Education:
Ph.D., English literature, Northwestern University
M.F.A, Creative Writing, New York University

Courses Frequently Taught:
English 101: Introduction to Creative Writing
English 170: The Healing Art: Illness and Recovery in Literature and Film
English 202: Writing Poetry
English 243: English Poetry, 1500-1700
English 301: Seminar in Creative Writing (poetry)
English 342: Renaissance Literature

Honors/Awards:
NEA Fellowship (2009)
Pushcart Prize nomination (2008)
Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship (2005)

Selected Publications:
“Complaint.” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth edition, to be published in 2010.
Poems published in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, The Southern Review, and Third Coast.

Faculty Status:
Tenure track, at IWU since 2008; next sabbatical, 2015-16

Professional and Personal:
As a teacher, I have two goals: I aim to help students develop their interpretive skills so that they can enjoy the provocations of literary texts, and I encourage students to see both creative and analytical writing as integral parts of their development as learners. I hope that my students develop their own interests while at the same time writing their best creative work and learning about the unique attributes of literary texts.

I am both a poet and a scholar. In my poetry, I use a style that is based on a principle of inclusion, one that allows me to write long, discursive lines which connect popular culture with political concerns, cross many geographies and time periods, and use a variety of rhetorical strategies to explore charged emotional material. In my scholarship, I focus on English Renaissance complaint poetry, a mode of expression that absorbed the language and rituals of both auricular confession and the emergent juridical language of English courts to create a poetics of dissatisfaction in the period.