Teaching
I believe learning communities are meant to be inclusive, liberatory, & responsive.
After 10+ years of teaching, curriculum design, and DEIA work in university and community settings, I currently teach online for The Porch, a Nashville-based nonprofit.
I also visit classes, offer workshops, and give lectures. Some of my favorite things to teach and talk about are modernist & contemporary fiction, queer futures, poetry, narratives of illness and exile, compositional structures across media, and artistic practice.
Read more about how I think about teaching via this interview with Susannah Felts, co-founder & director of The Porch, check out some recent offerings & student reviews below, or book me to visit your school, university, or community organization.
Classes & Workshops
The Novella
A multi-week class focused on critical reading of one of literature's most unruly & liminal forms. We consider the pleasures, temporal digressions, formal inventiveness, and open secrets of the novella. Selections include works by Nella Larsen, Cristina Rivera Garza, Kate Chopin, Yuri Herrera, Yoko Tawada, Patrick Modiano, and Cesar Aira.
Dreaming-Writing
In this multi-week class on artistic practice, we utilize Deep Listening methods to develop individual and collective dreaming practices, with the goal of generating new kinds of thinking, writing, & being together. We keep dream journals, develop dream lexicons, move dreams into our conscious writing space, and practice dreaming together. Along the way, we consider oneiric texts by Jackie Wang, CD Wright, Clarice Lispector, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others.
City Novels
An advanced seminar on British modernist & contemporary literature, featuring texts by TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Zadie Smith, and Mohsin Hamid, paired with selected criticism. Overall, this class asks how we imagine cities, with migration, diaspora, and the far-reaching effects of colonization in mind – and how cities shape our selves, collective imaginations of belonging, & ideas about the future.
Writing Intimacy
In this workshop, we explore and expand the possibilities of intimacy in our writing – particularly in relationship to the strangeness, and strangers, we are in touch with, both at the edges and the heart of our own matters. We consider creative texts by June Jordan, Akilah Oliver, Sawako Nakayasu, Derek Jarman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Laura Jaramillo, and others, along with contextualizing excerpts from critics José Esteban Muñoz and Lauren Berlant.
Talks
Introduction to Deep Listening
Deep Listening is an ethics, pedagogy, research method, & creative practice developed by musician/composer Pauline Oliveros to expand our perception of what is audible, knowable, and sentient in our environments. In this lecture & discussion, I dive into Deep Listening as a practice, with a focus on its revolutionary potential.
Rupture, Estrangement, & Extensibility
In a series of lectures and presentations, I explore rupture as a mode of creative and ethical inquiry through the works of Rebecca Horn, Dionne Brand, Ian U Lockaby, Derek Jarman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and others.
Speculative Bodies, Sick Futures
In a series of lectures and discussions, I consider what creative modalities, alternative economies, possible futures, and critical hope sick bodies in art & literature offer us in our era of rapid planetary change, contamination, and ongoing capitalist isolation, violation, & extraction.
“Provisional Poetics: Nathaniel Mackey and Gertrude Stein"
In this talk, I explore the deliberately provisional nature of Mackey’s and Stein’s poetry and prose compositions and their “technical-ecstatic” palpitation of given forms.