Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. 

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 

Recent Courses

CW 601: MFA Poetry Workshop at UMass Boston
ENG 109A: Poetry Workshop at Brandeis University
ENG 19A: Introduction to Creative Writing at Brandeis University
ENG 129A: Creative Nonfiction Workshop at Brandeis University
Ellipsis Advanced Poetry Workshop (six-week online course)
Writing with Humor & Wonder for Catapult (eight-week online course)
Speakeasy Project Poetry Workshop (four-week online course)
Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program (six-week online course)
Time & Memory at Writers & Books (two-hour generative workshop, part of a weeklong poetry summer camp)
The Art of Telling at Writers & Books (two-part generative workshop)
Introduction to Fiction: Asian American Storytelling at Texas Tech University
Introduction to Creative Writing at Texas Tech University

Teaching Philosophy

I am committed to providing my students with rigorous yet generous, surprising and enlivening spaces in which their questions are centered. I strive to create courses that empower students to cultivate their own imaginative and analytical inquiries. As James Baldwin put it, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” My goal is to have students walk out of a class still wanting to talk about a text, a literary move, a critical intervention, an urgent social issue. My courses encourage and challenge students to become active members of a creative, scholarly, and compassionate community. In addition to reading and writing voraciously for a class, my students are expected to attend readings and talks, to explore the campus libraries, student-run publications, and other institutional as well as local resources. My teaching foregrounds students’ learning goals, life experiences, and relationships to language. I know I have done my job if students show a renewed and deepened interest in their own inner lives, their own critical thought, their own social perspectives. 

A typical course of mine begins with an expansive, deliberately sort of impossible question, to which students and I return throughout the term: “What can poetry do?” or “Why do we need stories?” or “What do you want your writing to do?” I also ask students to draft their questions about writing and literature, questions they will at various points in the term revise, reimagine. This activity, among many others, allows students to take ownership of their educations and their identities as thinkers, writers, members of a learning community. Three principles guide my student-centered, question-driven pedagogy: 1) excitement, 2) empowerment, and 3) connection.  

1) Excitement 

I value my students’ capacity for discovery. My classroom offers encounters with language and thought in unexpected ways. I want students to have fun, to be motivated by something other than grades—some real, living stakes they have chosen to invest in. My assignments aim to disrupt the habitual, the rote, embracing instead the hidden, the underground routes of imaginative and critical work. With this principle in mind, I employ unconventional, interdisciplinary, sometimes funny prompts. My prompts are like dares: try this, see where it takes you. 

Please go here for an example of this principle of excitement in action.

2) Empowerment

I value my students’ capacity to use and develop many valid forms of writing. Students are often afraid to write, to enter their own intellectual and creative lives, afraid of and bored by what they see as impenetrable academic lingo, the one “correct” way to write. My teaching asks students to honor their and others’ literacies and language practices, meaning the language(s) they speak at home, the vernacular(s) they use with friends, the fresh combinations they enact in and out of the classroom, moment by moment. With this principle in mind, I teach an abundance of socially relevant and innovatively crafted texts by Black writers, Indigenous writers, writers of color, queer and trans writers, disabled writers, multilingual writers, and writers whose life-worlds span several overlapping identities. Throughout the course I ask students to contribute readings, as well. I regularly invite two to three writers to visit each class virtually, so students can engage directly with living authors. 

Please go here for an example of this principle of empowerment in action.

3) Connection

I value my students’ capacity to act as contributors to literature and culture, as people extending and complicating the conversations around them. My classroom is not somehow outside of the “real world,” outside of history, politics, and “real” literary discourse. I love supporting students in making connections between writing and our life-worlds. With this principle in mind, I create and encourage students to create opportunities for effecting literary/social change. My goal is for every student to experience literature as something that needs their interpretations, their interventions. What is a poem? What is justice? Who gets to say? Definitions in my courses are contestable, malleable, alive. 

Please go here for an example of this principle of connection in action.

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It would be too simple to say that my courses are reading and writing intensive. Fundamentally, they are inquiry intensive. The readings, generative exercises, workshop discussions, and other activities—all the components that make up my courses—equip students with the resources and essential dreaming time to devise their own writing practices, their own interpretative frameworks, and most importantly, their own questions. If one way does not work, try another way, another. As Lucille Clifton insisted, “you come to poetry not out of what you know but out of what you wonder.” I believe you can substitute poetry here with writing in general as well as education. My joyful task, as a teacher, is to help students value and exercise many different ways of creating, thinking, wondering—including those they may not claim as their own, yet.