author / editor / educator

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portfolio

professional portfolio

I am a detail-oriented editor and creative specialist offering services in copywriting, copyediting, proofreading, content creation, and education.
I have worked extensively with arts nonprofits and literary book publishing, but I also have experience with corporate and individual clients.
Do you have a specific vision but can’t quite seem to execute it in words? I can help with that. Or do you have lots of ideas but are struggling to narrow things down? I can help with that, too. I’ll adapt to whatever your needs are, be it following your lead or helping you find your own path.
My full CV is available here, or you can read below for a selection of previous projects I’ve worked on.


EDITORIAL

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by 24th Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limón
Without Her: A Chronicle of Grief and Love by Rebecca Spiegel
Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964–2014 by Tomaž Šalamun, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry
Aster of Ceremonies: Poems by JJJJJerome Ellis


COPYWRITING

  • A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala.

    Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.

    Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.

    published by Milkweed Editions

  • Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.

    A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. “I am made from the obsession of detail,” she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother’s singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where “everyone is broken, but trying.” A multitudinous witness.

    Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry’s many dialects—to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. “I make myth for peace,” she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means “steadfast and opulent,” and “dangerous and infinite.” She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.

    But in Besaydoo, there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity—a liberating togetherness sustained by song.

    published by Milkweed Editions

  • What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?

    Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books—and her personal one, too—in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.

    Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini’s operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation—but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they’re right. “Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music.”

    Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: Which image is the real one? This one—or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both—together, they might contribute to something like truth.

    published by Milkweed Editions


CONTENT WRITING


My teaching experience includes introductory writing courses, poetry and prose workshops, and literature courses. I’ve taught through a variety of organizations, including the University of Arkansas, the Brown Chair in English Literacy Initiative, WITS, The Loft Literary Center, and the Open Mouth Literary Center. I’m an adaptive instructor capable of adjusting my curriculum to a wide range of age and experience levels. Please get in touch if you’d like to know more.

educational


Feel free to contact me with specific queries, project proposals, or questions about my rates here. I look forward to hearing from you!