I am a writer and teacher living in Groningen, the Netherlands, where I am a tenured faculty member in the department of modern English literature and culture at the University of Groningen. I work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures with specializations in children's and YA texts, the modern and contemporary Gothic, gender and diaspora studies, and multilingualism and translanguaging. I am also a poet, a novelist, and a writer of creative nonfiction.

I am the author of three academic books: Intersecting Diasporas (SUNY Press 2021); Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas (University of Wales Press 2022); and They Also Write for Kids (University Press of Mississippi 2023). My writing handbook, The Imposter's Guide to Writing About Literature, is under contract with Rutgers University Press. My research has been supported by grants from the Dutch Research Council, the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research, and the Children's Literature Association.

My first full-length poetry collection, Ghost Family, was published by Contraband Books. My second, Sicilianas, won the 2022 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize from Bordighera Press and was first finalist for the North American Poetry Book Award, judged by Lisa Russ Spaar.  The Poison Girl, my debut novel, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil in the fall of 2024, and I am also at work on a middle-grade novel. My poems have appeared in journals including Colorado Review, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and Verse Daily, and my creative nonfiction and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including ANMLY, Bellingham Review, DIAGRAM, failbetter, The Journal, Necessary Fiction, ROOM, and South Dakota Review. I am the managing editor of Seneca Review, where I also read poetry and CNF submissions; I read fiction for Cutbank and have served as a flash fiction reader for CRAFT.

Raised in rural northeastern Connecticut, I lived for eight years in New York City with short stints in Palo Alto and Hoboken, NJ before moving to Long Beach, CA and then to Irvine and Riverside. While in school, I worked a series of jobs as a caterer's helper, a waitress, a short-order cook, an office assistant, a barista, a tutor, and a copyeditor.

I started teaching literature and composition for first-year college students in NYC in 2011; in 2015, while adjuncting at CSU San Bernardino and Occidental College, I finished my MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine and my PhD in comparative literature from Yale. Today I live in Groningen with my family. At the RUG, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in literature, creative writing, and professionalization, with a special focus on helping prepare students to write for publication.