ARTIST STATEMENT: My work begins alone at a keyboard and finishes on a microphone with an audience. With a thirst for solitude matched by a hunger for intimacy, writing performance poetry is a refuge and a playground. I have a humming desire to live in a world of deep conversation and funny banter, with as little small talk as possible. Let there be grief, let there be mirth, let there be tragedy, and overt innuendo; just please, let’s not be bored or banal together. Most importantly, let’s BE together. Above all else, I am interested in creatively wielding words in service to connection. Spoken word poetry draws upon something ancient in our humanity. The more digitally distanced the world becomes, the more I value the power of oral tradition; how drama, wordplay, and sound device can be all the technology we need to entertain, teach, and comfort each other. I write to move closer—to myself, to my communities, and to the possibility for courage that shows up in the space between the page and the stage. I began writing-to-read as a teenager in the 90s, in line with the rhyme-heavy flows of spoken word poetry at the time, watching the rising stars of the National Poetry Slam and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. I was directly enchanted by the live performances of Saul Williams, Ani DiFranco, and MEDUSA the Gangsta Goddess, artists that I witnessed harnessing the energy of giant audiences while standing alone on stage—they were preachers, spellcasters, rockstars of the word. While I don’t play any instrument, my journey has often involved sharing the stage with musicians, exploring the need to match their scale of engagement, to use the poetic voice as a booming invitation to synchronize attentions. Following the path of performance poetry has gifted me with several related artistic hats that draw upon similar skills, and in turn, playing different stage roles has contributed to the way I write. For over a decade I hosted a poetry slam, which grew me into a circus-ringmaster, stage emcee, at home with improvisation and crowd interaction, writing dialogue on the air. I’ve spent time training as an actor and watched some of my writing become more like personal monologue. Currently working as a teaching artist, inventing curriculum alongside writers of fiction and creative nonfiction, my toes dip into prose with greater frequency. But at the end of the proverbial day, I never stray too far from the love of chain linking words together by sound, always curious about what can be found in the realm of vibration plus meaning. My writing is nutrient-dense: a three-minute essay accented by alliteration, a four-page memoir told in metaphor, a condensation of facts into feelings. When I was a young poet who knew everything, I wrote poems for the soapbox, standing with righteous feminist fingers pointed outwards at the ills of the world. Now that I am middle-aged and seem to know very little, my writing is more often an inward attempt to figure out what hurts and what heals, to reveal myself transparently as part of problems and solutions. I need poetry to be honest; I need poetry to be accurate. Without a loosening of the conventional rules of language, there is little hope that I can cross the chasm between myself and another human. I write and perform like a bridge builder, against the agony of the uncrossable gap.