I didn't come to poetry from a workshop or a college program. I came to it because I needed somewhere to put what I was carrying. Words were the first place that felt like mine — not inherited, not imposed, not filtered through someone else's version of what my life should mean.

I grew up carrying the weight of histories that weren't always named clearly in the places where I came of age. Ihanktonwan and Hunkpati Dakota Oyate — these aren't just genealogical facts for me. They're living presences. They shape how I hear language, how I understand what it means to survive, and what I believe art is for.

I started writing seriously in my twenties, though I'd been making up poems and stories since I was small. What changed was that I found rooms — open mics, workshops, late-night conversations with other writers — where someone was actually listening. That changes everything. Writing in private is one kind of work. Writing into an audience is something else.

I became a performer because I couldn't not. There's a way a poem lands differently when a body is behind it — when you can hear someone mean it. I started doing open mics around the Twin Cities, reading at small venues, building my set one poem at a time. Eventually those small rooms led to bigger ones: The Loft, Button Poetry, Penumbra Theater, MacPhail Center for Music. Each one taught me something different about how to be present with an audience.

In 2017 I started collaborating with JG Everest, a composer and musician who had been making music in the same circles I'd been performing in. What we discovered together was that his music and my words were coming from the same place — the same emotional territory, the same insistence on specificity and weight. We recorded The Hummingbird's Dance in 2022 at Crazy Beast Studio with producer Ben Durrant. It is the fullest document of what we do together, and I'm proud of it in a way that surprises me still.

Around the same time, I co-founded the Arrow Broken Poetry Collective with a small group of writers who believed that Marine on St. Croix — a small town, not a major arts hub — deserved a place where poetry could happen regularly and matter. We've been hosting monthly open mics ever since. It remains one of the things I'm most committed to: creating the room, not just filling it.

I've also done workshops and residencies at schools, community organizations, correctional facilities, and tribal communities. The work at Stillwater Prison has been particularly meaningful to me. I say this not as a badge, but because I want the people who might book me to know: I'm not afraid of difficult rooms. I prefer them, in some ways. The people who've been told the least often have the most to say.

I am, right now, a poet and a performer and a teacher. I travel to do this work because I believe it matters outside of the places it usually lives. I take on residencies and workshops because I know from experience that one person finding their voice can shift the whole ecology of a room — and sometimes of a life.