Meet Me
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.
—Rumi
I am a second-generation Washingtonian (“Taxation without Representation”), married with one daughter. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern studies and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, and two Masters: one in creative writing (Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, North Carolina) and one in public health (Columbia University, New York). I have worked in 20 countries including the U.S. in HIV prevention, harm reduction for drug users, as a consumer health advocate ("Cigarette Makers Defend Menthol to U.S. Advisers"), and as a parent educator. I served on the Board of PEN Mexico for three years and currently serve on the Board of the National Center for Health Research. I am a mentor through the Mexican non-profit Jovenes Adelante, and a certified instructor of Compassion Cultivation Training, a program developed at Stanford University where my husband and I were fellows in 2016-17. In 2023, I began serving as a contemplative coach to a young social innovator through the Dalai Lama Fellows Program.
Poetry
My next book of poems, Locomotive Cathedral, will be published in March 2025 by Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska. My manuscript was selected by judge Hilda Raz as honorable mention in the 2023 Backwaters Press contest. My second collection of poems Mother, Loose won the Accents Publishing chapbook prize in 2014 and was published in 2015. My first book, Provenance, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in 2008 and was a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Awards that same year. My poems have appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, the Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Fugue, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and Poet Lore, as well as in various anthologies, including The Beacon Best of 1999, Creative Writing by Men and Women of All Colors. In 2009, the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities awarded me the Larry Neal Writers’ prize in poetry. I have received an artist fellowship in poetry from the D.C. Commission on the Arts, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times. As a member of Washington Writers’ Publishing House, I acted as senior poetry editor and organizer of the fundraising event, the Writers Ball.
Nonfiction & Essays
I am co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World (St. Martin’s Press) and have appeared on the Today Show and other radio and television programs to promote Trees, which was published in the United States, Mexico and Japan. While working at the National Center for Health Research, I also co-authored the Survival Guide for Working Moms (and Other Stressed-Out Adults) (Quill Inc.). My Letters to the Editor on health issues have appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and you can read a blog post I co-authored on campus rape here.
My first foray into essays/memoir—“I'll Make Room”—appeared in the fall 2011 issue of Gargoyle Magazine. "I'll Make Room" was selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2012. Other essays have since appeared in the Georgia Review; Green Mountains Review; Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction; The Chattahoochee Review; Better Magazine, the Seneca Review and The Bellingham Review. In 2013, I was awarded an artist fellowship grant from the DC Commission on the Arts to work on a collection of essays, and in 2014 my essay, "A Tale of Two Rivers," won the Penelope Niven prize in creative nonfiction from the Salem College Center for Women Writers. Read what Judge Samuel Autman wrote about my essay here. "A Tale of Two Rivers" appeared in Copper Nickel in the fall of 2015. I was awarded artist fellowship grants in nonfiction from the DC Commission on the Arts in 2019 and 2020.
Translation & Editing
As member of the Tramontane Poets, a writer’s cooperative in Mexico City, I translated many of the poems published in a bilingual poetry anthology called Ruido de Sueños/Noise of Dreams. A Panorama of the New Poetry in Mexico: The 1940-1960 Generation (El Tucán de Virginia Press, Mexico City). Other Spanish-language translations of mine, including letters written by Sub-Commandante Marcos, leader of the Chiapas uprising in Mexico, have appeared in TriQuarterly. Most recently, I edited and wrote the introduction to the anthology, Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices (Shearsman, 2010). In 2013, I led a "live" poetry translation workshop, together with Peruvian poet Roger Santiváñez, at Harvard University as part of the Transversal Translation Seminar.