I started working one-on-one with academic writers at the University of Wisconsin Writing Center in 2012 and quickly discovered that talking is writing work. Conversation has remained a key tool for brainstorming, drafting, and revision in my work with writers over the past decade.  

Since my time at the UW Writing Center, I have worked as an undergraduate advisor, postdoc teaching literature at the University of Virginia, and professor teaching writing-intensive courses at Saint Mary’s College. Since I completed my PhD in 2019, I’ve also worked with faculty writers in disciplines including literary studies, American studies, environmental studies, anthropology, gender and women’s studies, history, and psychology on their works in progress. These experiences have deepened my conviction that sustained one-on-one consultations can help writers develop their strongest work.

In 2024, I joined Draft by Draft to continue supporting writers at all phases of the writing process, from initial brainstorming to sharpening a final draft. My approach to writing coaching focuses on careful listening, asking questions, and responding to the needs of individual writers. I love learning about writers’ projects and helping scholars articulate the intricacies of their arguments in clear, engaging terms. I am particularly adept at helping writers articulate the big picture significance of their claims and scaffold concrete next steps. 

My research and writing focus on early and nineteenth-century American literature, gender and sexuality studies, the environmental humanities, and the health humanities. I also write for public audiences about topics including popular culture and public health. My writing has appeared in venues including Early American Literature, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Climate and American Literature, Edge Effects, Entropy, and Synapsis.  From 2021 to 2023, I collaborated with colleagues to conduct an oral history project about COVID-19 in South Bend, Indiana, and develop related public programming.

I grew up in Kentucky and now live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I enjoy taking long walks and looking at trees.

I joined Draft by Draft in 2024, looking to support academics seeking a more sustainable, easeful relationship to their writing. In addition to working one-on-one with writers, I design and facilitate our DxD writing groups.

My approach to this work is shaped by five years with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Writing Studio at Columbia University, where I met one-on-one with hundreds of dissertation writers seeking fresh insight into their drafts, ideas, and process. I served as Studio’s Interim Director during the 2023-2024 academic year; previously, I had been Assistant Director and, before that, a writing consultant. Across these roles, I’ve been struck by the power of sustained, one-on-one conversation to help writers clarify ideas, navigate new genres, and develop more satisfying writing practices. My style in these consultations is warm, curious, and nonjudgmental. I hold space for the messiness and recursive nature of the writing process, and I love seeing writers’ ideas evolve and grow. 

I’ve also worked extensively as a writer and editor, most recently with the Chronicle of Higher Education. In that capacity, I commissioned and edited the work of external contributors — almost exclusively scholars — writing for the Chronicle’s ideas and opinions section. Though I see writing coaching as distinct from editing, I find that this background comes in handy when coaching writers working towards publication. I can often anticipate the questions an editor might ask, and I’m adept at helping writers translate editorial feedback into a revision plan that resonates with their own vision for the work. 

My own academic interests center on postcolonial studies, African literature, and international humanitarian law. I hold a doctorate in English and comparative literature (2021) from Columbia University, where my research focused the literature and reportage of the Nigeria-Biafra war. In recent years I have primarily taught first-year writing seminars with a human rights focus; prior to beginning graduate school, I also spent several years teaching journalism in Liberia and South Sudan. I grew up in Virginia and now live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where you might find me teaching yoga, caring for my young daughter, or immersed in a sudoku puzzle.

In 2016, I became an academic writing coach in order to empower excellent scholars and researchers whose work I admire. I first learned that conversation is one of the best ways to improve academic work during my four years teaching in the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin, where I had the good fortune to hold recurring one-on-one consultations with dissertators in a variety of fields. 

After I earned my PhD in English in 2014, I spent two years as a postdoc at UCLA, where I co-led a seminar in which participants workshopped essays eventually published in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017). That experience gave me a hunch that faculty members in a wide variety of disciplines could also benefit from the kind of one-on-one writing support that universities offer to their undergraduate and graduate students, but still too rarely provide for their professors. 

Eight years as a writing coach has confirmed that intuition: I’ve worked with hundreds of academics across the humanities and social sciences as they drafted and revised books and journal articles. I’ve worked with some writers on an ongoing basis for years, across multiple projects. I’ve seen how one-on-one coaching, in concert with a writer’s exchanges with mentors and colleagues, not only helps academics finish their projects, but also enables them to thrive as writers, thinkers, and people. That’s why I was delighted to welcome two writing coaches to my team in 2024. 

My research focuses on poetry and poetics and the literary discourses of organic farming movements. My work on Lorine Niedecker’s poetry has appeared in Post45: Contemporaries and Modernism/modernity, and my articles on a variety of other poets have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Victorian Poetry, and the collection Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. I’ve published short essays for a broader audience—“Organic Farming’s Political History” and “Composting’s Colonial Roots and Microbial Offshoots”—in the digital magazine Edge Effects. I also write poems. For more on my writing and scholarship, see my personal website.

I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I live in Indianapolis, where I lead mindful hikes with Indy Community Yoga and co-organize a poetry series called NIGHTJAR at the Tube Factory artspace.