Agenda

Interview

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.

I am a poet with a background in American and English literature. While I often teach creative
writing and poetry from the Renaissance to the 21st century, in the past few years I have also
focused on environmental writing. One of my favorite classes to teach at my home university is an
advanced workshop in nature writing, in which students read a wide range of literature and
environmental essays. Meanwhile, their weekly work for the course also includes taking hikes and
keeping a daily log documenting their encounters with the local land. The course challenges
students to increase their skill using poetic and prose forms in their own writing while also asking
them to build an intimate personal relationship with the place right around them-- its trees, streams,
birds, weather patterns, worms, slime molds, and so forth.
Unavoidably, given the environmental changes we’re now living through, my own poetry has
become increasingly responsive to devastation in the rural and urban places in which I write. I am
now at work on my fourth book of poems, “The Wow,” which involves a number of poems dealing
with climate distress in my area of the United States.

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and
teaching stay.

Venice and the Department are ideal collaborative locations for my ongoing work for several
reasons. First, my in-progress manuscript “The Wow” features a sequence of poems set in Venice.
Roughly one quarter of the poems are now drafted, and I plan to use the weeks at Ca’ Foscari to
visit sites central to those texts as I revise. I will also use the time there begin new poems from my
working notes.
Then, my original poetry is nourished by my practice as a translator. I hope to invigorate my
own composition process in Venice with several new translations of work by Italian poets.
The resources at BAUM and BALI will be invaluable to me in this area, as will be
conversations with colleagues.
Furthermore, I’m excited to explore ideas about poetry with students in the Department. I look
forward to sharing poems from my new book, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye, while
engaging students through seminars on Poetic Forms and The American Sonnet.

3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of Linguistics
and Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?

Since 2022, I have enjoyed fruitful conversations about American poetry, feminist authors, and
literary theory with Professor Mena Mitrano. Our research intersts overlap at numerous points and
I look forward to more collaboration and conversation with Professor Mitrano and her students this
fall.