Biography

My interest in mythology grew out of time I spent volunteering at a Shetland marine mammal sanctuary after graduating from Amherst College. Folklore I learned there showed me how mythological and folk traditions act as frameworks for understanding our relationship to nature and wildlife. This interest has fueled much of my research and writing, and I have become interested, too, in how poetry both represents and forges connections to the land around us. At Cambridge, my research will explore how Ted Hughes repurposed and retold early Celtic mythology in his poetry, and I will also chart connections between Ted Hughes’s mythic and personal poetry. Finding metaphors for personal experience within mythic narratives—rife, as they are, with shape shifting and magical apparitions— is, I believe, a way to examine literature’s transformative potential. Mythology brims, too, with quests to rid the land of curses—to make fields prosperous again–- and I am interested in how Ted Hughes used mythic traditions as templates for writing about our own need to preserve the natural world. I earned my MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, and, while studying there, I began writing a book of poems inspired by my work with marine mammals and my studies of folklore. Since graduation, I have been teaching writing in Baltimore and working on a novel centered around the history of Shetland’s Antarctic whaling. I am overjoyed to be joining the Gates Cambridge community.

Previous Education

Amherst College
Johns Hopkins University