Biography
I am a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. My most recent book, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is a collection of 9 essays that show what this foundational creation story of the indigenous Americas (the Popol Vuh) has to teach people about the relation between emergency and emergence. My scholarship and poetry are likewise inquiries into the relation between crisis and creativity or world creation—often experimenting with literary and disciplinary form to bring ideas and feelings to life. Alongside my books, my work has appeared in such venues as Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Modern Philology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Portable Gray, and Fence (where I also served as editor-in-chief from 2022-24).
More specifically, I work on the literatures and cultural practices that—for various social reasons—tend not to be taken seriously as literature and culture: the contemporary literature, visual art, legal philosophy, and environmental thinking of non-alphabetical sign systems such as pictographs and khipu; dreams; practices and textual formations of divination; magic; creation stories. Because my scholarship and creative practices are concerned with the world-bearing qualities of literary works (especially poetics), these inquiries often take place at the intersection of anthropology and literary studies. I have, for instance, served as a project advisor for the full re-install of the art, anthropology, and archeology collections for the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. And my teaching reflects these interests in both content and form: my classes regularly involve strong creative components, in addition to lessons in context, history, and theory.
I have several in-process works. Cantares, a forthcoming adaptation of the mid-sixteenth century Nahuatl-language Cantares Mexicanos. Caravaggio’s Americas, a book of essays on the relation between the historical baroque and the indigenous Americas. And Migrant Lots, a study of divination and migration as focused by modes of risk analysis other than the theory of probability and the science of demographics that emerges from it. I am also increasingly engaged in collaborative projects in theatre and opera.
In 2024-25, I am a residential fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. And from 2026 to 2028, I will serve as a discipline representative for the Americas for the Renaissance Society of America.
Selected Publications
Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, book of poetry and creative nonfiction about dreams as reservoirs of historical and anthropological experience. Fence Books, 2019.
Infinite Regress, a sequence of poems for exhibition catalog of visual art of Eamon Ore-Giron. Bom Dia Books, 2020.
American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler, co-edited with Wai Chee Dimock, Jordan Brower, et al. Columbia University Press, 2016.
Boundary Loot: OHMAXAC, poetry book with a preface by Dennis Tedlock. Punch Press, 2012.