Photo by Krista Niles
As a writer, I am interested in how individual and community geographies can be shared, simulated, or re-interpreted through the written word. My essays and articles have focused on globalization, U.S-Mexico border issues, the environment, health and the arts and have been published in Orion, Fourth Genre, OnEarth and other magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. I am currently at work on a novel exploring a post-apocalyptic U.S. landscape and the various strategies of adaptation and survival (including love) amidst severe economic and environmental change. My poetry explores inner and outer landscapes, celebrating and investigating the sites of overlap between them.
My writing helps me understand how my own experience and identity connect to larger contexts, both near and far. I believe a deeper understanding about people and places can come from telling and listening to stories, and my work often provides spaces and opportunities for gathering and sharing them.
One of my favorite things to do is to write in community with others. Someday I’ll invent the participatory novel!
For a fuller explanation on why I write, see my essay “Why I Write,” a piece I originally wrote for an application for a writing fellowship. I didn’t get the fellowship, but a year or two later, the editors at Kore Press asked me for something for their blog, Persephone Speaks (the Oct. 15, 2008 post), and I happily handed it over.
The pages in this section offer samples of some of my work:
Fiction offers a synopsis of my novel-in-progress.
Non-fiction offers a selection of links to published work.
Poetry shares some of my poems.
You Are Here is a literary journal about space and place that I founded in 1998. It’s still alive!
Also visit these other pages on my site highlighting other writing-based projects I’ve done:
Moving Stories is a workshop series and teaching method combining dance and creative writing.
Poetry for Children highlights my work teaching poetry in schools and communities.
Grrls Literary Activism is a series of writing workshops for teenage girls offered by Kore Press in Tucson.
These dance projects all incorporated writing, poetry and/or spoken-word stories into the process and performance: The Invisible City, We Are What We Eat, Re:Configurations.
Action Down There is a group of women artists and writers who create and “perform” public literary acts to bring attention to unnecessary violence, injustice, and over-consumption of resources.
110 Degrees is a Tucson-based youth magazine I co-founded and ran for five years with Josh Schachter at VOICES, Inc., mentoring teenagers in research, interviewing, writing, and photography so they could share their own and the community’s stories.
A Path to the River/Un Camino al Rio is a bilingual a children’s book, the result of a year-long project I conducted with children and neighbors in one Tucson neighborhood about its relationship with the Santa Cruz River.