The Garden Party (poetry) studies the uneasy performance of class and femininity in the public sphere and what it means to move through the world via the strange and often arbitrary rules of social constructions. The book creates a conversation with other artists and art forms via extracts from works by the Bloomsbury group, Judy Chicago, Louis le Brocquy, Claude Cahun, Nan Goldin, Freddie Mercury, and Sarah Kane’s plays. The Garden Party is forthcoming with Northwestern University press in 2027.

Louisiana Saturday Nights (poetry) considers the legal designation “non-resident alien” and what it means to land from the sky (like an extraterrestrial) into an entirely foreign landscape and culture. Filled with odes to Bass Pro, Hooters, Mark Ruffalo, and Brendan Fraser, the book uses pop culture, music, and landscape to ask: how does it change a girl to come of age somewhere she is considered an oddity? Louisiana Saturday Nights has been a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, the Alice James Award, Four Way Book’s Levis Prize, and the Michael Waters Poetry Prize.

Guilty Guilty Pleasure (creative nonfiction) traces my own coming-of-age in southern Spain amidst a culture obsessed with the murders of white women. Using interviews with a Cold Case investigator, memoir, and cultural criticism reflecting on true crime (My Favorite Murder and Last Podcast on the Left), art (Marina Abromovic), literature (Jane Eyre, Tiqqun, Anne Carson, and Roland Barthes), and violent threats made by an ex-boyfriend. The central argument of the book is that visual narratives are key to how race and class factor into whose story gets told and who, ultimately, pays attention to that story. Essays from this project have been published in Prairie Schooner and listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021.

The End of the World (creative nonfiction). In 2012 when I stepped off a plane from the UK to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had never listened to country music, never seen a football game, had never even heard of a nutria. A braided book-length essay, The End of the World, explores the end of a significant long-term relationship in my twenties alongside the landscape of coastal Louisiana and the barrier island of Grand Isle where I experienced a tangible understanding of the impacts of poverty, climate disaster, and rising sea levels. Weaving from literature (Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Annie Proulx), a slight obsession with David Attenborough, through references to True Detective, Mean Girls, and the disastrous 1897 Swedish balloon expedition to the North pole, my goal for The End of the World is to take a deeply personal story and apply it to a global disaster. The lesson? Radical change is the only path forward.