Woven through and in addition to my scholarship and poetry, I am committed to what I’ll call — borrowing from Jill Stein — public poetry therapy. Realizing in public life the care and creativity at the center of the poetry therapy movement, I have a longstanding social practice as a writer.

Public Writing: My work as a grant-writer has raised over one million dollars for Catholic Charities of the East Bay, which offers a range of services in mental health and wellness for its community. I have also worked as a writer and as a dramaturg for The Wooden Floor, an arts intervention nonprofit in Santa Ana, California that supports local youth and families. I have published op-eds in support of my part-time colleagues, presenting poetry as a meaningful form of peaceful protest, and arguing for systemic reform of US health care. I am a prize-winning translator, and recently published a well-received translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” in Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation.

Disability Studies: For many years I served with Dr. Art Blaser as the co-director of the Disability Studies minor at Chapman University, growing the curriculum, coordinating scheduling and staffing of courses, advising students, and organizing events for the community. When Dr. Blaser retired I became sole director. The Disability Studies minor has graduated hundreds of students since its inception, centering courses in the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences. At the heart of my work as director is highlighting psychosocial disability in relation to literature and the arts — to this end, I have curated four Ed Roberts Day readings at Chapman, presenting readings and talks by poets Matthew Freeman and Raymond Luczak, novelist Roxanne Varzi, and artist Renée Reizman.

Roots & Branches: I founded Roots & Branches, a creative writing workshop for Orange High School juniors held over two summers at Chapman University. I worked with nineteen students, holding workshops in July and publishing their poems, and curating readings on campus. The workshop, drawing its name from a book of poems by Robert Duncan, drew on research into poetry therapy offered in Charmaine Pollard’s Writing for Resilience.