, and NYU's Freshman Core program. My approach to college-level teaching emphasizes discussion and collaboration, and I pioneered several community-engaged projects with my place-based composition courses at ISU. I have also taught creative nonfiction to senior citizens at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, nature-study to children aged 6-11 at the Bailey Museum, and poetry writing to Girl Scouts as a writer-in-residence at the Comstock Adventure Center.
In my first year I taught four sections of the course “Credo” in the freshman “Trek” program and the English courses “Creative Nonfiction” and “Literary Theory and Criticism.” In the coming year I will continue to teach “Credo,” as well as “Literature and Environment,” “African American Literature,” “Introduction to Literary Studies,” and another section of “Creative Nonfiction.” In the 2024/2025 academic year, I was the Mattie Allen Broyles Inaugural-Year Eminent Scholars Endowed Chair, which funded work on my academic book, tentatively titled Demolish the Fence: Interspecies Fieldwork and Ecospheric Writing from the Margins of the Progressive Era.
The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library reintroduces the incredibly wide-ranging literary corpus of horticulturist, naturist, philosopher, gardener, teacher, Country Lifer, nature-study advocate, poet, and visionary Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954) to a twenty-first-century audience. Including affordable, modern, and authoritative editions of Bailey’s essential writings, scholarly works offering fresh appraisals of Bailey’s legacy, and an online, open-source digital platform and archive to promote the study and teaching of Bailey’s work, the series will provide the most authoritative primary and secondary material available on this overlooked New Agrarian prophet and environmental movement-maker. Reading through the Liberty Hyde Bailey Library will open the door not only to understanding one of the most interesting and sensitive minds at work in the early twentieth century, but also to the larger, complex history of early environmental thought in America. Work on this series will begin in the summer of 2020. Advisory Board: Robert Dirig, Former Assistant Curator of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium Herbarium (1980-2008), Cornell University Scott J. Peters, Professor of Development Sociology, Cornell University Daniel Wayne Rinn, Independent Scholar (PhD in History from the University of Rochester) Mary Swander, Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita, Iowa State University, and former Poet Laureate of Iowa Paul B. Thompson, W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics, Michigan State University In memoriam – Jane L. Taylor, Founding Curator of the Michigan 4-H Children’s Garden, Michigan State University
The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion, a completely new anthology, collects the best and most accessible literary garden writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey, the Father of Modern Horticulture. Despite Bailey's huge influence as a journalistic popularizer of amateur gardening from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, and despite the rise in recent years of widespread interest in gardening, such an anthology has never been compiled until now. The essays and poems that make up the collection include work from Bailey's most beautiful literary and philosophical books, quotes from which can be found on this social media page, as well as essays from periodicals that have never been published in book form, and even an essay that Bailey read over nationalized radio in 1930 and has never before appeared in print. The result of about a decade of research and collecting on the part of the editors, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings will provide the best introduction available to those unfamiliar with Bailey's writing, and for the seasoned Bailey enthusiast it will offer a trove of delightful and unexpected marvels. "The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings makes a major contribution to literatures across a range of fields, including horticulture, environmental studies, gardening, natural resources, and philosophy. The writings it includes are a gift to our troubled world. They are an antidote to the materialist, consumerist frenzy and emptiness of our time, just as they were in Bailey's. There is no other book like it in print." -Professor Scott Peters, Bailey scholar and author of Democracy and Higher Education: Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement Editors John Stempien and John Linstrom have completed the manuscript, and we anticipate the book to be available in early fall of 2019. Please follow us on Twitter and Instagram at the handle @LHBaileyBooks!
In this two-year postdoc with The Climate Museum, I worked on everything from programming to exhibitions in SoHo pop-ups to planning for the future of this exciting young nonprofit as it imagines a permanent building and continued growth of its mission and work, which it has been doing since its founding in 2015 after Hurricane Sandy hit NYC.
In this one-year postdoc position, I taught two sections of Introduction to Literary Studies, two sections of Major Texts in Critical Theory, and one section of the Creative Writing Capstone in Fiction, in the English Department at New York University. I was also an academic advisor in the English Department and a volunteer mentor in the department's new undergraduate mentoring program.
Following the completion of my NYU Public Humanities Fellowship with the museum, I continued with MCNY to the end of the academic year to lead virtual field trips with classes ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade, on topics ranging from the history of graffiti art in New York City to the Movement for Black Lives today.
Sponsored by the Public Humanities Initiative at New York University, I worked with the Education and Curatorial teams at the museum to build and execute programming for schools, families, and teachers, support curatorial projects, and engage diverse publics around the history of New York City and its many communities.