About
I am an educator and artist from Northern New Mexico, a place shaped by Indohispano activism, philosophy, and art. My work emerges from a commitment to embodied, land-based community practices rather than isolated, elitist, low-stakes declarations. The Southwest is a landscape of fire and fallout, where the U.S. government embedded radioactivity into the land and bodies of its people. Growing up, my well water contained toxic levels of uranium—an inheritance inseparable from my poetry. I write to reckon with nuclear colonization, to explore how history manifests in flesh and earth. Place and body are not separate—when I write about my difficult upbringing, I am the desert viewing itself, remembering.
My poetics are shaped by querencia, the Indohispano concept of deep belonging, and by coyote identity—a trickster way of crossing borders, moving between the personal and the political, the physical and the mythic. I write from within the ambivalence and turbulence of zozobra—that collective, embodied anxiety that pulses through a place where grief, joy, survival, and resistance are inseparable. My work often blends English and Spanish, reflecting the liminal space of my heritage as a coyote—a mixed-race offspring of Indohispano and Anglo lineages. I carry both privilege and the wounds of colonization, holding space for contradiction and transformation. My forthcoming poetry collection, Harsh Terrain (FlowerSong Press, 2025), explores these complexities through a poetics of survival, memory, and the high desert’s unforgiving beauty.
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Alongside my poetry, I am developing Coyote Pedagogy, a book that explores adaptable, land-based, and justice-oriented approaches to education. Rooted in the traditions of resolana and radical pedagogy, it reimagines learning as a practice of relational knowledge and creative resistance. My work is informed by my background as a poet, educator, labor activist, and community organizer, as well as my experiences as a diesel mechanic in the Army National Guard, a military conscientious objector, a certified master gardener, an herbalism apprentice, and a mindfulness and Tai Chi practitioner. I write to bridge past and future, to metabolize loss, and to cultivate new possibilities for identity and belonging in a world of rigid categories and policed borders.
