I spend a lot of time with the written word: I have nonprofit jobs writing grants and teaching creative writing to kids, I’m always scribbling my poetry or writing up an article or ep-ed, and I’ve written successful grant proposals, books of poems, reports on queer health and sexual rights, academic articles in history, on and on.

Here are some writing projects I’ve done, in roughly reverse chronological order.

The Safe Return Project: Roots that Bind us Together

In 2021, I began the transformative process of working with the Richmond-based reentry and movement organization The Safe Return Project. I loved working with formerly incarcerated folks and learning, thinking, and writing with my colleagues. With The Safe Return Project, I had the opportunity to successfully apply to grant funding from the California Arts Council to conduct community-based, art-centered research on addiction for formerly incarcerated individuals.

But I was proudest to co-write a report entitled “Roots that Bind Us Together,” for which the team and I conducted 20 interviews with organizers, community members, and formerly incarcerated leaders, conducted analysis and desk research, and worked to write a report centering community knowledge on environmental racism and the prison industrial complex.

Along with the report, the team created curriculum to share learning and an illustrated video I had the pleasure of narrating. Feel free to listen to my voice below!

SHRINES

The oldest poem in my first solo project and full length collection, SHRINES, was written in 2014, a full decade before its publication. The poems in SHRINES, published and launched in June of 2023, are vibrant and young, buzzing with the energy of coming of age.

I wrote poems for about eight years before I submitted a version of SHRINES to Game Over Books. When they offered to publish the book, I planned and threw a launch event in Berkeley. Any excuse to have a party, right?

I remember the moment I finished the longest set of my life, reading through poems I had written over years for an audience of my fellow poets and queers. When I ended my set and the show, I remember the audience kept applauding and celebrating me, my first book and the energy in the room, standing and yelling and all together. It was one of the most lovely moments of my writing life.

Human Rights Watch: Guidelines on Interviewing

Very early in my practice as a researcher,