While I only had the joy of being a student in one “real” art class in oil painting (thank you Portland Community College for expediting my high school years), my entire life has been shaped by how I embody the aesthetics that inspire and create me. My maternal grandmother––artist extraordinaire––certainly fueled this and encouraged art and education in all its forms. My immediate family too helps me understand the elements of art and how it places us in this world: the earth of my craftsman father with his wonderful woodworking hands, the air of my spiritual mother who taught generations of humans how to negotiate being alive, the water of my sister who can not only capture and develop the image of a moment through her lens but can translate the beauty of pixels into myriad ways of forming and re-forming thought. I myself, it seems, complete this quartet with fire: the youngest and perhaps the Promethean element that can at once be the sun of the center and also the terrifying scorch who inevitably burns and scars.

For my own aesthetic, artists such as Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning opened up a vast and infinite visual sea of colour and lines that ignited the early feeling of recognition and invigoration. Much of my adult life has been spent working on writers and theorists, which I continue to strive to unpack and share with students and friends alike. However, when I sit alone with a blank page I find myself falling back into the froth of my own churning, self-swallowing sea. As my artistic “project” is still evolving, each work I produce somehow gets at these depths of myself (and for myself, as I happily have hoarded the majority of my pieces).

Ultimately, as my main man Lord Byron explored throughout his life, it is not that I produce work because I want to, but because it is the only thing I can do when I cannot seem to “do” anything else.

Education

Master of Arts, Department of English, University of Oregon, September 2012. Thesis: “‘Some Other Being’: The Autobiographical Phantom in Wordsworth and Byron.” Committee: Forest Pyle, Mark Quigley, and Deborah Shapple

Bachelor of Arts, Department of English, University of Oregon, December 2009

Awards, Honors, and Certifications

Conference Award, the International Association of Byron Societies, 44th International Byron Conference, Palazzo Rasponi Dalle Teste, Ravenna, Italy, April 15th 2018

Wine & Spirit Educational Trust Level 2: Empire Merchants, New York, NY. June 2016

Graduate Student Teaching Award, Department of English, The Society of Graduate Students and PSAC Local 610, with the School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Students at the University of Western Ontario, May 2015.

Conferences, Presentations, and Lectures

“‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star’: A Byronic Exploration of our Alien World and the Social Responsibility of Pop Art's Influence.” 48th International Byron Conference, Greece, July 2024.

“‘Uncloseting Byron’: A Mixed-Media Literary Vassal to Our Liege Lord.” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2024.

“Futures in the New Worlds: The Conclusion of the IABS’s 47th Annual Conference.” 47th International Byron Conference, USF, California, August 2023.

"Color me Mad & Bad: Byron in Contemporary Art." Byron Society Lecture Series, The Byron Society, 15th February 2023. Online.

“Byron: '23 and Me, Byron Now,” Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2023.

“‘A Secondary and Neglected Object': Musings of Loss in Byron's 'Detached Thoughts.” Newstead AbbeyByron Conference, Newstead Abbey, UK, April 2022.

“‘Born for Opposition: Byron and the Revolutions of the New Poetic Combatants.” 46th International Byron Conference, Aristotle U of Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2021.

“To Gaze Upon Him: Punctum and Marring Elements of Byron in Art Now.” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2020. Conference Presentation.

“‘Five bits of lead’: Punctum and Byron in Art Now.” Byron’s Don Juan: A Romantic Bicentennial Symposium, DePaul University, Chicago, October 2019. Conference Presentation.

“Fiction: Byron in the Age of Fake News and its Poetic Combatants.” Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2019. Conference Presentation.

“To Cut.” Transformation of a Pattern: Poetry Reading. Yi Gallery, New York, September 28 2018.

“‘This is a fact and no poetic fable’: Mobilizing Byron’s Political ‘Hints’ in Correspondences and Don Juan Canto V.” 44th International Byron Conference, Palazzo Rasponi Dalle Teste, Ravenna, Italy, July 2018. Conference Presentation.

