Teaching
2024: History/ Social Studies Faculty, Bard Masters of Art in Teaching
2021-present: Faculty, Bard Prison Initiative
2021-present: Faculty, Institute for Thinking and Writing, Bard College
2023-2024: Mentor, Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, The Poetry Project
2022: Workshop facilitator, New Writing, New Languages, The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen, Hudson, NY.
In this in-person workshop, we will embark on transdisciplinary writing that might extend language into communicating the illegible, the unspeakable, and the unthinkable. We will entertain both the critical necessities and flights of fancy that might move us to write (with) a new kind of language, while paying respect to the languages of heritage and artistic practice we bring into the workshop. This new writing and new language may come from moving the hand, listening with the whole body, and marking or transcribing sound, breath, and space. Together, we might read and discuss the following: textual and visual scores by Raven Chacon, Candace Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, and Mónica de la Torre; artists books by Renee Gladman and Kameelah Janan Rasheed; video, sound and digital writing by Benjamin Krusling, 최 Lindsay (Lindsay Choi), and JJJJJerome Ellis; writing, soundings, and drawing by N.H.Pritchard and giovanni singleton; translation writing by Sawako Nakayasu and Mirene Arsanios; concrete poetry and asemic writing by Amanda Berenguer and Mirtha Dermisache; dictionaries and indexes by Harryette Mullen and Angelo V. Suarez; and video-performance and writing by Etel Adnan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, and Adrian Piper.
2022: Writing Faculty, The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College
2022: Workshop facilitator, On Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s “Texas”: Close Readings in a Virtual Space, hosted by Jeffrey Lependorf, The Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY (video)
2022: Workshop facilitator, ”Just speak nearby”: Dis/Course with Kimberly Alidio, hosted by Laura Henriksen (hybrid workshop/ reading group), The Poetry Project, New York, NY. From the workshop, published work by Gemma Boyd, Jen Hunter Connelly, Rachel Galperin, Gia Gonzales, Mack Gregg & Kassandra Savage, Yvonne LeBien, Marc Solomon, and Aaron Tian.
Trinh T. Minh-ha says in her first film Reassemblage: “I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby.” To “speak nearby” is to participate in co-listening, as well as speaking, in a moment shared with another across separate, albeit proximal, locations. This Dis/Course is an occasion to gather and make assemblages — screwed, welded, nailed pieces of sonic, voiced, textual materials of spatialized utterance — which one might call poems. Poetry recreates spatial ecologies of embodied speech and listening, and, I propose, has some similarities with sound art, which, according to Alan Licht, is an immersive experience through architectural space (as opposed to requiring one remains in place for the predetermined time of a musical performance or recording). How do poetic utterances move with found sounds of disturbed landscapes and diasporas: the affective tones, pitches, prosody, ambience, and noise by which a space speaks? And how do poems listen to others’ speaking? In the spirit of poetic assemblage, we will read sonic-focused writing (Hocine Tandjaoui, Brandon LaBelle, Maryanne Amacher, Anthony Reed, and Dylan Robinson), listen to sound poets and experimental vocalists (Pamela Z, Lily Greenham, Charles Amarkhanian, NH Pritchard, Charmaine Lee, Claire Rousay, Fel Santos, Tracie Morris, and giovanni singleton), and, perhaps, write with found (recorded) sounds as one would speak nearby.
2021: Workshop facilitator, Writing As Though You Might Write Again (Two-hour hybrid writing workshop), 3 Hole Press, New York, NY
A writing prompt is a kind of recipe. And the proliferation of recipes, writes Danny Licht, makes cooking a matter of technically worded instructions, timers, measurements when it should be instead a practice of connecting with one’s senses and what is at hand. This hybrid writing workshop is about our tastes, and the steps we take in our lives and writing to suit them. This workshop is about writing as though we might write again, akin to “cooking continuously, of allowing one thing to lead to another, of open-endedness and casual possibility” (Licht 13).
