Here’s a recent interview with Joeita Gupta of Accessible Media Inc’s program The Pulse about a recent article I published with the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies:

I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. My current research examines the overlap between autistic and poetic modes of expression, and draws on literary analysis, critical autism theory, and creative self-reflection as means of enriching understanding of both poetry and autism. A very condensed version of this research, titled “You don’t have to be autistic to write poetry, but it helps: some thoughts on neurodiversity, subjectivity, and the poetic tradition,” was awarded Best Oral Presentation at the Memorial University Graduate Students Union 2021 Aldrich Interdisciplinary Conference.

Previous research has focused on expressions of voice and voicelessness in poetry by racialized and minoritized writers in Canada, on class and gender in Canadian literature, and on 20th and 21st century Newfoundland poetry. I also study the disability memoir as a genre.

Since 2019 I have taught undergraduate poetry writing at Memorial, and, since 2020, have hosted the annual Poets on the Radio program on CHMR-FM, showcasing new work by Memorial poetry students.

My masters’ thesis (Memorial, 2018) was a poetry collection called The Debt, which explored notions of cultural identity and precarity in moratorium-era St. John’s. A full-length collection based on this work was published in 2021 by Biblioasis. You can read more about that here.

My doctoral research has been supported by the Memorial University School of Graduate Studies F.A. Aldrich Fellowship, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship program, and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholarships.

Also: I’m autistic as heck.