As an academic writing coach, I work primarily with faculty in the humanities and social sciences as they draft and revise journal articles, scholarly monographs, edited collections, and sometimes textbooks or books for interdisciplinary or public audiences. 

Since I began editing and consulting with writers full time in 2016, I have worked with dozens of researchers in disciplines including anthropology, history, geography, qualitative and quantitative sociology, demography, economic history, environmental history, and international law. I’ve also worked extensively with scholars in fields concerned with art, architecture, and literature, such as architectural history, design history, visual culture, rhetoric, comparative literature, ecocriticism, Latin American studies, and literary studies in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. 

I’ve worked with writers as they drafted and revised book manuscripts that have been published by or are forthcoming from Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, Duke University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Virginia Press, and Yale University Press, among others.

Backstory

While teaching in the Writing Center, I learned that conversation is one of the best ways to clarify thought, inspire substantive revision, and empower writers to improve their work. After earning my PhD in literary studies from the English department at the University of Wisconsin in 2014, I spent two years as a postdoc at UCLA. There I coordinated a Mellon Sawyer Seminar in which participants workshopped scholarly essays that were later published in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), an interdisciplinary anthology that I co-edited with Ursula K. Heise and Jon Christensen.

During the process of discussing first drafts, commenting on revised drafts, and editing the anthology, I came to realize that the strategies I had developed to support students in the Writing Center not only transferred to such collaboration with faculty, but also met a need. I saw that I could empower excellent writers and scholars whose work I admire. I became an academic writing coach in order to help such writers produce their best work and cultivate sustainable and rewarding writing habits while doing so.

Scholarship

My research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. poetry and poetics and the literary discourses of sustainable agriculture and organic farming movements. My article on Lorine Niedecker’s food and farming poems of the 1930s and 1940s, which appeared in Modernism/modernity in 2018, was nominated for the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature’s annual outstanding essay award and received an honorable mention. My scholarly articles have also appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Victorian Poetry, and edited collections. A couple of essays based on my research but written for a broader audience—“Organic Farming’s Political History” and “Composting’s Colonial Roots and Microbial Offshoots”—have been published in the digital magazine Edge Effects.