2021: Workshop facilitator, Perception Is Material (Week-long poetry workshop) co-taught w/ Stacy Szymaszek, Summer Writing Program, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, Boulder, CO
Everything Data Flows: Documentary Poetics & Entanglement, Week 1, Naropa Summer Writing Program 2021: The act of perceiving the world and the archival/ official document is as much the material of the poem as the world and the document are. We will consider how poetry — in its prosodic and energetic charge, rather than in its reference to a world beyond perception — documents our material worlds. We will discuss how poets document what we might call oppositional realities, and how poets engage the texts and textures of archival/ official documents. (You are welcome to bring in your own archive or begin to create one for this workshop.) Through reading, discussion, and generative writing, we will together move towards radical possibilities in documentary poetry practice. Class texts include: Nathaniel Mackey, Sonny and Linda Sharrock, Alice Notley, Stephen Jonas, Hannah Weiner, M. NourbeSe Philip, Emily Abendroth, Aeon Ginsberg, Harmony Holiday, Benjamin Krusling.
2021: Workshop facilitator, Documentary Poetics: Archive + Counter-Lyric (Eight-week poetry workshop), Kundiman, New York, NY. Artist talk on Repeater by Julie Tolentino (Curator and host),18 August 2021
Poets can care about and for language used to pose questions. We can make multi-dimensional macro-micro inquiries into the language used to pose answers. As much as we are typically tasked with imagining, we can attend to what is present and to what is already arriving. This eight-weeklong workshop splices together the poetic techniques of recording everyday life and engaging political-historical documents used to ask how poets subvert a self subject to the state, neoliberal capitalism, and the cultural diversity machine. We will write poems of our working and domestic day to ask, What is possible in the act of documentation? We will engage both the vitality and violence of archival documents, and turn our gaze back onto the documenter’s authority. We will write from the crossroads where past, present, and future are already in conversation. We will read, among others, Eduardo Corral, Joshua Escobar, Jasmine Gibson, Edgar Garcia, Renee Gladman, Saidiya Hartman, Julia Huxtable, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Benjamin Krusling, Pamela Lu, Myung Mi Kim, M. NourbeSe Philip, Akilah Oliver, Sara Uribe, and Jackie Wang.
2021: Graduate Instructor, Creative Writing, English Department, University of Arizona
2021-2022: History Faculty, Bard Early College Hudson Valley
2018-2020: Graduate Instructor, Writing Composition, English Department, University of Arizona
2012-2018: Social Sciences-History Instructor, St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, Austin, TX
2011-2012: Adjunct Professor, University Programs, St. Edward’s University, Austin, TX
2010: Visiting Professor and Post-doctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies, University of Illinois
2001-2009: Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies, University of Texas
1999: Lecturer, Program in American Cultures, University of Michigan
1998: Adjunct Professor, History Department, Columbia College Chicago
1994-1997: Graduate Student Instructor, History Department, University of Michigan
Artist talks
2023: Conversation with the Contemporary Poetics Working Group | John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
2023: Sonic Languages 4: The Mutable Poem, An Artist Talk on Teeter, hosted by Noah Ross + Small Press Traffic | Et al. books, San Francisco, CA.
2021: Artist talks & reading on : once teeth bones coral : and Famous Hermits, w/ Stacy Szymaszek, hosted by Prageeta Sharma | Literary Series: Poetry and Prose | Pomona College, Claremont, CA
2021: Artist talk on : once teeth bones coral : , hosted by Gabrielle Civil | Writing Now Reading Series | California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, CA
2017: Writing workshop & artist talk on after projects the resound | Student Promoted Access Center for Education and Service | University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA
2017: Artist talk on after projects the resound w/ Jason Magabo Perez, hosted by Josen Diaz and May Fu | University of San Diego, San Diego, CA
2017: Artist talk on after projects the resound, hosted by James McMaster | PERFUT 306 - Race and Performance | New York University, New York, NY
2017: Artist talk on after projects the resound, hosted by Ruth Nicole Brown | GWS 201: Race, Gender and Power | University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Urbana, IL
2016: Artist talk on solitude being alien, hosted by Fred Moten | University of California-Riverside, Riverside, CA