“‘Within the Eye of the Volcanoes’: Transposing Worldly and Poetic Shock in Byron’s ‘Epistle to Augusta,’ ‘Prometheus,’ and ‘Darkness.’” 42nd International Byron Conference, Fondation del Duca, Paris, France, July 2016. Conference Presentation. 

“Survival and Autobiography: Byron’s Ruination in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV.” Survival: 25th Annual Conference for the Center of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, March 2015. Conference Presentation.

“‘There comes a time . . . when nothing matters’: Interpreting Signs and Not Mattering in Cicely Hamilton’s William––An Englishman.” Regulating the Edwardian Body. Western University, March 2015. Seminar Presentation.

“We Can’t Just Breed the Studs and Kill the Duds: C.W. Saleeby’s Ethics of Eugenics.” Regulating the Edwardian Body. Western University, March 2015. Seminar Presentation.

“Finding a Poetics of Alliance: mamâhtâwisiwin, âniskwâpitamâcimowin, and Lummi as Guiding Theories of Indigenous Poetics.” Indigenous Critical Theory. Western University, March 2015. Seminar Presentation.

“The Stillness of Dynamic Tension: Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ and Chapters 13 & 14 of Biographia Literaria.” Futures of Romanticism. Western University, January 2015. Seminar Presentation.

“What’s Happening with 4.4?: The Winter’s Tale and Bohemia.” Shakespeare and Performance Choices. Western University, December 2014. Lecture.

“‘borne away / a human being’: Mediating Disaster in Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage.” Romanticism and Happiness. Western University, November 2014. Seminar Presentation.

“Deconstruction II: How Can We Resist Paul de Man?” Critical Theory. Western University, October 2014. Seminar Presentation.

“Richard III and the Abject.” Shakespeare and Performance Choices. Western University, October 2014. Lecture.

“Settler Colonialism: Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini.” Indigenous Critical Theory. Western University, September 2014. Seminar Presentation.

“What Then?: Transgressions and (Re)collections in Byron’s Don Juan.” Collecting Byron Conference, Drew University, New Jersey, April 2014. Conference Presentation.

“Peer Review Strategies.” Annual Composition Conference. Department of English: Composition Program. University of Oregon, September 2013. Conference Presentation.

“The Politics of Autobiography: Byron’s ‘Other Being’ and the Ruination of Poetic Subjectivity in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos III & IV.” 39th International Byron Conference, King’s College, London, July 2013. Conference Presentation.

“‘I and I’”: Losing to the Symbolic Order in Richard III.” University of Oregon, December 2011. Conference Presentation.

Publications

Unpleasant Angles: A Collection of Poetry and Paintings. Poetica Press, 2021

“‘Byron in 1821: A Retrospective’ MLA Annual Convention.” The Byron Journal, vol 49.1, Liverpool UP, 2021, 95-8. Print.

“To Cut.” 2018. Yi Gallery & Shop, Yi Gallery. https://gallery-yi.com/events/5/.

“Show 26 - From Byron With Love.” Audio blog post. Soundcloud. Bar the Shouting, 14, February 2018.

“‘The Hideous Dropping off of the Veil’: The Uncanny in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.” Nomad: The Undead Edition. Ed. Max Rayneard. The Comparative Literature Program’s Journal of Undergraduate Writing, University of Oregon, 2009. 65-76. Print.

Event Organization

Co-Organizer, Stuart Curran Symposium for the Keats-Shelley Association of America, NYU, October 25th 2024

Co-Organizer, New Worlds, 47th Annual Conference, International Association of Byron Societies, University San Francisco, California, August 2023.

Organizer, 50th Anniversary Dinner for the Byron Society of America, Alice Restaurant NYC, January 2023.

Co-Organizer, Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2020.

Co-Organizer, Byron’s Don Juan: A Romantic Bicentennial Symposium, DePaul University, Chicago, October 2019.

Co-Organizer, Byron Now, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, January 2019.

Member

The International Association of Byron Societies, Board Member, Communications Officer

The Byron Society of America, Board Member, Outreach Coordinator

Modern Language Association

Keats-Shelley Association of America

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism

International Association of Writers & Editors